Skimbleshanks

Day 32

Walden, CO to Kremmling, CO

Distance: 78 miles

Highest point: 9,683ft

New occupation: Trainspotter

…There's a whisper down the line at 11.39

When the Night Mail's ready to depart,

Saying `Skimble where is Skimble has he gone to hunt the thimble?

We must find him or the train can't start’…

T S Eliot (Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats)

Yes, today I am the Railway Kat.

It’s not that the cycling wasn’t great. But the thing I got most excited about was the ridiculously long freight train, honking its horn, and winding its way around the narrow Colorado tracks like a slow moving, docile python.

I pulled over from the road, watching it approach, waved to the driver as he honked his horn, and then filmed as all of its hundreds of containers trundled slowly by. I won’t bore you with the video, but it’s the kind of thing they’d put into reverse on sepia film and project onto a screen in minimalist surroundings in a modern art museum. And there’s something strangely comforting and hypnotic about it. A bit like listening to the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4.

But it was also a fantastic day’s cycling. Heading out from Walden into a sunny but mild morning, I knew that I was going to be riding into wilderness. Instead of taking the straight shot road that gets you to Kremmling in 60 miles, the ACA maps designate the longer 80-mile route through a couple of wildlife reserves, and over the 9,683ft Willow Creek Pass.

It was a beautiful ride, away from the traffic.

And if it weren’t for the fact that I was focused on fighting the side wind (sound familiar?) and the uniformly spaced cracks in the road that juddered the whole bike every time I went over them, I would surely have been stopping to do a bit of serious “twitching” myself.

I could already see a number of different small birds fluttering around and landing on the wire fence next to the road, only to take flight again as soon as I would draw level. The some huge birds of prey (Red Kites I think) soaring and hovering in the strong winds, and then swooping down and then suddenly up, like they were on a roller-coaster ride.    

It wasn’t until around 60 miles into the ride that I hit any civilization, the small town of Hot Sulphur Springs (does what it says on the tin). I celebrated by stopping at a road-side shack to get a hot dog and a coke and douse my eyes (which were stinging for some reason) with cold water in their rest room.

And I didn’t have to wait long after that for my own sight for sore eyes... 

Rolling into Kremmling, lovely Marianne from my hotel pointed me in the direction of the town’s bike shop, Motion Sports, where the owner John was kind enough to lend me a floor pump to blow some air into poor Steed’s tyres for the first time since West Yellowstone…  Given that I also gave his chain a clean and grease, and de-gunked him this morning, he is happily purring like a kitten.

Which makes two of us.

Me x