Day 9: Flat lands and tires

 Montpelier Idaho, where today's 126 miles started, is at the north end of a valley formed between the Bear River Mountains to the east and the Wasatch Mountains to the west. The Wasatch are the dramatic range of mountains with Salt Lake City at their foot. Its kind of interesting to be skirting the region from a different angle than the usual east-west transit on I-80. The ride down the valley and around Bear Lake which fills it's southern extremity was very flat. 

 

Following Steve B out in the early Sunday morning chill:

The lake is bisected by the Idaho/Utah state line

(FYI the arm positions are a poor attempt to mimic the skier on the sign as we did with the Northern Transcontinental ride .... sorry Paul).

I got to say the Utah part of today's ride was nicer than either Idaho, where we started, or Wyoming, where we ended in Lyman (which is next to I-80). I wonder if that is an effect of the Mormon Church with its expectation that people will support the community?

As on prior days I timed my departure from the first rest stop ahead of the big boys group hoping to glom on to their train when it came by. Unluckily I was on a bike path (Utah built bike paths to support Bear Lake recreation) when the train came by on the paved road. 

I sped up and laid down some serious watts to chase on at the next point the path connected to the road.  I wasn't the only one with that idea and we soon had an oversized but friendly line of 10 or more to get to the south end of the valley and the first and biggest climb of the day. Here is the ride profile, which should always be taken with a grain of salt since what looks like a vertical hill got no steeper than 8%.

A familiar sight at the start of the climb:

After the climb there was a bit of government promotion. This is good. They should do more of it.

The descent was gradual - a bit of a ripoff after that climb in my opinion, but OK, its still downhill which is good. I caught up with Rachel M out there at about the point we went back into Wyoming

 (no intention with those arm gestures 😏). We struck up a conversation which didn't turn out to be such a good idea when I did not see and rolled over this small rock

that flatted both front and rear tires. Its a special rider that can pull that one off --- normally the front tire hitting it would displace it so the rear tire wouldn't suffer. However that was one stable rock and one consistent rider!

Two flats at once

shouldn't be a big deal since I'm carrying two spare tubes. And fortunately Jose happened by just then with the sag Minivan. That allowed me to use the floor pump to inflate the fixed tires. As an afterthought I asked Jose if I could get a new tube as a spare since I was now down to zero. That turned out to have been very fortuitous because a couple miles down the road I noticed my front tire was low.

When I got the first flats I knew exactly what caused them and so I didn't need to spend time diagnosing it. This time however I had to determine what was going on because if you don't (and I've been guilty of this when I was in a hurry) and you put your last spare tube on, its possible it will also go flat from the same cause, e.g. if there is a thorn poking through the tire. So I spent some time on the side of the road pumping up the tube with my little frame pump, then trying to hear or feel where it was leaking. The problem was it was noisy out there with the wind and the traffic. Then I tried spitting on the area it seemed to be leaking from but no good. Finally I took out my water bottle and just started squirting water over it between pumping it up and located a fairly fast leak close to the valve stem on the seam of the inner tube. With that info I could inspect the tire very carefully where the leak was located. Nothing wrong. So the diagnosis was this was a defective tube (I bought a bunch on Amazon --- I guess I shouldn't be surprised --- but methinks I should put some air in the tubes at home rather than assuming new tubes are good).

A few days ago when we did some miles on the Interstate 90 shoulder, I thought "Why not establish a hierarchy of bike tire hazards?" Top of my list is the Goat Head weed found throughout the Southwest and even up to Washington State. I guess the official name is Bindii

These wicked ground cover things evolved to stick into animal paws/hoofs. They look like lots of other weeds you ride over but if you do you've instantly got a dozen punctures.

Next up in my opinion are wild roses which frequently lie down over mountain bike paths. For a while there I couldn't ride my mountain bike without flatting from their thorns.

Third are the shredded radial tires from semi trucks. Because truckers frequently doesn't notice that one of their 16 non-steering wheels is flat, the tire will completely disintegrate and may even catch fire. That scatters small pieces of rubber with very fine metal wires protruding.

And that is the problem with riding on an interstate highway shoulder. Nobody drives down the shoulder, nor does anyone run a street sweeper down it and the wind and water won't move these fragments. So over the years these shredded belts just collect there waiting to bite a bike tire. As I mentioned on the previous post, the group had a spate of flats when we did a segment on I-90.

You might think glass from broken bottles should be on my list, and when I was a teenager riding sew-ups it would have been. However the ubiquity of plastic bottles has greatly reduced the amount of glass on the road.

Add a comment on what would be on your list!

Anyhow, to continue the day's saga, after the diagnosis I put in the new tube I just got from Jose, inflated it with my pump then a CO2 cartridge and it held. Riding up the road I noticed the hotel sag truck & trailer pulled over on the left so I pulled in and got another spare tube just in case since I was again down to zero spares. So this all blew more than a half hour and I was now the last rider in the tour group.

With little prospect of having riding partners that would want to go as fast as me, I felt free to do a little picture taking:

 

 

We can see what the avian wildlife think of this plaque:

This one's title gets my "logical tautology of the day" award.

The lunch stop was hosted at a really interesting Fossil Quarry where they do workshops on digging and preserving fossils. 

These were some specimens on display (Photo credit Rachel --- I was in hurry at lunch)

A workshop was in progress. This is what they pulled out of the quarry today:

The ride between lunch and the last rest stop was thirty miles. It included some of the most intense cross winds I've ever dealt with. I was leaning my bike to the left to keep it on the road. My guess is they were in excess of 50 mph. Since it was mixed with spitting rain, Luis B (the last rider who was now slightly behind me) suggested it might have been caused by a micro cell thunderstorm. When the road turned and I was dealing with 50 mph headwinds, riding at 9 mph, I started doing the math on exactly how long this day was going to last. However it was all a ruse. After a half mile the wind was much calmer, then turned to a tail wind and I was flying along at 24 mph. 

At the last rest stop the sky was still threatening:

So now my delayed day became a lucky break as many riders ahead of me were caught in the downpour, whereas I only had wet roads to contend with.