tour de wyoming

My friend Gordon Grant started this chatter late in the ride, long after our lactic acids had begun boiling out our ears, downshifting next to me and reviving our decades-long conversation about life's 'meaningful quest' as we neared the final summit of a 400-plus-mile bike ride. Soon we were shouting back and forth – not for the first time – about whether merging with some sort of mega-consciousness in the universe's clockwork was a worthy reward for a lifetime's wrestling with the lonely puzzles of death, God, the afterlife ... and eight percent grades.

We were not alone. Well, maybe cosmically ... but not on twisty switchbacks in the Beartooths, where a few hundred souls were pedaling pedaling pedaling on the fifth day of the 2008 Tour de Wyoming. For a moment we were synched with a grey-haired woman of probably 60 years, and when I apologized for the shouting, she huffed: "I don’t know what you're talking about, I'm just trying to breathe."

If she hadn't then pulled rapidly away up into the mountainous stratosphere – an experience I had with a number of riders ferrying greater years but fewer pounds than me – I would have replied: "Lady, don't you realize, this is your chance at satori."

But then I started thinking about sartorii, those long muscles that run from your hip to your tibia ... and then Gordy was shouting again, chiding me for seeking simple answers, arguing that we can only approach such deep questions obliquely, through the indirect revelations of stories ... At which point I felt a new pain on top of all the others, somewhere in my abdomen, as I bent over the handlebars and my obliques cramped.

Friends and family – my triathlon daughter, Rosie, and my bike-riding nephew, Owen – got me onto a road bike back in 2005, and into my first Tour de Wyoming in 2006. The tour organizers offer a simple training regimen that gets you in shape over a 10-week period before the ride begins, with sessions five days a week, building to a century ride (100 miles) before embarking on the tour. I smartly compacted that schedule into about 10 days, and saved my 100-mile mojo for the tour itself.

Which left a reasonable question about whether I would actually complete even Day 1 of the ride ... much less Day 2, which involved pedaling up and over the Bighorn Mountains between Buffalo and Ten Sleep. And that wasn't the worst: the worst was a 92-mile day between Ten Sleep and Meteetsee, highlighted by 90- degree temperatures, melting blacktop, forest fire ash in every breath, and Gatorade overdoses that turned us all lime-green by the end of the day. Yet we made it through – perhaps a numinous tether (given our other-worldly conversations) allowed us to pull each other through the drop-dead moments.

Naturally, I was deliriously happy when Rosie suggested we do it again in 2008.

The Tour takes a different route every year, mostly within Wyoming's boundaries, but the distance is generally about 400 miles over six days, and the population of riders is limited to fewer than 350. This is distinctively small: Famous tours like Iowa's "Rag Ride" include 10,000 participants, emptying grocery stores along the route like locusts hitting a corn field.

Limited numbers make it easier on our hosts, from little mountain hamlets like Saratoga to quiet farm towns like Basin, where local service groups often provide big breakfasts and local entertainers – the great Jalan Crossland in Tensleep! – come out nights to pick and sing to sleepy, achy, endorphin-addled riders. But limited numbers make it harder to get a place on the Tour. When the announcement goes up on the Cycle Wyoming website in March, the slots fill as fast as you can punch in the internet forms, and if you're ten minutes late, you lose. So we all sit poised at our keyboards as the magic hour approaches – not just folks in Wyoming, but people from 37 states and several foreign countries, including, this year, Japan.

Tour De Wyoming special perks

After 12 years, Cycle Wyoming, the group that sponsors and runs the ride, thinks it's settled into the right size at the right price. This year each rider paid $185 to participate, and that included breakfasts, some dinners, a truck to haul tents and other gear, arrangements for showers, Port-o-potties, and rest stops every 15 miles or so where you could fuel up on fig newtons and peanut butter sandwiches in the shade of a canopy. At the end of the day, you buy your own Moose Drool and chardonnay.

(Someone Who Shall Remain Nameless hijacked some gin, which we sipped on the second night while playing croquet – SWSRN packed mallets as well – on the Greybull Middle School lawn.)

Many of the riders are in no shape to hit the croquet fields right after they dismount. You'll find them snoring on blow-up mattresses in a dim-lit gym, or limping around town looking for a motel room. These are not easy rides, and though there are "SAG" wagons to help those in trouble, participants are encouraged to train to complete the entire tour on two wheels.

The routes are generally loops, so you don't often have to re-travel the same pavement. This year, for instance, we began in Cody, rode 70 miles to Greybull, then up to Lovell (and on to an overlook and swimming holes at Yellowtail Reservoir), then to Red Lodge, MT. (okay, it’s not in Wyoming, but it wishes it were), back to Cody, and up to the heights of Sunlight Basin.

The mountains were gorgeous, with outbreaks of lupine and Indian paintbrush and balsam root lighting or lightening the way. But the committee that plots the routes is not just seeking postcard vistas – there are badlands, and beet fields, and rattlesnakes among the sagebrush. "We always include mountains, but you also want a limited amount of ugly," says organizer Amber Travsky. "That adds some flavor to it, and that's also part of Wyoming."

This seemed an apt year for a bicycle tour. I'm getting older, and the mind-body duality thing is no longer a section of college philosophy – it's a fairly serious dialogue between my head and my muscles, and a reminder that the two are drifting a bit apart, but remain friends. The smart ideas inside my skull are generally wrong regarding the body I inhabit, which seems much less willing to quit than the brain at the helm.

And, again, this duality: It's a surprise to find my body holds its own ideas about what it can do, quite different from what I think I know. It's like a neglected dog that's been following you around, and, given a moment's notice, begins bouncing happily, eager to please. My misgivings and fears of failure give way to a very real affection – I'm traveling with a friend.

An apt year, too, because during the meditative hours of pedaling, we are thinking some deep thoughts about the vehicles around us. We're bicycling across a state that has grown rich from fossil fuel extraction, and - because it is thinly populated and spread out - burns a lot of those fuels to get from place to place. It's an improbable site for a herd of bicycles, and there are moments when the kid in the pickup truck or the geriatric in the Winnebago looks at us like we're aliens.

It could be that this is how anyone sensible looks when a cramping bicyclist swerves precariously toward their lane, and they're wondering what sort of mad dog does this sort of thing under the midday summer sun.

wyoming highways
tilting the Winnebago...

But it could be also that they're wondering, as I am, about the next world we're going to live in. Whether this is the last Exxon-powered road trip, the last drive to the country cabin, the last trip out to the dump to shoot bottles off the fence. The price of gas, if it continues to rise, may render these over-muscled engines unaffordable. Or it may be a regulatory decision that takes all the fun and the freedom and the value out of our gas-guzzling lives - some government directive, driven by concerns about national security, about global warming, about the consumption that has softened and soured us ... all these things seem to be squeezing the American heart, and that may be what's roiling the surfaces of those faces behind the Winnebago windshields. Or not.

But I'm certainly thinking about it, because that's one of the huge benefits of long rides on a bicycle: it's a quiet, meditative world where you can count the flowers, hear your lungs doing their work, and open your head to the world that lies ahead. As the days of pedaling go by, just as my body seems to be getting stronger and happier, my mind jumps up and down with the same eager dog energy, imagining solutions that are all the more exhilarating because the problems are so hard.

And the bicycle, as foreign as it may seem in the gas fields of Wyoming, is one partial solution to our current energy angst. Actually, it's surprisingly well fit to the small-town scale and libertarian leanings of the Cowboy state. You don't need to pay Exxon or OPEC to ride a bike to the grocery store. Okay, maybe it was assembled in China – but if we're trying to cut the umbilical to the foreigners or corporations who siphoning off our wealth, and if we're trying to spew a little less CO2, even a partial shift to self-propelled locomotion could be effective. And the conversations you'll have while huffing up the pass!