The Tower 300 Adventure - Day 2

Continued from The Tower 300 Adventure Day 1

This day started much less stressful than the previous. I had survived one night! I didn’t get eaten by a bear! A surprise Narnian lamppost didn’t appear above my campsite and illuminate my face all night! (Although the moon was almost full and quite bright, I was tired enough to not care)

We woke up, packed up camp, jetboiled some water for oatmeal, and started on our way up into the Bearlodge mountains.

Now, if you haven’t been up into the Bearlodge via the Sundance Horse Camp campsite, you are in for a treat. It’s really steep and includes several steps that you have to hike-a-bike up. At least I did. I’m sure some of the racers out there hucked it up the mountain. I can see why they call it the “Horse Camp” and not the “Bike Camp”.

It did have beautiful views!

And more broken spokes. At this point I’m down 3. It seems every mile further we got, I lost another spoke. And to make it worse, they were all snapping on the same side of the wheel. Breaking spokes is bad. Breaking them all in the same place is even worse.

I keep telling myself that I got this far, and that’s further than I ever thought I’d get. My goal was to get up to the “meadow” as Gus calls it. When we rode the Bearlodge Mtn Classic a week prior, riding through the meadow is one of Gus’s favorite parts.

Lucky for us however, Ashleigh had been chronicling our adventure online. A fantastic bike mechanic reached out to her and offered to come to our aid! It turns out mobile bike service is allowed in the Rules. We met him on a gravel road where he got me rolling again, and then we started zooming downhill (the best direction to go with a fully loaded bike, fyi) headed towards Sheepnose Trail

Now, I want to be clear - “trail” is a very strong word for what we were experiencing. One might hear the word trail and think a nice straight gravel path. Or potentially some single track dancing through the woods. At worst, maybe it’s an overgrown pitted cow path.

That was not Sheepnose.

Sheepnose is more like you dreamed of a trail once when you were young, and now it’s years later and you are trying to recall this trail. Where did it go? Was it in the woods or on the rock? Was there ever a trail at all or did someone just convince you there was and you fell for it?

Thats Sheepnose.

Occasionally we’d get a glimpse of one of those little diamond trail markers that give you hope, only to have that hope dashed by a cluster of trees or rocks that would make no sense in this place on a real trail.

It was - by far - one of my favorite trails we experienced. I love that stuff.

At one point we were running low on water. Who knew you could go through so much water while simultaneously making so little progress? Luckily there was an idyllic cool babbling mountain stream at one point that we filtered. That water was fantastic.

Eventually the sheepnose saga came to a close and we found ourselves back on a gravel road headed down hill towards Cook Lake. Cook Lake was not “along the way” at all. It was several miles north as well as many feet of elevation down. Fun to get to, but not exciting to think about leaving. We were again low on water. That’s ok, we heard there is a pump here. We can find it once we finish Cliff Swallow Trail. This trail was excellent. A little steep in a few places but I absolutely would ride it again. Ideally when I’m more awake and better fed. We were getting pretty hungry at this point, having not had much to eat aside from beef jerky and nerds gummy clusters for much longer than you want to eat only beef jerky and nerds gummy clusters.

We finished Cliff Swallow then headed to the camp host site where the pump was. We found it. We did not however find a handle on the pump. At the post race discussion days later we found it the handle was still in place just a few hours earlier. I guess that explains who we saw driving away as we got in there. The camp host - with the pump handle.

It was still many miles to Hulett, and we were almost completely out of water. I guess we’re drinking filtered lake water?

If you are curious, filtered water from cook lake tastes as bad as an idyllic cool babbling mountain stream tastes good. At least we didn’t get sick. The filter worked.

From there we climbed back out and worked our way to Black Tail County Rd and started flying down towards Hewlett. Even though we were tired and hungry and cold, this descent was majestic. Full moon in a clear sky. The occasional cow watching from the side. I’m sure those cows were jealous of how fast we could move.

Finally once it was quite certainly night, we arrived in Hewlett! Time for dinner. Maybe we should get some steak? Or pasta? Sandwiches perhaps.

Wait. We’re in a tiny Wyoming town at 10pm. There is nothing open. Believe me, I tried calling several places. Except Captain Ron’s Rodeo Bar! They had not only frozen pizza they could make, but also pop! I’ve had some pizza in my life - some real fancy pizzas. I’ve had home made pizza. I’ve had Pad Thai pizza. I’ve had fully loaded supreme pizza with so many toppings you couldn’t even count them all.

None of those tasted as good as those simple cheese pizzas we got that night. They don’t even come close. If there were the “Seven Wonders of the Modern Culinary World”, this pizza would be squarely at spot number one.

With full bellies and a realization that we still didn’t know where we were sleeping, we wandered north till we found a small string of trees next to a track field. This seemed far enough out of the way that no one would care if a few pizza lovers setup their hammocks for the night…

Continued in The Tower 300 Adventure Day 3