78.57 mi / 6:08:00 time / 12.8 mph avg. / 23.5 mph max. / 3293 ft. climbing
Staying at Simpson’s Conoco Gas Station Campground

Since it was so warm, I hadn’t even bothered to set up my tent, and simply slept on top of the picnic table. It worked pretty well, and made packing up camp go faster than usual. That meant I once again rolled out of camp at sunrise, this time to beat the heat out of the valley.

I crossed the Colorado River on Navajo Bridge at Marble Canyon, and then began my southward trek that would take me to Tucson. I was now once again in the Navajo Nation, and the road was actually in much better shape. It also helped that no one out driving at dawn. I spent the first 35 miles climbing 2800 ft. back out of the river valley, and then hit the first services at mile 45, at Gap (where a lone gas station provides the only services). Then it was another 30 miles downhill to Cameron.

My dawn start once again meant that I had covered a lot of miles by mid-day, which leaves a bit of a conundrum. Early in the planning I had thoughts of making this an epic 113 mile day with 6000+ ft. of climbing, so I was still tossing around that possibility as I reached Cameron. But I figured, if they have a motel there, I’ll take a room and let that fill in for yesterday’s missed motel, and that would solve the problem of surviving the midday heat. As I rolled into “town”, they did have a motel! Yay! And, it was full. Hey, what else is new? I’ve heard rumors that the world is in some sort of recession/depression, so someone should really tell all the people out here about it, because obviously they have no idea. Morons!

I got the number for another motel 10 miles down the road, but got no answer when calling. The “RV Park” across the street was just that, a gravel parking lot in which to park your RV, without a hint of shade, so that was out. Well, I might as well start heading up the hill to that other motel, take my chances, and if they’re full, maybe do that 113-mile day after all. I had some 7 hours of daylight left, though it would mean an ugly day of 10+ hours on the bike.

Then, as I stopped at the last gas station out of town, I saw a sign about campsites on their wall, and before I knew it, I was getting out my money to pay. The “campground” was behind the deli/laundry building, but it actually had patches of grass and a few decent trees in a row, so I was able to catch a break lazing in the shade for a while, after getting a burger at the deli. Still, it was so early that the idea of stopping there continued to gnaw at me. But I just kept telling myself that pushing on further wouldn’t have gotten me anything. After a while, a strange thing happened to the sun…it start becoming obscured by these things that I think are called “clouds”. I haven’t seen anything like it in so long that I can hardly remember the name for the phenomenon. It even looked like rain in the distance, so despite the heat, I had to set up the tent and put on the rainfly.

No sooner did I do that than a ridiculous windstorm began. The winds had to be 40 mph, and they continued for hours. For the first time in its life, I had to guy down my tent to keep it from breaking in half. That’s when I finally made peace with ending my ride here, because even though it sucked being holed up in a hot tent, it would have sucked a whole lot more to be fighting that wind at mile 100 in the midst of a 3000 ft. climb.

There was no way I was cooking in that wind, so I had what was actually a fairly decent dinner of pita bread filled with tomato, string cheese, and sometimes yogurt, plus a big jar of applesauce, Doritos, and a liter of Pepsi. Yum! The wind finally calmed a bit at nightfall, allowing me to get some sleep.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 3:24 pm and is filed under 2009 Bike Tour, bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.