A challenge for America's Most Beautiful Bike Ride

Lake Koocanusa

It’s time for another bike ride, and I’m not sure I’ve recovered from the last one even though it was almost two weeks ago.

The Seattle to Portland ride starts on Saturday, and I’ll be doing my own version of it – the STP and Beyond. This year I turn left at Longview-Kelso for a trip through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and the Mount Rainier National Park. Last year, it was a right turn and a trip out to the coast and home.

Two weeks ago was the Kootenai Gran Fondo* in Libby,Montana. This ride – only in its fourth year – is a contender for the title of America’s Most Beautiful Bike Ride. Sorry, Lake Tahoe, but it is. Lake, forest, rivers and all under the Big Sky of Montana. It’s small now but growing, from 21 riders the first year to 60 this year. If you want natural beauty – and a challenge – this is the ride for you.

About the challenge part: It’s 76 miles the first day and 98 the second. Your gear is transported to Eureka, MT, where you can camp at the school grounds or find a room (reserve early). So all you have to do is ride your bike – up some very challenging climbs.

Mostly I was a challenge to the ride organizers. Not only am I slow, but I stop to take pictures. Despite that, the kind of confidence I have is called “over,” the kind that makes you believe you can still run a quarter mile in under a minute, run over New Zealand's All Black forwards on the rugby pitch and sooner or later complete every mile in any kind of terrain on any bike ride.

But when I went on the Friday afternoon 30-mile warm-up ride, it became instantly obvious to John Weyhrich, the ride leader, that he had a challenge. He pulled me aside and suggested that I start an hour before the 10 a.m. mass start. “We’d like to keep you in the middle of the pack,” he said and gave me my own map and directions.

I should have told him one more thing: I get lost. Within two miles of starting at 8:30 on Saturday morning, I was lost and rode an extra eight miles before I got back on the route. So much for the advantage of an early start. By the end of the day, I was racing three miles an hour up the Pinkham Creek hill against two other riders who didn’t want to be the last one in.

Not sure if I took that honor on the first day, but I know I did on the second day. And that was despite a half hour early start and an ignominious car ride up eight of the steepest 10 miles on the course. By the time John came by to bribe me to let him “bump me up,” I had already decided that if I was a problem for the organizers, I would accept a ride. I faced up to the fact that I’m a ride leader’s nightmare.

The problem comes about because of the fast guys up front – and the slow guy at the rear. I caught a glimpse of the fast guys as they whizzed by me on the Lake Koocanusa Bridge, riding so closely packed they could have lit each other’s cigarettes if they had wind-proof lighters and practiced such a nasty habit. Fast cyclists push the line of riders ever forward and I extrude it in the opposite direction. The fellow hosting the “popsicle stand” near the end of the ride told me at about 4 p.m. when I got there that the first riders blew by without stopping between 11 and noon that morning. That’s a long stretch of distance and time between the two ends of the line for two or three support vehicles to cover.

Not sure why I have not mentioned the heat. It was hot. So hot that women riders at the second water stop on day one were putting ice cubes down their bras. So hot that the first riders who stopped at the popsicle stand were pushing the popsicles up the legs of their bike shorts to cool their thighs. The thermometer at the Eureka school read 107 degrees when I got there. The bank thermometer when I left Libby on Sunday afternoon read 113 degrees. It was so hot I actually heeded the nagging of all who have ridden with me in the past to drink more water. We were never more than 20 miles from a water stop, but I never arrived at one with water in either of the two bottles I carried.

Over the two days, I rode 174 miles, just like everyone else who rode 76 on Saturday and 98 on Sunday. But that includes my eight “lost” miles on Saturday, and I’ll always have an asterisk on my entry in the ride log.

*Did not ride the steepest eight miles.