Central New Mexico

I awoke to the sting of raindrops hitting my face. I groaned loudly and fumbled with the nylon of my bivy sack until I succeeded in closing the zipper. A headache pounded in my skull and my stomach gurgled and lurched. My first thought was, "Damn, I'm even more sick than I was yesterday. I totally have giardia. I'm going to die out here." But as I began to emerge from my sleepy haze, I realized that the crappiness I was feeling wasn't nausea. I was really, really hungry.

The rain picked up intensity as I thrashed out of my sleeping bag and stuffed it in its drybag as quickly as possible. I had somehow kicked off my shorts during the night, but before I even bothered to pull them back on, I walked over to my bike in my rain jacket and underwear and tore into my food stash like a half-starved raven. I pulled out a mashed package of Grandma's Cookies and shoved the whole mass into my mouth. The I opened a package of almonds and inhaled those, followed by infuriatingly well-wrapped cheese snacks and handfuls of Sour Patch Kids. I can't remember ever feeling so hungry in all my life. It was almost an out-of-body experience, with the repressed civilized side of myself standing aside, somewhat bemused and somewhat horrified as she watched my hands involuntarily tear through mass quantities of junk food. A full-on feeding frenzy.
When it ended, with my stash half depleted, I pulled on my shorts and rainpants and darted around camp, picking up random loose objects that I had strewn about during my sickly apathy the night before. With a sugar rush coursing through my blood, my energy went into overdrive, and I marveled at the turnaround even as I braced myself for another wave of nausea. It didn't come. My body was retaining the food. But my elation about that could only last so long. The rain was starting to come down hard, which probably meant more bad roads, which meant I had to start riding 30 miles into Cuba as fast as my tired, can't-climb, severely undernourished legs could carry me.

I had only traveled about eight miles from what felt like an extraordinarily remote campsite when I began to see car after car parked along the road. At first I thought, "Makes sense; it's the fourth of July weekend." But the cars went on for miles. Bumper to bumper. No campers. No campsites. Just cars. Many had made poor parallel parking maneuvers and ended up 10 or 20 feet down the embankment. Then I started to see the painted school buses. And the crowds of people huddled in cotton quilts, sleeping in the grass as the rain pelted down, and the half-collapsed Wal-mart tents, and the piles of garbage bags, and the extracted car seats, and the shelters made out of bed sheets and the red-eyed, dreadlocked 20-somethings walking their mangy dogs at 7:30 a.m. I stopped one of the dog-walkers and, pretty much expecting the answer, asked him what in the world was going on.

"Duuuude," he droned in a half-stoned, half-excited whisper. "Don't you know? It's the Rainbow Gathering, man. Like 10,000 people are all here together. It's amazing."

The guy's demeanor was right out of a bad movie about the '60s. I just smiled. There was trash everywhere. Unconscious people were sprawled in the mud. Rotten garbage cars had been driven off cliffs. The entire thing was horrifying. How could this guy not see that? But he didn't appear to see much of anything. He just looked at me with his glazed-over eyes and grinned.

I have a bit of a hippy-dippy background myself. I used to hang out in drum circles, listen to the Grateful Dead ... when I was 15. Now I wanted nothing more than to be far, far away from a culture that seemed to be about little more than driving a bunch of obnoxiously decorated vehicles to places where they literally didn't fit, getting really baked, trashing the forest and passing out. They were standing on the wet roadside thumbing rides, yelling at me to "Get high on life," and they couldn't see the hypocrisy of it all? Very rarely do I feel like a bike snob, but I wanted to yell back and tell these people to get a bike, and try going somewhere - somewhere real, not somewhere cooked up by the hippy bureaucracy as a magical Mecca and artificially enhanced by chemicals.

Anyway, I was happy to put the Rainbow Gathering behind me and begin the long descent into the fog-shrouded valley that encircled Cuba. Clumps of clouds draped the pine-covered hillsides in a way that made me feel homesick for Juneau. Of all the places on the route that could resemble my rainforest home, I never expected to find one in New Mexico.

I dropped into Cuba on a long pavement descent as I squinted into the pouring rain, opening my eyes just long enough to see the numbers on my speedometer surpassing 40 mph. I replenished my food supply in town, and bought a little extra in case I had to spend another night out. It was 125 miles to the next real town, Grants, and although it was all pavement, I was skeptical I'd make it there in a day knowing I was possibly still sick and already had 30 miles behind me.

Despite my obnoxious breakfast and equally huge second breakfast at the Cuba Subway, I tapped into the food supply right away. My appetite was out of control. I considered that a good thing. I had obviously ridden the previous day on a serious calorie deficit, and was trying to recover from illness, but I was still confounded by where all that food might even be going. I calculated a rough calorie estimate and came up with 3,800, which seemed unreal as it was only 10 a.m. But I wasn't trying to follow any kind of weight loss plan at the time, so I didn't really care.

The Cuba-to-Grants route traverses a sparsely populated Navajo reservation, where open space is abundant and buildings are few. It was another stretch where I started out with an obnoxious amount of water - six liters - and still decided to stop halfway for more, despite the fact that temperatures were very mild - high 70s at worst - and drizzling rain was still falling from the sky. Such is my paranoia about the desert. My maps indicated there was a store at mile 45, but when I reached it, I discovered it was a laundromat. That was a little unsettling - I had heard plenty of stories about unfriendliness on the reservation - but decided to go inside anyway.

The laundromat was packed on a Friday afternoon, with crowds of children weaving through the halls as their parents folded clothing and leaned against rumbling machines. All faces looked up as the white girl in bike tights walked inside, holding a red water bladder. A Native American man in his 70s who had no teeth and was at least six inches shorter than me approached. "I'm wondering if there's a place in here where I can fill up my water?" I asked.

"Sure," the man said through a big, gaping grin. He pointed to a bathroom in the corner. "You can get water in there. But we have pop machine, too. You can get a cold Coke; it's much better." He directed me over to the Coke machine and started fishing around in his pocket, pulling out a handful of coins.

"Oh no," I said. "I can buy my own soda."

"It's no problem!" he said, and made a move to put his own coins in the slot as I whipped out my wallet and showed him a dollar.

"No, I have cash. I want to buy a soda," I said.

He nodded and smiled. "Where you coming from today?"

"Cuba," I said. "I'm going to Grants."

He shook his head. "No, that's too far. You go to (I forget the name of the town). I have a son there. You stay with him."

"It's really OK," I said. "I know I can make it to Grants."

He laughed. "So you're Super Bike Woman! Fine, OK, that's good."

Other people put down their folding and walked up to ask me more questions about my trip. The children giggled and one girl handed me a piece of paper she had been coloring. So much for unfriendliness on the reservation.

In fact, even after I left the laundromat, three more people stopped on the side of the road to ask me if I needed water or directions. One woman even offered me a swig of her Gatorade. The overreaching friendliness and the cool, moist air put me in an incredible mood. It was everything I did not expect from "The Rez," and the surprise was refreshing and invigorating. I felt like I could pedal fast and strong enough to launch the bike airborne. And the stronger I pedaled, the more I ate. The headwind picked up, and I just pedaled faster and consumed with gusto. At one point, I reached into my framebag, and all I had left were the three waterlogged Clif Bars that I had been carrying as emergency food since Canada. I had managed to eat everything else. I guestimated at least 8,000 calories - Michael Phelps territory. That made me feel almost as proud as the incredible time I was making.

I reached Grants by sunset, just as spectacular thunderstorms raged to the south. 155 miles in 13 hours with a leisurely breakfast stop, one day after feeling as sick as I've ever felt on a bike. Grants felt like a huge victory, and I celebrated with Pizza Hut, full-on laundry at the laundromat, and a full hour of doing nothing but watching CNN. (On the Divide, any time that's not spent biking, eating or sleeping feels like a waste. But that was the day after Sarah Palin resigned as governor of Alaska, and I had been seriously deprived of current events and political gossip.)

Life was good again.

The next morning, I studied my maps and realized that the next stretch comprised of nearly 300 miles of mostly dirt with only one fuel stop available - a tiny little town with just two cafes called Pie Town. Many veterans of the route warned me that Pie Town was always closed, and it was the Fourth of July, so I called the Pie-O-Neer cafe from Grants. I got a message saying they would be open until 4 p.m. It was 8:30 a.m. Pie Town was 80 miles away. It had rained a ton the night before, and I expected to find plenty of mud. It was impossible. I left a pleading message: "Hi, my name's Jill. I'm riding through town on a bike with the Tour Divide. I'm sure you've seen others come through. Anyway, I'm calling from Grants. I'm going to try, but I don't think I'll make it there by 4. I was wondering if I could ask you to leave a lunch on the doorstep, maybe a hamburger or sandwich and pie, and a gallon of water, and a check. I can just pick in up on the doorstep, and I'll leave cash. I don't really care what the food is. At this point, I just need calories and water. Please. I'm good for it, I swear. I have lots of cash. My name is Jill Homer."

I pedaled out of Grants in an unexpected bubble of strong emotion. I'm not even sure where it came from. Many people have asked me at what point of the race did I realize that I could finish it, and the exact moment has been hard for me to pinpoint. Sometimes I think Montana. Sometimes I think 65 miles from the end. But, after further reflection, I think that was the moment. Pedaling along Route 66 out of Grants, New Mexico. I realized that I had only 400 miles left to pedal. Just three more days if things went well. And that realization filled me with everything from elation to strong doubt. Tears streamed down my face as I pleaded to God, the Universe, the Powers that Be, my own inner strength, anyone and anything that might be listening: "Please be with me. Please stay with me. Please help me get through this."

I left the pavement and pedaled up the Pie Town road, a long, rolling traverse of seriously washboarded clay. My teeth rattled and my butt clenched with the worst kind of saddle sore agony, but I didn't really mind because anything was preferable to mud, and I had been expecting mud. The road did start to become softer as it climbed. I concentrated hard to tap into my snowbiking Zen and imagine myself as light as a feather: "Let me float on top of this. Just let me stay on top of this." The tires skimmed the sloppy surface, tossing mud but rolling true, and I pedaled with everything I had in my tired legs, with the Pie Town carrot dangling over the horizon.

I rolled into town at 2 p.m. and strolled triumphantly into the Pie-O-Neer cafe. A guitarist and base player strummed mellow country songs in one corner as a handful of people listened from tables and snacked on burly pieces of scrumptious-looking pie. Before I could announce myself and ask if they got my message, a woman rushed up to me and wrapped her arms around me in a gigantic hug. "You made it!" she exclaimed. "I can't believe you made it!"

"I made it," I smiled.

The guitarist in the country band was just finishing up a song. "We did not think you were going to get here in time," he said. "After all the rain last night, I thought that road would be soup."

"Actually, it wasn't so bad," I said.

He smiled and shook his head. "Well, congratulations. That's some amazing riding."

The woman nodded. "And, I have to say, you're the cleanest and best-dressed person in this race."

I laughed. "Really?" I looked down at my outfit. I had a big chainring grease stain on the front of my jersey, and my baggy shorts were rumpled and dusty.

"When Matt Lee got here, he was covered in mud, red eyes - he looked half-dead," the woman said. "He just fell in the door, mumbling, 'I need food.' He really looked like death. I thought, 'That can't be healthy.'"

I laughed again. I was about to give her my "Here in mid-pack we have more fun" speech when she pulled me over to a table and sat me down. "What do you want?" she said. "We don't have a lot on the menu, but I can see what I can cook up."

The first thing that came into my head was salad, so I asked for it. She told me they didn't have salad, but she had a bunch of veggies in the fridge and she could whip one up. She offered me a spinach quesadilla and tomato vegetable soup, and I enthusiastically ordered it all. Fresh food! Real, fresh food! I was so giddy that I completely forgot about the pie.

I devoured the healthiest and tastiest meal I had consumed in three weeks as the country band played an impressive set of original music. The woman brought me new Pepsis as fast as I could knock them back. She directed me into the kitchen so I could fill up my water and choose from a spread of pies. I chose coconut cream. "Good choice," she told me. "That one won an award from a big food magazine last month."
I left Pie Town feeling like I was pedaling my first mile of the day even though I had 80 behind me - another example of why human kindness is the most valuable resource on the Divide. I made a couple of short stops to explore some super-intriguing old adobe buildings and began climbing into the Gila National Forest. The desert soon turned back into pine and hemlock-studded hillsides, with the distinct feature of an almost barren forest floor beneath the tree canopy.

As evening approached, the thunderstorms that had been encircling the mountains all day began to close in. I hadn't yet decided how far I was going to ride that evening, but I knew it wasn't going to be to real shelter. The route would soon dip away from the forest and back into the open desert. After that, I knew there would be at least 20 miles in which I would be completely exposed before I re-entered the national forest, and there were no camping options before then. I lingered for a few minutes near the top of a long descent and tried to decide whether I should stay or go. I decided to go.

I crossed onto a gravel road that cut through a wide-open ranchland with a few scattered houses. The clouds in front of me sunk in and became dark to the point of near-complete opacity, which told me that just a couple miles away it was raining, hard. The wind picked up velocity to my side, and as I glanced behind I could see another opague storm advancing quickly toward me. A glimmering curtain of lightning flashed through the crescent of the two storms, and I knew that if I didn't catch the one in front of me, the one behind me surely would. My heart rate shot to primal speeds, and I pedaled as steadily fast as I could manage through the eye of the storms, wondering when they were going to join forces.

It's hard for me to describe just how frightened I am of lightning storms. To me, they are the scariest, most unpredictable aspect of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. At least with grizzly bears, you know 99 times out of 100, they're going to run away. Lightning has no such guarantee. Incredible streaks of electricity tore through the sky as I traversed a region that didn't even have a stop sign to cower beneath. I was the tallest thing in a one-mile radius, whether I was on my bike or crouched on the ground. And if I stopped moving, the back storm would surely catch me. As long as I kept pedaling, I could at least hold out hope that the gap held.

And that's where I was at, stress-pedaling right into the heart of an electric storm as another one approached, when I heard the loud zip of my rear tire spitting out mass quantities of air. I stopped and inspected the damage. I was running slime tubes, and my frame was coated in green goo. The slime was bubbling out of a hole in the tire, but whatever I ran over seemed to be gone. I picked up the frame and spun the wheel around until it stopped gurgling. Then I pulled out my air pump and started pumping frantically, hoping the slime would hold.

I inflated the tire to about 25 psi and decided that was good enough, but when I started riding, air started to spit out again. I swore out loud. I did not want to have to change the tube, which on my bike involves undoing the brake caliper and generally takes me long enough that I would undoubtedly end up underneath the back storm. The air stream stopped quickly and I decided to stop and pump one more time. As I kneeled in a puddle atop a road had been innundated with rain only minutes before, I looked up and noticed a full rainbow draped over the heart of the storm, and all around it was an incredible ceiling of phosphorescent red light, a reflection of the sunset that burned through a thin clearning to the west. Streaks of lightning continued their violent dance beneath the rainbow stage. It was so breathtaking that I even through the dark fog of the stress I was feeling, I knew I was witnessing a moment of powerful beauty. Beauty more powerful than fear. I pumped a few shots of air into the tube, and it seemed to hold. I got back on the bike and continued approaching a vibrant curtain of color and lightning that filled the entire sky. "Be brave," I chanted. "Be strong."

Before I reached the front storm, the road turned mercifully to the west while the storms continued their swift march east. I began to climb back into the forest, but stopped before I entered the canyon to look back on the now-fading sunset one last time. In a corner of the valley many miles behind, I saw tiny bursts of bottle rockets exploding in the shadows. "That's right," I remembered. "It's the Fourth of July." I watched the fireworks for a few minutes, listening to their tiny pops and smiling at their miniscule streams of blue light that were pitifully dwarfed by the booming thunder and blazing red sky. "Why don't those people just save their money and look around?" I wondered out loud. Couldn't they see that their efforts were so, so small; and nature was so, so immense?

I pedaled a few more miles until the road seemed dry again - a small patch of land that hadn't been pummeled by storms - and began setting up my camp. After weathering that horrific storm, and having found the courage to power through it without breaking down and cowering in a ditch, I felt a surge of confidence that can't be duplicated by any other kind of success. And as I laid down beneath a near-full moon revealed by a new clearing in the clouds, I realized that this was the answer to that ever-present question: "Why do you do this?" Why does someone like me - who doesn't possess any remarkable athletic talent, and who isn't all that competitive, and who still harbors plenty of fears about things remote and lonely and wild - why do I participate in incredibly difficult, expensive, time-consuming, admittedly dangerous ultraendurance races when I might find more success and fewer challenges in more reasonable endeavors? And that moment, in the Gila forest, perfectly framed the reason:

Physical fitness is fleeting. Strength is forever.

Northern New Mexico

I stood outside the Skyline Lodge for nearly 10 minutes, wracked with internal conflict. I held my icy hands against my mouth and listened to the echo of my breath, like an expanse of empty space. My shoulders quaked because I was still cold, but that hardly mattered anymore. I longed for the comfort of civilization, but I wasn't yet ready to face the happy indifference of everyday life - the vacationing people at the lodge, drinking beer, laughing and talking loudly about things that didn't mean anything to me. And they would want to talk to me, rolling in on a bike and caked in mud as I was, and I would have to describe a race that in that moment felt trite and meaningless. I craved deep solitude and escape even as my body begged for warmth and food. The little voice in my head demanded I march onward. "If you walk in that building, you're going to quit," it said. "But I have to go inside," I reasoned. "Dark's coming and it's not getting any warmer. And I have to find out what happened. I can't just leave with all these uncertainties."

Flames raged in the fireplace as I walked inside the lodge, and before I said a word, a woman walked up to me and escorted me in front of it.

"You can take off your stuff to dry here if you want," she said. "That big group in front of you had a clothing canopy going on." She walked over to a sheet of paper that was hanging on the wall and looked at her watch. "What time is it? See, um, 5:45, June 30. You must be Jill?" I nodded. "Ok. Jill ... Homer?" I nodded again. "Jill in. 5:45. OK, now when you leave, come over here and sign out. I assume you'll be spending the night?"

I nodded. At that point, it didn't seem like a choice. The employees at the Skyline Lodge in Platoro had obviously heard of the Tour Divide, since they seemed to be closely tracking it, so if anyone in all of southern Colorado could help me, and I wasn't even sure in what ways I really needed help, but if anyone could help me, it was them. "I'll go grab you a menu," she said. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm fine," I said. "But ..." and it all came out right there, coming upon the ambulances, learning about the accident, talking to Pete, not knowing his condition, concerned that he was badly injured.

"We heard about a biker hit up there," the woman said. "Pete, you say?" She looked at her sheet of paper again.

"Oh, he's not in the Tour Divide," I said. "He's doing his own thing."

She scrunched up her nose in a way that told me she didn't quite understand, but said, "I'll tell you what. I'll call around to the hospitals and see what I can find out."

"Thanks," I said. "Thanks so much."

I settled in with a plate of chicken fingers and fries as the woman made a series of calls from her business phone. The kindness I stumbled upon in Platoro was an incredible relief - I had been expecting typical wilderness lodge skepticism about the dirty person on a bike. I had expected to be snubbed and even turned away, or at the very least asked to mop up the puddles of rainwater under my chair. Still, the interest at the Skyline Lodge swung a little too far in the other direction. Everyone there was Tour Divide savvy and couldn't stop talking about it. Matthew Lee had just won the race earlier that day, and several other frontrunners were closing in on the finish. The employees and a couple of guests sat around the fireplace with their laptops and updated me continuously on the standings. I was happy for Matthew and the others on the lonely highway, but at the time I genuinely did not care much about the race, and despite the unconditional kindness of the employees at the lodge, I couldn't help but be annoyed that they were so wrapped up in it. I was upset and wracked with uncertainties. My friend had just been in a terrible accident. Why did they think I cared that I was in 15th place?

The woman got off the phone after about five minutes and said she couldn't find any info about Pete. I asked her if she had a pay phone and she shook her head. "We have a courtesy phone, but it hasn't been working great with calling cards," she said. She paused and said, "If you need to make a personal call, you can use this phone. Please make it quick, though." I called my mom. She listened with sympathy and promised to do as much digging as she could and relay the information as quickly as possible. But I knew that in Platoro, I was pretty much out of touch with the world. I was going to have to accept uncertainty as my condition for at least the night. I took an Ambien and prayed the drug would cut through the empty space in my heart.

The problem with my uncertainty is that it went beyond not knowing Pete's medical condition. It went beyond my doubts about the importance of the race. It spread out into my entire life, and a truth I had been unwilling to admit to myself until that moment. I had been playing around on my bicycle all summer while I let of swath of unknowns about my future stagnate - my job, my newly single status, my lack of a home and dread about returning to Juneau. I was able to ignore all of these things as long as I was riding my bicycle, but the truth was I had a whole life to get on with. As long as I was riding my bicycle, I was avoiding the hard but necessary task of moving forward.

The next morning came and went with no new info. Quitting the race was still on my mind, but it wasn't very feasible from Platoro. And, even as upset as I was, I couldn't help but laugh at the thought of my final call-in should I quit there: "Hi. This is Jill. I'm in Platoro. Yeah, I'm bagging it. I just realized I have a life to move on with. Wow, what a waste of time these past two and a half weeks were." Of course I didn't believe it. My time on the Divide had been treacherous and invigorating and amazing, and I wasn't actually ready to give it up just yet. I was still in good health. I was excited to see New Mexico. And of course I still wanted to finish the race. Jeez, I had dedicated an entire summer to that race.

A Skyline Lodge guide approached me as I was packing up my bike outside the building. "Where you headed today?" he asked.

"New Mexico," I said. "Gonna hit up the Brazos Ridge today."

"The Brazos?" he said. "Have you checked the weather?"

"Afternoon thunderstorms," I said. "30 percent chance, which means I'll get pummelled. What's new?"

"No, no, no," he said. "Don't go up there. I fought fires in the Brazos for five years. You'll be up to your knees in mud. I'm not kidding. Knee deep."

"I have to go," I said. "I really don't have a choice." And as I looked up at the perfectly blue sky that I knew was as fleeting as good moments on the Divide, I realized that was true. I didn't have a choice.

I pedaled 20 miles down Platoro's dirt access road before I reached the highway junction at a town called Horca. I had hoped to use a pay phone and stock up on food, but the store was closed at 10:30 a.m. on a Wednesday and the pay phone didn't work. I wanted to scream because this whole place was so remote, and so out of touch with the outside world. And the Brazos, the Brazos was one of the most remote regions of the entire route. It wrapped around a designated wilderness area, high above the desert and well away from towns. It seemed so cruel of the GDMBR to carry travelers out here, so far from anywhere, so we could be alone and scared and knee deep in mud. But I guess that was the point. Lonely and wild. That was the point. I tried to remind myself of that, but all I could think about was Abiquiu, still more than a day away. Screw remote and wild adventure. I just wanted to find a phone that worked.

I climbed La Manga Pass and dropped down to the border at Carson National Forest. The clay road was still soft from thunderstorms the day before, and a couple of ranchers in trucks stopped to warn me about impending rain. "It's OK," I told one of the ranchers. "I get rained on every day. I'm used to it." I climbed to a wide plateau where my GPS indicated I was above 11,000 feet. It seemed so high and open that I thought maybe, just maybe ... and pulled out my cell phone. Cell phone use is controversial in Divide racing - it's outright illegal in the Great Divide Race, and legal but mostly discouraged in the Tour Divide, to avoid use as a means of soliciting outside support. I had my cell phone with me but had rarely used it - only a couple of times to make call-ins as I stood in front of pay phones that didn't work (most don't these days), and to call my family from towns because it was cheaper than using my calling card. But in that moment, high on the Brazos Ridge, I needed that cell phone to help settle the storms raging in my mind. It seemed so unlikely that it would actually work, riding along the Cruces Basin Wilderness that was close to exactly nowhere. But as I pedaled higher on the plateau with my phone turned on, I heard that familiar ring that told me I had voice messages.

No fewer than six different people had called to update me on Pete's status. He was actually OK, they all told me. He had a broken collarbone, possibly broken arms, lots of cuts and bruises, probably terribly sore, but he was going to be fine. Amazing, they all said, after being hit head-on by a truck. I listened to the messages and then called my dad, who confirmed the good news. "And how are you doing?" he asked.

"I feel much better now," I said. "Relieved." But as I looked toward the dark clouds building over the plateau, I realized that my relief only extended to my emotional trauma. I was about to head out into the wilderness amid what was almost certain to become another violent thunderstorm, with no known shelter on the horizon, and I felt a very raw, primal sort of fright. I wondered if I should tell my dad this, but decided against it. "Be brave," I chanted as I turned off my last connection to the outside world and approached the black horizon. "Be strong."

Within the hour, the rain was pelting down and the road was breaking loose. I mashed through the mud, drivetrain slipping, chain bouncing, wheels serving, pedaling as hard as I could just to slough off the goo that was clinging to my frame and trying to keep myself afloat. It wasn't enough. The gooey road dipped and climbed out of stream drainages. The drops were slow. The climbs were unrideable. As I pushed my bike uphill, the wheels jammed up. I lifted the bike to carry it and my feet slipped. I fell to my knees, still sliding backward, clinging to the overturned bike for traction. The Skyline Lodge guide and the south-to-north GDMBR tourist were both right. Northern New Mexico was bringing me to my knees. I felt like sobbing, but I had already spent my emotional capital for the day. And, anyway, I had to keep moving forward. It's not like I had a choice.

By the time I reached the merciful pavement of Highway 64, I was coated in mud and half frozen, in New Mexico in July. I shivered up the highway climb until I reached a campground at Hopewell Lake. The campground had a day-use shelter and I huddled inside to get out of the rain. The moisture seemed to be letting up a little. There was even a sunset forming to the west, and I had hoped to ride further in order to make Abiquiu by early morning. But the day-use shelter, "No Camping" signs and all, was just too inviting. I unrolled my sleeping bag and drugged myself into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

The next morning I awoke to bright sunlight and considerably less malaise. I started my usual morning chores of eating a candy-based breakfast, brushing my teeth and using sticks and rocks to chip cemented mud out of my drivetrain, and started pedaling up Burned Mountain. I dropped into a town called Cañon Plaza, a cluster of adobe buildings and wooden fencecs, where New Mexico was finally starting to look like New Mexico. I crossed through Vallecitos, where the infamous "Dog Alley" welcome wagon greeted me viciously. Every single house had a mean loose dog or four, and every single one of them chased me, growling, barking and nipping at my ankles. Frazzled and frightened, I pulled out my bear spray and uncorked the safety, pointing the business end straight at a vicious yellow mutt. He backed up at just the right second, when my fear of dogs was just about to trump my fear of macing myself. Despite multiple grizzly and black bear encounters in Canada and Montana, that was as close as I came to using the 11 ounces of bear mace that I carried the entire distance of the Great Divide.

I rolled into Abiquiu at about noon and ate a big chicken burger, fries, yogurt and six random pieces of fruit at the one convenience store in town. I walked out into what felt like real, unwavering heat - the first I had felt on the Divide. It felt like it was 100 degrees, although in reality is was probably just in the mid- to high-80s. I stocked up on water, despite having a filter, because I didn't know how much water I'd find up high. I started up another 4,000-foot monster climb.

I was finally in full-on, Southwestern desert, which was both exciting and intimidating. New Mexico is notoriously the most dangerous state on the Divide. A combination of heat, bad roads, scarce water, fewer supply stops, and race fatigue can quickly turn a bad situation into a deadly one. I was aware of the hazards, and being a cold-adapted person from a wet northern climate, took them very seriously. The heat out of Abiquiu felt powerful and I reacted by sucking down water. I didn't know if I needed all that water. I certainly had enough water. It weighed heavily on my back up the steep climb. But as I reached the Polvadera Mesa, my thirst for water turned into a deep, unsettling nausea. I didn't know if I had been hydrating too aggressively, or if I ate something bad in Abiquiu, or I was simply worn out and my body was rebelling, but I suddenly felt very sick. I dropped my bike and darted into the woods to vomit up all of my lunch. My immediate reaction was regret, because there were a lot of lost calories in there, and I didn't have that many on hand if the road to Cuba turned into a long one.

However, lost calories were the least of my worries. I drank a little more water and ate a seriously melted Mounds bar shortly after I threw up, only to lose everything again a few miles later. It wasn't an isolated incident. I was really sick. I rested on the side of the road until my head stopped spinning, then tried to get up and keep going. The road was really bad, probably the gnarliest surface I had encountered yet. Large slabs of stone formed a staircase up the mesa, and loose sand inbetween made the whole thing hard to negotiate at full attention, let alone through the haze of nausea. I felt light-headed and woozy, and my energy levels plummetted the longer I went without new calories. But at that point I was so nauseated that I couldn't even stomach the thought of forcing something down. Near the summit, I crossed an open meadow that was populated with cows. I walked my bike up the road, chatting with every single one of them through an almost feverish delerium. "Can you tell me where the water is?" I would ask them. "I think I'm running out of water." (I still had plenty, but my mind was somewhat addled and seemed to fixate on my overall fears about the region. Plus, I was only slightly aware that I was talking to cows, so I obviously had problems.)

I reached a junction where the road seemed to finally turn downhill from the seemingly endless climb. My stomach felt raw and empty, my head light and my legs wobbly. I was so weak that I was having a hard time even walking my bike, and the junction felt like a point of no return. Cuba was still 50 miles away. On the other hand, going back to Abiquiu would be downhill the entire way. The voice of reason told me I should go back. I was obviously sick. I might have giardia or some other kind of bug that was only going to get worse. But the voice of reason could only speak quietly through the faint fumes that my body was now running on. I wasn't thinking completely clearly, but in that moment, moving forward seemed like the best solution.

Beyond the pass, the road continued to roll along the 10,000-foot ridge, with steep climbs and drops that offered absolutely no relief. The evening sun filtered through the trees and burned in my eyes. I slumped over my handlebars and labored through every step. I coasted down one short hill only to meet another steep climb, and then another. I oozed off my bike and dropped to the ground - on my knees in northern New Mexico, again. I was spent, completely bonked, and still too sick to eat. I looked at the shadows stretching across the road and sobbed. "I don't want to climb any more," I pleaded out loud. "Please don't make me climb any more."

But the road, of course, didn't care. I stumbled up a few more rollers before finally reaching a long downhill, on a rough, rocky and rutted track that was very difficult to negotiate in my addled state. My body begged me to lay down and sleep, but I reasoned that as long as daylight lingered, I needed to get myself as close to Cuba as possible. I had been completely alone and had not seen a single other person or vehicle since I left Abiquiu, so I was surprised when I came across a string of what I call "grubber cars" - crappy old sedans that had been driven well beyond the point of sensibility on four-wheel-drive roads, where they subsequently became stuck and abandoned. I had no idea why all of these cars were suddenly here (I would learn that the next day.) But some reason that no longer makes sense to me now that I am no longer in a flu stupor, I decided to break into this car and open up the cooler in the front seat. I think my sick-addled mind was still fixated on running out of water, because I remember I was hoping to find water bottles. What I did find was the most disgusting soup of sun-heated, rotton food that I have ever come across. It was beyond foul. I slammed the cooler shut, absolutely horrified. If I had anything in my stomach to purge, I would have vomitted for sure. Leason learned.

When dark finally descended, I found a nice grassy meadow beneath a wash of stars. I laid down my sleeping bag, and without eating, brushing my teeth, or even taking off my jacket to use as a pillow, I laid down to sleep the guiltless sleep of the dead, completely drug-free.

Southern Colorado

I felt strangely unrushed when I woke up in Salida to a beautiful bluebird morning. I flipped on the Weather Channel and warmed my gigantic 7-Eleven sweet roll in the microwave. I savored it with an extensive breakfast of coffee, smoothie, yogurt, peach, banana and orange juice, then chased it with a round of peanut butter cups. I had no planned destination for the day, and therefore no required distance to stress about. And I was feeling so fresh and strong that I had no doubt in my ability to go far. I stopped in Poncha Springs to buy a new pair of sunglasses (I had a way of obliterating old pairs and went through a total of five cheapie gas station shades over the course of the trip.) I spent a half hour there talking with a GDMBR tourist who was traveling south to north (I've since forgotten his name.) He handed me $5 and asked if I'd give it to a couple he stayed with in Del Norte. "The big climbs in Colorado aren't too bad," he said of the passes south of there. "But watch out for northern New Mexico. It doesn't look like much on the maps but it will bring you to your knees."

The first climb out of the gate - Marshall Pass - was a monster: 4,000 feet of elevation gain along a canopy of 14'ers. The route followed an old railroad grade. I motored up the gravel feeling grateful that locomotives were notoriously weak climbers. They forced engineers to cut long, snaking paths up these huge mountains. Now, 100 years later, cyclists could enjoy maximum coverage of this beautiful terrain for minimal pain. The knee agony of northern Colorado was only a distance memory, the potential meanness of northern New Mexico only a vague promise. The entire Tour Divide seemed wrapped up in that one morning, and that morning was perfect.

I was likely humming happy Sunday School songs to myself when a Honda Element pulled up beside me. I quickly recognized the driver and he smiled back - I'm pretty sure just as surprised to see me as I was to see him. Mike Curiak and I had only met once before in person, on March 1, 2008. I had just woken up in McGrath, Alaska, race-addled and bewildered by the transition from the deep-frozen Iditarod Trail to a hot, crowded house, when I noticed him standing in the front room in his longjohns. He was supposed to be on an entirely self-supported tour of the entire Iditarod Trail and reportedly wasn't stopping in any buildings, so I asked him whether he was planning to beyond McGrath. "The future is uncertain," was all he said before I was whisked away to catch my plane home. Now, the future was here and we were both basking in Colorado sun. Life is strange like that. "What are you doing in this part of the world?" I asked him.

Mike told me Pete Basinger was going to be coming through the region that day and he wanted to surprise him with cold Pepsi and other sugar treats. "Really?" I said. "Pete's just behind me?" Pete is a quiet but gifted endurance cyclist from Anchorage. He was riding the route as an individual time trial, meaning he didn't start with any race but was out there gunning for the overall record. Pete and Mike Curiak had battled for that record during the Great Divide Race in 2004. In the end, Pete finished only 20 minutes behind Mike, who established the GDR record at 16 days and change. Pete had been working toward the elusive record every other year since. He was shut down by "total body breakdown" just 600 miles from the finish in 2005, and contracted food poisoning in 2007. "How's Pete doing?" I asked Mike.

"Good," Mike said. "He's still on record pace. But he's had a lot of issues with his bike. I sent him a big box of parts a week ago. Then he taco'd a wheel outside of Silverthorne and had to hitchhike back into town. He called me because he was debating whether to buy the one set they had at the bike shop. I said, 'Do you have a choice?'"

"Man," I said. "That guy can not catch a break."

Mike offered to ride with me up to Marshall Pass. He pulled out a bike complete with an Epic Designs frame bag that had a custom-built pocket specifically designed to hold Mike-and-Ikes. He offered me a handful of the colorful candies along with a Pepsi. "It's Pete's favorite," Mike told me.

"I'm not going to drink Pete's Pepsi!" I said.

"Don't worry," Mike said. "I have another one for him."

We pedaled leisurely up the road, both stopping to shoot photos of flowers and landscapes. Mike commended me for being a fellow camera geek and an unhurried participant in an endurance race. Above is a photo taken by master photographer Curiak himself. I love how I can hand him a point-and-shoot camera to snap a posed shot in front of a Continental Divide sign, and he can turn it into a dramatic retrospective of the sweeping Colorado skies.

Mike and I parted ways at Marshall Pass and I sped down to Sargents, where I ran into the same huge group of bicycle tourists that I had snacked with in Hartsel the day before. They had gone up over some road pass while I climbed and dropped and climbed and dropped in the Salida area, and we had somehow both ended up at the same point. My maps indicated that I was going to be on Highway 50 for 12 miles, so I asked if I could ride with them. We motored down the road, chatting about their house building cause while I further explained the Tour Divide. As we talked, my heart began to race toward levels I hadn't felt since I was actually able to climb strong back in Montana. I looked down at my odometer and we were doing more than 19 mph, on level pavement. The problem was they were on unloaded road bikes and I was riding 50 pounds of mountain bike beast. I mashed into the pedals harder, determined to keep up, sucking down big gulps of air between conversations so they wouldn't know I was maxing out. It seemed almost silly to waste so much energy on pavement, but I seemed to have energy to spare, and I was ecstatic about all of my unexpected company that day.

Highway 50 was choked with traffic. More than once, we were buzzed closely by RVs and honked at by truckers. "Man, I don't know how you guys do this - touring on pavement," I said. "It kind of sucks." They just laughed. "It's really not that bad," one guy said. "Tell me you don't have moments where you wish you were on pavement instead." (How true this would turn out to be.) Still, I was grateful to finally turn onto a nondescript dirt road and begin the lonely climbing anew.

I call this photo "Waiting for Pete." After Mike informed me that Pete was not far behind, me, I spent the entire day looking over my shoulder. I wanted to watch him power up from behind and mumble short but sincere words of encouragement as he flew ahead.

You could say I'm a big fan of Pete's. He's my friend, too. Alaska is a small state in a people sense, and we often end up at the same events. The first time I met him was at the 2006 Soggy Bottom 100. He was way out in front, but the race had enough out-and-back that we passed each other three times. He always said, "You're doing awesome," or "good job," which was a huge self-esteem boost to a totally new, very insecure endurance mountain biker who only knew him as an Alaska cycling powerhouse.

Since then, we became more acquainted through the Iditarod Trail Invitational. I went to him for winter survival advice, which he always freely gave. I brought him my poor dilapidated Pugsley for total overhauls mere days before that race, both years, and he'd blast through the repairs without even doling out the maintenance lectures I sorely deserved. I made a feeble effort to repay him by taking over the blogging duties for the 2008 Great Divide Race, and he still wrote me afterward and said he owed me his first-born child. "She's probably 7 by now," he joked. Yeah, Pete's awesome. Good-looking, too. ;-)

Anyway, I let myself get really excited about the fact that he was going to catch me that day. In fact, as the day wore on, I made less stops and rode later than I would have otherwise, for fear I was going to miss him. It seems pretty silly, and it was, but out there on the Divide, where you're running the high gears all the time, your mind seems to regress, almost becoming childlike in the process, and it's difficult not to fixate on simple things.

Meanwhile, the big picture was swirling all around me. I surpassed the century mark for the day and kept riding, cycling between daydreams about Alaska and an awestruck awareness of my newfound place in a big, big world. I was Jill Homer, Alaskan, pedaling myself toward the Mexican border. And I was Jill Homer, former recipient of multiple F's in seventh-grade gym class, riding in one of the hardest mountain bike races in the world. But the beauty of the Tour Divide is that it's only as hard as you want it to be. It can be tough, sure, agonizing even. But more often than that, it's fun, pleasurable, relaxing, and dare I say, at some perfect moments, even easy. I smiled because it was fun to know that secret.

Still, the fatigue of a 120-mile day with tons of climbing (someday I'll actually go back and quantify it so I know the real number), was beginning to wear, and by 10 p.m., I just had to camp. I was disappointed that Pete hadn't caught up to me yet, but there was a chill in the air and an inky thickness to the night, and I was tired and hungry. I pulled off the road into the Storm King Campground and grabbed a site next to the creek so I could filter water the next morning. I munched on a brownie, jerky and packaged tuna, and gazed at the golden moon, lonely but satisfied.

I'm not sure how long I had been asleep when I awoke to rustling just a few feet away. My automatic bear-alert mode caused me to jolt upright, but everything after that became hazy and dreamlike. I had been using sleeping aids the entire trip to help me pass out amid the adrenaline and high heart rate left behind from hours on end of riding. I always felt normal in the morning, but this was the first time I had woken up within hours of taking the drug. I gazed around the campground through a thick Ambien fog. I could see a silhouetted figure unpacking things from a bicycle. He looked up and a dull headlamp shined in my face. I mustered a smile, though even my face muscles felt sluggish. I fumbled for my own headlamp and couldn't figure out how to turn it on. I pressed the light on my watch, but that wasn't working either. Finally, I just laid back down because this was obviously all a strange dream. Within seconds, I was unconscious again.

Sometime during an ungodly hour of the next morning, noises woke me up again. I peeked out of my bag toward a shimmering glaze of stars, and right beside me was a dark figure packing things into a bicycle. The Ambien had finally worn off and I was alert enough to acknowledge that he was really there. And, based on the timing, I was certain it was Pete. The thought made me giddy. "I should get up," I thought. "Maybe we can start out the day together, ride for a while, maybe even all the way to Del Norte." But another voice said, "Ha! You wouldn't be able to keep up with him for a mile." I stuck my face further out to get a better view, only to be hit with a startling blast of cold air. The temperature was close to freezing, probably 35 degrees, and the dark was powerful. It was well before my awake time. Guilty as I felt about not even saying hi, I laid back down and closed my eyes, quietly wishing him good luck as we both hoped for a quick sunrise.

The morning ride into Del Norte was one of the most fun trails of the entire route, a bumpy doubletrack that rolled down red sand hills toward the Rio Grande. I still felt empowered by all the good days behind me, and I rode hard and confident, even catching sweet air on some of the larger bumps.

I rolled into Del Norte at about 9 a.m. and started winding my way through town, looking for the home of Gary and Patti Blakely so I could repay them the $5 that someone somewhere owed them for something. Patti, who was riding through town on her own bike, managed to find me first, and she brought me home and started reheating homemade pizza and peach pie. I gulped down several cups of sweet tea as Gary and I discussed the more nontraditional aspects of my bike set-up. He was especially interested in my platform pedals, which I suspect he never expected to see on any serious Divide racer's bike. I explained that my frostbitten toes never took kindly to any of the clipless pedal shoes that I tried, and in order to avoid needless toe agony, I finally just bought a pair of too-large running shoes and some $20 commuter pedals with cages and it was one of the best decisions I made.

Patti rode with me several miles out of Del Norte before wishing me well. I started up Indiana Pass, the biggest climb of the entire route. It gains more than 4,000 feet in 26 miles, topping out at nearly 12,000 feet elevation. The summit is certainly not the end - several smaller passes complete with steep climbs awaited me on the other side. I was mentally prepared for that one task to take me the rest of the day.

The road was steeper and looser than most other Colorado climbs, and I had to engage the high gear to get up it without walking. My mind was still amped up and I thought I had high gear to spare; little did I know that it was already slipping. I reached the top feeling thoroughly cooked. I looked out over Summitville, the mining ghost town that is now a Superfund site, toward an expanse of mountains that seemed to last forever. There was no relief in sight. Only more climbing road, and ruins of old buildings, and ominous-looking stormclouds.

The thunderstorm hit with maximum force just as I was starting down the rolling descent. Black clouds sunk in with little warning and rapidly disintigrated into sheets of rain before I even slowed down to put my rain gear on. Deafening bolts of lightning streaked through every corner of the sky, all around me, and I had nowhere to hide. I was at 12,000 feet, where even the trees were too small to cower behind. I finally decided that my best course of action would be to just drop down the route as quickly as possible. But the descent into thin tree cover continued to throw more climbs at me, and I was already shivering from the cold but too frightened to stop and put on more layers. My fingers felt frozen to my grips; my legs were stiff and quaking. The lightning wouldn't leave me alone, and the pouring rain was pooling in potholes and streaming dark mud down the soft road.

I pedaled as hard as I could, and the storm calmed a bit just as I entered a long, steep downhill. By this point, my teeth were chattering audibly. I was as cold as I have ever been on a bike, even all the times I rode in driving sleet in Juneau were just similar, not worse. Still, I thought I wasn' t that far from Platoro., and I could weather the wet cold a little longer. I pedaled a few frigid miles before I passed the first vehicle I had seen since Summitville - a police car. An officer was standing outside. He asked me if I was alone. "Yes," I said. Beside him, the road was shredded with swerving tire tracks. I assumed a four-wheeler accident. I continued down.

About a mile later, I came upon two ambulances inching down the road. I pulled up behind them and watched my odometer drop to 6 mph, and then 5. They were wide enough that they took up the whole rough road, and it would have been difficult to pass them, and I decided I shouldn't anyway. I rode my brakes and coasted behind them, shivering violently, becoming more uncomfortable with each maddeningly slow minute. After what seemed like an eternity, we finally reached an open clearing, and both ambulances stopped. The drivers got out with radios in their hands and started talking to each other. I was just about to make my way around them when one of the drivers saw me and waved me over.

"Are you with this biker?" he asked.

"Wait, that's a biker in the ambulance?" I said. The driver nodded slowly. "A cyclist?" He nodded again. "Who is it?"

He shook his head. "I can't tell you."

I felt a thick lump of bile gurgling up from my stomach. "Is it Pete Basinger?" The driver nodded. All the blood left my head, and I said in a broken squeek, "Is he OK?"

"He's responsive," the driver said. "He's talking to us."

"What happened?"

"He was hit by a truck pulling a horse trailer. Head-on."

"A head-on collision?" I sqeeked. "With a truck? Do you know what's wrong?"

The ambulance driver shook his head. "We have him stabalized and we're trying to call in to see if we can land a helicopter in here."

"Where are you taking him?" I said. "Can you tell me where you're taking him?"

"Not sure," the driver said. He leaned over to the other driver and mumbled a few things I didn't hear. Then he turned back to me. "Do you want to talk to him?"

"Um, I probably should just let you guys go," I said.

"We're not in a hurry right now," the driver said. "Either way we have to wait to see whether we can get him out of here."

I stepped into the ambulance and nodded at the two EMTs sitting inside. I was still shivering wildly, a combination of the cold and fear, and I braced to restrain myself as much as physically possible. Pete was strapped to a bed and his head was completely stabalized so he couldn't turn his neck. His long eyelashes pointed where his eyes were fixed on the ceiling. Based on the severity of the accident, the way he was strapped in and the fact that the EMTs were calling in life-flight, I was convinced I was looking at a man who was badly injured, possibly even paralyzed.

"Hey Pete," I said, startled by the shakiness in my own voice.

"Um, Jill?" he said.

"Yeah, Jill," I said.

"Heh. This is pretty crazy, isn't it?" he said.

"It's intense," I said. "How long ago did this happen?"

"It's been about a three hour process getting here," he said. "But I don't even know ... where are we now?"

"Stunner," I said at the exact same time he did.

"Stunner Campground," he said. "That's what I thought. Did you hit any rain?"

I smiled. He couldn't see me, but I was coated in mud and my hat and coat were still dripping rain water. "A huge amount of rain," I said.

"Yeah, that's why I left Del Norte right away," he said. "I wanted to beat the rain."

"Smart man," I said.

He laughed. "I'd say you had better timing than me."

"Are you in much pain?" I asked.

"It's not too bad," he said. "Now. Those rednecks who hit me were walking around me, talking about what they were going to do with me. That was the scariest part."

We paused and the silence echoed. I looked down, muddling for anything to say. "So did you see me at the campground last night?" he asked.

"Storm King? Yeah, I heard you come in. I was going to get up and talk to you. Sorry I didn't."

"That's OK," Pete said. "I didn't want to wake you up."

"I'm still sorry," I said. "I'm really sorry this had to happen."

"Yeah," Pete said. "Shit happens. Just sucks right now, three days from the end."

"Three days," I mustered a laugh. "I was thinking more like seven."

"It won't take you seven days," Pete said. "Where are you staying tonight?"

"I think Platoro," I said. "I'm thinking about just going to Platoro."

"Platoro's good," Pete said. "The cabins there are expensive, but they have good food."

Another pause lingered in the thick air. "Well, I should let you guys go," I said. "You're in an emergency and stuff."

"Yeah," he said. "Good luck."

"You too."


Outside, the sun was beginning to break through the clouds and a bright rainbow formed over the ambulences as they inched away in the opposite direction I was headed. I guessed the helicopter wasn't coming. I watched them until they drove out of sight, then turned to face the last climb into Platoro, Stunner Pass. Where the storm clouds cleared, a dark cloud of grief descended over my body. Here was a friend, a fellow Alaskan, a man I admired looked to for inspiration - mangled on the Great Divide. His life might be changed forever. I didn't really know, but in not knowing I let my imagination serve up the worst possible scenerio. I felt sick with regret and doubt. Pete had been out there, battling the same harsh elements, riding the same hard roads, pushing through the same physical and mental fatigue that I had been experiencing. We were out doing the same thing, this totally unique thing, riding the spine of the continent as fast as we were physically able. And to what end? To what end? What purpose could it possible have to net this kind of consequence? I couldn't get the image of Pete strapped down in the ambulance out of my mind. And out of that, the little voice in my head dug from my memory a haunting loop of "What Sarah Said" by Death Cab For Cutie ... "And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time ..."

I crested Stunner Pass in a depth of sadness. I could no longer muster the energy to ride my bike so I just walked it, even as the road dipped downhill. I stopped every few steps and just stared into the distance, hating the vile forest, the remoteness of it, the way it just swallowed space with its massive mountains and dark shadows. I thought about the things in life that were important, truly important - my friends, my family, my career. None of them were near here, not even anywhere close. I was riding my stupid bike through a strange land, and that definitely didn't seem important. I was angry with it all and I couldn't think of anything that would take that anger away, except to go home. I wanted Platoro to be a place that could take me home. I didn't really care how. I remounted my bike and dropped down a steep hill, finally emerging through the trees to a little cluster of cabins. And beyond that was more forest, just forest. Platoro was nothing more than a lodge. A remote wilderness lodge. There wasn't a bus station there. There probably wasn't even a phone. My anger bubbled to the surface until it erupted in a stream of tears because there was nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

P.S. You can listen to my call-in from Platoro at this link.