Wallace to St. Regis

That was... unexpectedly hard.

Here's the Strava Ride from today, for those keeping score re: how slow I was today.

Why so slow? Well, a couple reasons. First, the obvious one: The first third of the ride was uphil. I started in Wallace and headed up the last little bit of the Trail of the Cour d'Alenes into Mullan. FWIW, once the trail hits 90, it's way less awesome; it's basically a frontage road, so it's nice enough, but nowhere near as cool as the part I rode yesterday. There's a fair bit of mining (and mining history) to look at, though, and a bunch of signs that basically say "don't leave the trail, because this vista you're so enamored of is entirely composed of super-toxic mine tailings."

Anyway. Got lost for the first time today in Mullan, because the Northern Pacific (NorPac) Trail isn't particularly easy to find. Then, because I took the guy in Kellogg's advice (think like a train; straight and steady), I missed a turn on the NorPac; turns out I was on the wrong trail out of Mullan, which meant that I had to make a sharp left at one point. I thought like a train and rolled another couple miles before realizing that I was VERY far from the blue line on my phone, in a place where Google thinks there is no road at all. PSA: There is a road there, it just doesn't go up the mountain.

Oh, and: The NorPac isn't paved. At all. Straight gravel.

So. Think like a train, up a hill for a while. There are some absolutely beautiful views, especially when the trail winds away from I-90. Also, there are widely varied trail conditions. It seems that when they ripped out the rail line and built the NorPac Trail, they demolished all the trestles. Every place where the hillside turned tighter than a train can turn, the original rail line just bridged across in a straight line. So there are a few places where they built the trail from scratch, through tight bends in the mountain--which means that they didn't dig a nice deep bed and fill it with gravel, they just graded it and called it a day. Which means that those sections (never very long) are now chock-a-block with frost-heave rocks. By contrast, the rail line is pretty smooth; can't have frost heave mucking up your ties, I suppose.

Got to the top of the hill, looked around the ski area for a bit, took a picture with the sign, and started down the hill. The first chunk of downhill was choppy enough that I was having trouble holding more than about 12mph. It intermittently improved, but... I didn't exactly fly down the grade. At one point, I got it up to 15mph and heard a chirp from the wheel issue, which promptly stopped again.

And then it kicked in for a second at about 12mph. But! I finally figured out what was ACTUALLY HAPPENING: Something in my freehub is completely, utterly hosed. Coasting any faster than about 13mph makes the terrible howl. Pedaling at any speed is silent. In retrospect, this makes a ton of sense; it didn't really seem tied to a speed, and it kept "getting worse" late in each ride (because I'd be tired and trying to coast down hills). Especially after the Swamp Hike, when all I wanted was a free ride...

So the good news is that I've figured out how to prevent the noise. The bad news is that except for the slowest of circumstances, I get to pedal non-stop now. The other bad news is that if the hub really goes out, I'll have a big, unfixable problem on my hands, but presumably that can be mitigated by not coasting and making it worse? Also, my wheels are now very, very noisy under about 5mph, because all the dirt from the Swamp Hike that snuck into the rims through the spoke holes has dried out and is rattling around. Once the rim gets rolling fast enough to build up some centripetal acceleration, the dirt pins itself to the outside of the rim and quiets down, but... Slow is rattly. Pretty sure these wheels are done after this trip :-(

Ok. So. Slow, no coasting, down a hill. For a long time. I flatted (first of the trip) just outside Haugan, changed a tire, and rolled into the 50,000 Silver Dollar Casino for a cold beverage and some souvenirs for Elliott and Lucy. It's not exactly Wall Drug in there, but it's not far off; I don't know why we never stopped in when we drove past.

From there, I took a frontage road (paved! sweet, smooth, delicious pavement!) another two miles before being forced back on the trail, which by this point was abysmal. I looked hard at I-90: wide shoulder, not much traffic to speak of, bright sunlight behind me. So, I got on the freeway. At the next exit, I got off, fully planning to get right back on. But after consulting the Google again, it turns out there's a road that runs 12 miles, first up a little mountain pass and then straight down into St. Regis from exit 22. So I started down that, flagged down a car coming the other way, confirmed that it was paved, and rode up a hill. Then pedaled down a hill. Then checked into the Super 8 and showered 40 miles of gravel off of my legs.

Honestly, I'm not sure how things would have gone had I tried to ride yesterday according to plan. Yesterday's rolling time was 4 hours; today's was another 4 and a half, but there's a solid 30 minutes on top of that where I was stopped, looking at maps or fishing food out of my bags. And owing to the detours, it wasn't much shorter in distance, either; I'm honestly not sure I could have pulled off a 9 hour, 128 mile day, with 40+ miles on gravel, after three consecutive 100+ mile days. Today was hard enough as it was; it would have been pretty ambitious from Plummer even with daisy-fresh legs. It turns out gravel is punishing on 23mm tires; despite less total effort (per the power meter) today than yesterday, I felt pretty good after yesterday's ride, and today, I feel fatigued.

It's really pretty out here, though. Like, really pretty. Also, I'm now in a different timezone, and I've officially ridden my bike to Montana. So there's that.