Garmin
Check out my cycling activity on Garmin Connect. #beatyesterday
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/7154573536
Relive
https://www.relive.cc/view/vrqDdGr1Jwq
I90 uphill start
Frontage roads mostly downhill all day...losing nearly 2,000 ft from high
Fast downhills...felt strong
Livingston fly fishing on the Yellowstone river
Missed 1st rest stop and got bonus miles
A couple more times on I90
Mike flat at 2nd rest stop
Into the 90’s and low 100’s.....max 104f
Joined by Rod and John for last 15 miles
Trying for 5 hour Century...made it by less than a minute
McDonalds for smoothy and Super 8 at big truck stop
Dinner....Subway,,jo jo’s, potato chips, PBR in the room
Into Albuquerque... is it a little tough to get excited about ending a trip in Albuquerque? Yes. Because once we got out of Santa Fe it was... well, what you might expect New Mexico to be, tan ground and a lot of scrub and choppy hills that went on and on and on and... and it ends in Albuqurque.
The impressive thing was how the landscape changed, starting with awful yet-to-be-asphalted gravel roads through the rest stop at 24 miles, but we were impressed by how pretty the high plains and mountains were, full of trees, the comment "this doesn't look like New Mexico" was made quite often. Note the road conditions... 
Then on to next rest stop riding with Cassie and then on to lunch back with Jerry and Bruce and absolutely pounding the pavement, probably averaged over 23MPH for the 15 or so miles, but then when you've got this to look at - scrub and rock - why not ride fast? Those thunderstorms stayed looming all day but we never got a drop, they awere to our east.
The big news of the day was getting up this morning in South Fork and climbing back over Wolf Creek Pass, an easier side to climb as it's more gradual, then a brisk and extended 40MPH downhill for a coffee in Pagosa Springs and then lunch and then into New Mexico, where we spent the last 20 miles of the day. Chama.. maybe only known for the old narrow gauge railway that ran from here to somewhere (oops, just found out the river is important in some of the paintings by Georgia O'Keefe), otherwise, like South Fork, the abandoned and for sale restaurants and shops and houses and mobile homes seem to outnumber those still operating. For you "Breaking Bad" fans Chama is also hotbed for meth production and usage. Property for sale and more of it - not sure if recent economic events or broader than that but it's plentiful... 
Another guess, but I think this was climbing the 2nd pass, still sunny then and looking back. But not sure.
Then across to the first rest stop and the start of the climb. Greg's time was just under 1.5hrs for 20 miles... not bad at 12MPH. Just on and on and on in the hot sun. The only remarkable thing was (and you can sort of see this in the elevation) the false summit near the top when suddenly, inexplicably, we weren't going to drop down on the perfectly good saddle we were crossing, no, WAY UP THERE, on the mountain above was a line carved into the rock, we needed to climb WAY UP THERE! It was the most surprised I have ever been on a bicycle, thinking from the tree profiles and land contour we were about to drop over to the left, and seeing that road up there to the right. But of course we did just that, we climbed it, almost 11K feet, highest I have ever been on a bike (or I think most people?). Then down, the road was in pretty good shape but not steep enough to be scary in the turns. Then lunch, then bad roads, then into Montrose.
Then downhill, and fast, memorable for both the painful bumps from asphalt patches as well as the speed of the descent. Which never ended, it went on, and on, and on. But it went on in a far different climate, this side of the pass was dry (!) and sandstone brown and the Sage was now a silvery green plant just a foot or two tall. Beautiful in a very different way, the cliffs and bluffs and rimrock were obviously of two types, a soft homogenous sandstone with harder rocky layers sandwiched in between. So it was easy to see the rock was hard and could sustain sheer vertical edges, while the sandstone degraded into shallow slopes, so the result was cliff, slope, cliff, slope. In some areas there were edges of rock that looked the prows of ships with the slanted hills of sandstone and the vertical cliffs of harder rock. And it was all over, everywhere, left and right, and we rode out right through the middle of it over ledge after ledge. I think there were 5 of them, ledges in the road where we thought it was over but then we could peek over the ridgeline and oops, one more down and up to go. Something like this: 
All the way down to Loma at 4,00ft, about half of where we were at Douglas Pass. Lunch. A quick ride to Fruita to buy bike lights as required by the park rangers at Colorado National Monument so we could pass safely through the tunnels. Turns out they have lights that bikers can borrow at the ranger station, it is so odd that the bike shop didn't tell us that (!). $17 for a light for me, off we went. This was the optional part, the original route sent folks up the river to Grand Junction, for the rest of us Fred had created a route up and through the Colorado National Monument, so about 10 of us (that I tracked) took that route.. Brett, Cassie, me, Tom, Don, Greg, Brian (Colnago..), Big John (with the Seven) and I think Jim was out there somewhere all went right and then up 2,000 feet along the rimrock edge of the park. It was beautiful, a more homogenous red than what we'd been through with lots of Juniper, Pinion Pine and Sage. 
And I keep forgetting to mention Kevin.. Kevin, from Georgia, doing the whole trip in sandles. Yes, really. And on a fixed gear bicycle - 47x18. Fixed as in he can't go downhill any faster than his legs can spin, which is the only time anyone can pass him. And he comes in first just about every day. He's done RAAM (race across america on a bicycle) twice and apparently this is how he's decided to challenge himself... amazing.
Just a quick zip between towns, out of Wyoming and into Colorado. Lazy breakfast, lazy loading of the vans and bikes around 9:00am-ish, the exact opposite of yesterday's early morning start and focus. It didn't even matter that Tom and Don stayed in their room until 9:30 watching the end of the Tour de France stage (Col de Galibier mountaintop finish), hovering over Don's iPhone. After that we stopped next door to check out the fossil and jewelry shop. Know what, fossils of dinosaur bones feel a lot like stone (they are stone...) and if polished they look like petrified wood and people make jewelry out of them. Learn something new every day. Personally a whole dinosaur femur might be interesting, but at 225lbs depending on animal it might be a tad heavy to care on the bike.
More cheerful thoughts, the Green and the White Rivers are both hot-chocolate brown, and after the long shallow climb up to the ridge of the overlooking Rangely what you see is... Rangely. Free bumber stickers on request that say "I Love Drilling." Natural gas and mining, a tough, very real, Western town. Hot and dry and 360 degrees of brown. Lunch at 1pm on arrival, and that was after two (!) rest stops on the way, so lots of time for laundry, a new rear tire (mine, a 2nd flat today) and lounging about. As Tom said, when we left this morning (10am), we'd done more miles yesterday (70+) by that hour of the day than we were riding all of today. Back to the real stuff tomorrow...
Off the highway and through Fort Bridger (Rt 414) and then another 30 miles to the next rest stop at an abandoned general store and gas station. The section after the highway was flat and forever wide and we rode up to and through a bluff of wind-carved sandstone mounds. If you think of classic Utah national park pictures of rounded rocks, it was like that only painted in tans and browns instead of reds. We passsed through a gap to the rest stop at 60 miles, extra peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to hold us over to lunch. The one constant on this day, as everywhere we've been in the west, is how lush everything is. Sage, wildflowers, grass; green and more green, water pouring through the streams and irrigation troughs. Lakes have trees at their edge with water 3 feet up their trunks, just so much water, hard to hold it all.
Then the fun started. From 91 miles to 129 miles was a climb from 6,700ft to 8,400ft, ah, just 1,700ft over 40 miles, easy, right? No, start with a 6 mile climb and 1400ft, then give back a lot of it on a descent, then climb again, give it back on another descent, repeat for 40 miles. I think the actual climbing along these 40-ish miles was about 3x the difference in starting and finishing altitudes, here's the topo of the day's route, the one big climb you see (mile 91) is what we did right after lunch.
The climb took us above the raw edges of earth pretty quickly and into forests of 
Beautiful! 
