Day 17:
Where did we leave off? Ah, yes, Safford. Our destination for today was an almost non existent town called Three Way, so of course we dubbed today sexual innuendo day. If you're easily offended by that kind of stuff, you may want to skip this day. Mom, sorry, you have to suffer through this one.
The morning greeted us with some beautiful weather and great views of the mountains surrounding us. We rolled down the highway, I can't honestly remember if it was good or bad, it's been a couple big days, so I'll just say it was a good ride. Not far outside of town we ran into a couple of horses having some "fun".
A couple of horses getting dangerously close to 69ing. I wasn't going to stick around to find out.
Not much further down the road I noticed that we were passing an important land mark.
State prison, we all know what goes on there. I'm not going to touch that with a bar of dropped soap.
Eventually we turned off onto a quieter road and noticed right away that the road went straight towards the mountains. The road went basically straight up, but nothing unmanageable. It was almost intimidating watching this wall of impending doom coming straight at you, but good lord was it beautiful. It's probably boring reading me say that everything is beautiful out here, but there's really no other word i can use to describe it.
Impending doom? More like climb like Froome. What's up rap career
The climb was actually really fun. The road was straight for the first half, but when it started getting curvy (tee hee) things really started getting interesting.
And to your left, you'll notice Thumb Butte. Yeah, that's actually it's name.
And the climb just kept getting cooler and cooler.
Around every corner was a new voluptuous butte to look at.
A few scenic views later and I was over the pass. Thankfully, there was one of these before the descent.
"Safety pullout," you can't make this shit up.
A huge 8 mile descent later and I finally rolled into Three Way. The view from the top was crazy.
I think I got over 50mph on this one. Gotta love those speed wobbles.
There was a small ranger station at the bottom that had a special campground specifically for cyclists. We had to get the ranger to turn the sprinkler off so we didn't get wet at 6am (these innuendos are too easy).
Grabbing some much needed water and shade.
We set up camp for the night and hung out while enjoying the wide open starry night sky.
Day 18:
Today was a big climbing day. Jerome was very apprehensive after looking at the topographic map. Lots of switchbacks usually means pretty steep grades. Jerome had a plan that I'm surprised worked, but I'll get in to that later. First we packed up and hit the road, saying goodbye to the great camping spot.
Weird deceased drive in theater next to our camp.
The clouds were looking a little rainy that morning, but nothing precipitated. Made for some cool views though.
Cyclists love winding roads. Roadkill does not.
I usually take off on the climbs and wait for Jerome at the top or turn around and ride back up with him. I was expecting to not see him for a long time due to the steepness and length of the climb. Not far into the climb, I hear a car honking behind me with someone yelling at me. Sure enough, it was Jerome hitchhiking a ride to the top in a pick up!
God damn cheating bastard.
Well, if he was going to cheat, so was I. We unloaded all of my bags into the back with Jerome's bike. As soon as I stepped back on the pedals it felt like the bike was going to shoot out from underneath me. The rest of the climb was much faster and easier without all the baggage. On the way up, it kicked up real step for the last 3 miles. Half way up the steep stretch I saw a guy on the side of the road carrying a 16 foot cross. Jesus (literally)! I stopped and asked if he needed food or water, he rejected politely and "god blessed" me. I took off like a bat out of hell (seems like an appropriate analogy).
Crossed over into Apache national Forest at some point.
I hit the top and had to snap a picture. As per usual, the view was breathtaking.
Started from the bottom now we're here
I found Jerome in a campground at the top, to which his response was something like "how the fuck did you get up here so fast? I'm going to rename you Beastmaster." It was pretty cool how these huge pine trees popped up out of nowhere. I'm always shocked how quick the plant life changes.
Muscle man for my nephews Eli and Ryan
Once we ate some lunch (getting pretty fucking sick of peanut butter and bread) we started descending and heading towards the state line! Fuck yes, two states down, 5 to go.
Goodbye Arizona, don't bother writing.
Me: "when's this ride going to start getting hard?"
Jerome: "fuck you!"
Only a few feet from the state line we crossed into the Gila National Forest. This place is so cool. I've done the race out here a couple times, and I've always hated how fucking hard it is. Getting a chance to really pay attention to my surroundings this time around makes me appreciate it in a whole new light. The forest is magical. We had two adult and a baby javelinas skitter across our path. A deer almost committed suicide. Seeing life again is refreshing. Unfortunately we had to leave, but we came across a farmer's market in another one of those, almost extinct small towns; Mule Creek.
Old one room schoolhouse. Jerome is bragging about how good he is at hitchhiking.
We sat around for 30-45 minutes just shooting the shit with the locals. They were extremely nice and generous. It was really fun just to have company with some really good salt of the earth people. Again, we had to say goodbye and continue on our pilgrimage. The beautiful grass land made for some more great riding.
There's a lot of landscape pictures. Fucking deal with it.
We found a small restaurant in the town of Cliff, had a great meal and flapped gums with the owner for a while. They let us steal two and a half gallons of their water, and we headed to our campsite. The site was well of the beaten path with a big climb up to the reservoir. Jerome begrudgingly made it up the climb and we set up camp. For some reason we decided to just split a loaf of bread for dinner. Not enough food after the big day. Luckily, an extremely generous family offered us a burger after hearing us tell someone else we were riding across the country. We probably talked with them for an hour and a half about everything in life. Again, my faith in humanity is never lost, but renewed. I tucked Jerome in and we called it a night.
Day 19:
Phone was dead today, but there wasn't much to take pictures of. We climbed all day, again. Crossed over the continental divide, which was kind of cool. The descent into Silver City felt good to be done with the day. I got some bike work done the bike shop in town, and then we just sort of hung out for the rest of the day. Huh, I guess I could just be boring and sum up days like this, pretty easy.
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