Day 10: White Bird to Lowell

67 miles
3700 feet of elevation gain

So this morning we might have cheated a little bit. Last night we stayed at a campground down by the river. It was a little off the road (you had to travel via gravel road) so this morning Jim was going to drive us up through town to where we start. Technically we probably should have ridden through town since that's where we stopped yesterday, but we wanted to avoid the crowded narrow roads. We thought we'd cut about 1/2 a mile off, but in fact it was more like 2 miles of hill we skipped out on. Too bad, that meant we only had 7.5 miles left to climb. What a shame :) So we started this morning with a nice, big mountain. It took us 1.3 hours to get all the way up, and along the way we had a great view of the valley, as you can see in Jim's photos below. We also got to look at historical monuments on the Nez Perce war, which was interesting.

During this climb, rather than getting warmer as we went up we got colder. As you can see in my photo we were riding up through and then above the clouds, and it was freezing. During the downhill especially I thought my fingers were going to fall off. From now on, no matter how big a climb we start out with, I'm layering up better. These mountains are cold! On a good note, we started early enough that there wasn't too much traffic on 95 this morning, and the shoulder was much wider and we had two lanes going our direction, so the ride was much better today. Apparently we were supposed to use a different route going on Old 95 to some other random road, but we read the map wrong. Oh well, we got there.

So at one of the Nez Perce memorials were we stopped to rest this guy drove up with a pickup dragging a huge trailer. He was swearing and shouting at his poor dog, and stumbling all over the place. We watched carefully for him so we could get over, and when he finally passed us he was taking the corners wide and swerving on the road. Dad and I though he might be drunk. When we rode up to Grangersville there was his pickup, all smashed up and his trailer was turned on its side. Gotta be careful about drivers like that. We think we saw him locked in the back of a police car, but we don't know what happened to his cute black dog.

Following the climb we turned off on to Highway 13 and then in Kuskia Highway 12. These are windy roads through the woods and it's pretty, but they aren't always smooth and traffic's not fantastic. According to our map traffic, especially of big trucks, has picked up a lot since the routed the trans-am route, but trucks are actually my favorite vehicles right now. They give us lots of space.

Today was much better than yesterday. We had some nice descents and it really wasn't too hard, but my knee hurts a bit, probably from the rough roads and starting out cold on a mountain. We're at the Three Rivers RV "Resort" so I'll go soak in the hot tub ;) Tomorrow will be all rolling hills then Wednesday we're doing Lolo Pass.

P.S. Dad wants to petition the government to use stimulus money to build a bike path across the country. Anyone want to sign?