61.74 mi / 4:41:37 time / 13.1 mph avg. / 29.5 mph max. / 1104 ft. climbing
Staying at Buffalo National Forest Campground

Dawn came with on-and-off drizzle and threatening skies. Those situations always force me to make a gamble. Basically, there are two safe states: all my stuff is dry inside my tent, or all my stuff is dry packed inside my panniers which are surrounded by rain covers. It’s the transition between the two states that’s dangerous. Once I start taking down the tent, I have to keep going until everything is packed away, so the gamble is whether I can do that quickly enough before it starts raining again.

This time, I pulled it off. And when the rain started again (about five minutes after I was done packing), it wasn’t much worse than a light mist. It was in that mist that I explored Norris Geyser Basin, which is an area that has all kinds of thermal activity. Boiling hot springs, steam vents, and geysers. I figured I used up my luck in packing, so I didn’t really wait around to see if any of the geysers would blow, but chances are they wouldn’t have anyway; it seems like Old Faithful is the only predictable geyser left in the park. Still, Steamboat Geyser was throwing water six feet in the air, and there were clouds of steam shooting out of the ground (some quite noisily) everywhere I looked. At times I would even get enveloped in a cloud of steam, and it was a nice way to warm up. I even rather like the sulfur-smell that comes from the vents.

Speaking of smells, I read an unexpectedly poetic informational sign a few days ago that said something like “…and you’ll never forget the smell of juniper burning in a Western campfire”. That’s totally true, and I’m sure whenever I smell sulfur again, that will also take me right back to this trip. I know this because on the days when I could smell the smoke of forest fires, I was always instantly reminded of India. I guess I smell permeating atmospheric smoke so rarely that the trigger took me right back to the last place I smelled it. We’ll see if that smell-reference gets updated to the Western mountains in the future.

After Norris, it was mostly downhill through the 45-degree mist, sadly leaving the park. But I’m pretty happy that, except for Old Faithful, I was able to see most of the major features of Yellowstone. I could still go back and spend a year there though.

It was weird entering the town of West Yellowstone (which meant I crossed into Montana), because instantly commercialism reappears after being completely absent for three days. But one good thing about that is that it meant I was finally able to visit a bike shop and buy some new tubes. In Sheridan they didn’t have the size I needed, and in Cody the bike shop was closed for Labor Day, so I was really pressing my luck covering all that ground without any virgin tubes and only one patch left. Then it was the library for the first Internet in a while, and then a stop the the world’s most expensive McDonald’s.

Then it was back on US 20 for a few miles back up a mountain until I crossed the continental Divide and entered Idaho. The skies over that mountain range were all kinds of crazy, and I got blown around a lot, but not rained on, and after crossing over, it cleared up a good bit. One thing I quickly noticed in Idaho (as well as that short section of Montana) is that this is the first time of the whole trip where I see cars regularly going into the oncoming lane to pass. I wonder if it’s just some sort of region-based cultural thing. Luckily Idaho has some nice shoulders (Montana’s kind of sucked, with the rumble strip right in the middle of the shoulder), so they don’t get that close to me.

I ended up at this enormous National Forest campground that’s largely empty. Some pretty good rain must have come through right before I got here, but I avoided it for the whole afternoon. It’s kind of strange that with all the rain I’ve had, none of it has been in the form of a mid-afternoon thunderstorm, where it cools you off for a bit, and then you quickly dry out. It seems like it’s always showers at night or in the morning. Not that a mid-afternoon thunderstorm would have been welcome today, since I don’t think it ever got much above 60!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 12:37 pm and is filed under bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.