A Cold Day in Hell

Short Version:
A long ride. Coldness. No pets, no dyes, no removal of wetsuits.

Long Version:
The Red Devil trail from the Sand Creek trailhead was really nice to ride, despite the damage caused by motorcycles. It had nice feel and sections with great flow, and an hour on a trail like that is about as good a warm-up for a major mission as you can ask for.

The Devil's Gulch trail also had motorcycle damage, but was pretty excellent nonetheless. There was some envy when we met a guy riding the trail the other way, though - we'd been riding uphill for what felt like hours! By the time we reached the steep and nasty climb out of the gulch proper, we were knackered. Especially me. Actually, Nene was still fresh as a bloody daisy, and blitzed the climb quickly and without apparent effort. Grrrr. At the top of the grunt we turned onto Mission Ridge, and began the ascend a little/descend a lot of a downhill-trending ridge ride. The trail was incredibly dry, but was a lot of fun, and it was with definite sadness that we reached the end of the trail - and not just because we had to ride up and over the Red Devil hill again to get back to the Reaper, food, and warmth. Ride over it we did, though, with fifty minutes of climb earning us ten minutes of down, for a grand ride total of six hours on the bikes; the perfect way to ease ourselves back into riding after a week of hot-tub soaks and over-indulgence in delicious foods and alcomaholic beverages!

We were cold and tired, and especially cold, so it was early to bed with umpteen layers on. We shivered our way through delicious Indian curry on mashed spuds before Friday night motorcyclists drove their trucks past us and up to the trail for some riding and yee-hawing, and then we slept as best we could in that kind of cold, waking to find ice on the Reaper, and the plants, and the puddles. It was really cold.

We scraped the ice off the windscreen and set off. Junkyard guy was feeding his animals; we counted twelve dogs and fifteen cats, and there were more of each, which we would have counted properly if not distracted by the very cute dog walking around on its two front legs, twisted rear legs held high over its head.

We'd been too cold in the trailhead valley to eat delicious foods or make coffee, so we found a picnic spot in the sun at a town called Monitor. It was lovely and sunny, but the wind had a distinct chill to it. We noticed that there seemed to be less Amerikan flags around than in most other similar-sized Amerikan towns, and figured that we'd stumbled on a hotbed of Islamic Communism. This theory was confirmed when we visited the restrooms, where the doors were festooned with signage, warning us not only about the unlawfulness of bringing pets into the building, but also banning the use of dyes and the removal of wetsuits.

So we stayed grey, left our neoprene on, and went on our merry way, to a fruit and veg stand, where we purchased delicious foods, and then on into some seriously weird desert, where military convoys appeared and disappeared between rocky outcrops and wind farms with no apparent wind to spin their enormous turbines crowned the hilltops. The towns we visited became significantly Hispanic, as did the radio stations we were picking up, and then we were on the Interstate again, crossing the Columbia River and into Oregon, and then up into the Blue Mountains to camp in the woods. We'd seen a bunch of weird and wonderful roadkill, including coyotes, cows, deer, raccoons, and a very stinky skunk, and we'd seen a hugely fat woman driving an old Camaro Z28. All in all, a good day's driving... but we were still a LONG way from the State line, and even further away from our next destination: Pocatello, Idaho.