This is a multi-part trip report. If you haven’t already, you should start at the beginning. Remember that you can click on any of the photos to see larger versions of them.
After another night of camping from the van, we’re ready to ride! We start with a little trepidation, knowing that the entire day will be spent riding uphill away from the lake, into the hills. But we’re confident we’ll be ok after that. Most of the days have fairly short mileages, and Bryan has planned the longer days with options to bail. We’ll have two ‘zero days’, one to do a day paddle into the boundary waters in a rented canoe, and another to just be silly tourists in Grand Marais, the only real town on our route.
After months of planning and packing and driving, we’re anxious to get on the bikes and away from the van.
We start on pavement to get away from the lake, but quickly reach the gravel. It’s party time! Except that it’s almost immediately apparent that the party will not be fun. The roads are long ones, and just curvy enough to be deceptive.
Years ago I adopted a strategy for hills. I ride with my head down and count pedal strokes, one through a hundred, then look up to see the progress I’ve made toward the top of the hill. Usually this works well, but these hills are evil fuckers. They go up, and up, and up, and they curve at strangely even intervals. When I look up, it seems that I’m close to the top of a hill ending in a curve. After another hundred pedal strokes, I look up and it STILL seems that I’m close to the top of a hill ending in a curve. Another hundred pedal strokes, another look up between my glasses and my helmet, and I see the same thing. Over and over. And over.
At some point Bryan realizes that, if he’s riding uphill at 2mph, he might as well WALK uphill at 2mph. The same progress is made, and the same time is spent, but it’s less wobbly and uses different muscles. I adopt a similar strategy.
Meanwhile, the air quality is getting worse. We have only one short bar of LTE service on our phones – a symbol I start referring to as the Fuck You Square – so it’s hard to pull down current information on the uncontained wildfires in the boundary waters wilderness area. Still, it’s getting more apparent that they’re not far away.
Between our less-than-adequate fitness level, the unending hills, and the deteriorating air quality, the day becomes more and more difficult. We take several breaks. At one point we curl up together and fall asleep for a couple of hours. The day goes on and on. Finally, just as I see another climb ahead, I think ‘I cannot do this.’ But at the bottom of the hill, I see that Bryan has pulled onto a side road. It’s the entrance to the campground.
We’re so tired we have no photos from the campground, but we do meet another group of bikepackers, three guys from Minneapolis apparently on their yearly Friend Trip. We like them immediately because they’re all riding Surly brand bikes. Their gear and physiques suggest that they’re on par with Bryan and I in the Unserious Cyclist department. We tell them about the Trestle Inn, a little restaurant nearby, built from the timber from a railroad trestle torn down years ago and hauled to the site. It will open at eleven the next morning. We all decide to get a late start in the morning so as to hit the Trestle for burgers and beers before forging on. We all leave camp around the same time eat lunch at adjoining tables. Between the five of us, we’ve managed to get a decent fire and wind and weather quality forecast, and it ain’t good. I wander off to play Bach on the ancient upright piano. No one wants to play foosball with me.
Also, nobody wants to end the trip early. But we’re all already semi-miserable and one of the guys seems to have some sort of medical background and talks about how several days of hard exercise in smoke might cause problems this week but WORSE problems years from now. The woman behind the bar seems to agree. So the five of us agree to scrub our trips and ride back downhill to the lake.
It’s beautiful country. The haze from the fires almost makes it prettier. And coasting downhill, instead of struggling up, is a welcome relief.
We get back to the van to find it covered in ash. As disappointed as we are about the end of our ride, looking at that ash – and knowing that it used to be the trees and animals in the boundary waters, gives us a little different perspective on things. The ash represents a minor inconvenience for us, but it’s the only thing that remains of the quiet lives they led before the fires.