Day Fifty-Seven - Day in the Desert I.

This post refers to Friday 26th June.

I set my alarm early this morning (5:25) so I could get on the road as soon as possible. I wanted to make it to my stopping destination at a tiny place called Hite by the time their shop shut at 4pm so I could stock up on snacks and fluids.

As it turned out, the place I went to breakfast (I found out that the my hotel in fact only serves morning coffee) were leisurely in service and large in portions, meaning 8:30 was the best I could manage. By then, it had already rained twice, which was bizzarre because I thought it didn't rain in the desert? Anyway, my first 20-30 miles were mostly uphill, and took me quite a while to complete. It was getting hot by this point, but nowhere near what I thought. To be honest it was like any other hot day I've had. After these 30 miles, the rest was progressively downhill, very much appreciated. It meant I could get some miles in a lot faster.

During the latter part of the ride, I noticed black clouds and darkness following me (made to look pretty appcalyptic through my sunglasses), so I had a new challenge - beat the rain.

As it happened, I arrived at my stop place with two hours to spare, partly because the shop was open an hour later than I expected it to be. Hite was quite an interesting place as it turned out, it has only existed in it's current form for about 40 or 50 years because old Hite is now underwater from a dam that's been built. It's got the population of something ridiculous like 20, and is a settlement that only came about due to a gold rush a while back. They have a communal telephone (there I was thinking I might get wifi...), a grocery store/petrol station, helipad/runway, and that's about it.

I went inside the grocery store to buy some drinks and spoke to someone who had a badge that looked like one of those old sherrif badges, so I assume he was either a sherrif or a park ranger. He showed me a nice spot on the porch of a building next to the helipad I could camp on. It as concrete again, but at least it wasn't shingle. To be honest, I had more facilities than I was expecting, I had a public toilet all to my myself and some picnic benches under the porch to tie my tent up to. While I was doing that, two bikers pulled up, asking about the route I'd come. It turned out they'd been there for two days, waiting the right conditions to head out to blanding. They eventually did at 4pm, meaning they wouldn't arrive until pretty late tonight. Very late in fact. Almost right as they left, it started to rain, prompting two motorcyclists to pull up, one who lipped for half an hour and the other who I spoke to. It turned out they had rode from Telluride today, making my days seem ridiculously short compared to theirs. They left when it stopped raining, and I ate snacks and read the cycling magazine I bought at Heathrow for the rest of the evening. I found that magazine painfully boring, but for some reason it's become interesting. Perhaps I've become a bike geek.

Tomorrow I'll be off to a town called Hanksville, which is only 50 or so miles, but as I mentioned before I'm dictacted by where towns are slightly. I'm hoping to get some Internet / some sort of signal, I feel quite disconnected at the moment.