Days 9-12: Escape from Central Wyoming

I left the last post off with me ready to go to Rawlins. That involved 16 miles on the shoulder of I-80. Other bikers say it’s not too bad because the shoulder is so wide — I had 24 mph headwinds so I was crawling along at 5 mph while semi trucks raced by, sometimes two wide!

I stopped for a relief from the heat and wind

It was a stretch where I kept counting down the miles, and each one was excruciatingly long

Eventually I made it to Sinclair, home of Sinclair fuel (hence the dinosaur)

I got to see an American freight train for the first time — a childhood dream! (There Goes a Train, Nana). The trains blasted their horns next to the town comically loud at night

Very odd to cycle past a refinery, but an amazing feat of engineering

Even the playground was on-brand

(Next couple pictures out of order, from earlier in day) In the end, Rawlins wasn’t too bad. It had the typical downtown with every fast food chain on a street way too wide for its intended purpose, but the residential areas were leafy and so was the old penitentiary   

Leaving Rawlins, I waved to a woman hiking the Continental Divide Trail — it felt like the scene in Fantastic Mr Fox, where they see the wolf in the distance. A similar but different species. Afterward I felt soft for riding on paved roads when I saw what she was going to hike through 

Not sure about the spelling

My new tortilla dish — put the sun-warmed cheese ball in a tortilla and serve. Optional: add the cumin that you forgot you’ve been hauling for hundreds of miles. It follows my Swiss chocolate burrito I invented last year (you can guess the recipe)

I cooled down in the WYDOT snowplow building’s sprinklers and refilled on water when the workers came back from lunch (literally as I was leaving). Just after leaving, I met Svante, a Swedish grandfather who moved to Idaho recently for his mining business 

Split Rock — a navigational aid for native Americans, the California and Oregon Trails, and the short-lived Pony Express — getting mail from California to Missouri by horse relays, before telegrams were installed

Jeffrey City is almost a ghost town now, but back in the day it was going to be the next big uranium mining town. That fell through, and the church is now open for bikers to stay in. I met Eric and Rob (pictured below) there and we had a meal at the nearby very rundown bar/cafe. I had the “rattlesnake” burger — a cheeseburger with Jalapeños and a Texas toast bun (fried bread). The walls of the church are covered in messages written by previous riders. Very cool to see those that came before

The pen we had was running out so I wrote a minimal message. I challenge you to write your own next to it!

A sign of good things to come

Very large scale case of illegal dumping 😉

The flat, boring sagebrush finally dropped away. Again, I faced bad headwinds even going downhill. Every day in Wyoming has been marred by them. The soil and rock became very red and the heat was high as I weaved through canyons

I made it to Mike and Dennine in Lander — they’ve been hosting bikers for years. The house was full so I got to stay in the teepee! It was fun until I felt something fall on my arm as I was trying to go to sleep. I turned on my flashlight and it was a spider! I had to carefully extricate myself from my bedding so I could shake it out

I rode the first 35 miles of the next day through the Indian reservation very quickly — smooth roads and no wind. I startled a herd of horses and they cantered alongside me for a few hundred feet — magical! I then met a German guy going eastbound at a rest stop. He warned me that I would have a headwind but I was in denial from my traumatic experiences so far in Wyoming. Guess what the next 35 miles were like? Climbing up a mountain WITH A HEADWIND

The scenery in western Wyoming is much better at least. I saw three of the leading riders of the TransAm race (who can get across the country the quickest, non-stop 😳) zoom past me in the space of 20 minutes — and yes, they had a tailwind while going downhill 

The sign mocked me

I finally made it to Dubois as the sun was getting ready to set. The following days are going to be camping so I treated myself to a motel room and a restaurant meal (elk hotdog with mac-n-cheese)

This post is much later than I wanted — my first draft got wiped and it’s really awkward to rearrange pictures from my phone on this site, so that’s why things are out of order too.