Undoubtedly the title question springs to mind for you also, reader, as you leaf through this tedious monologue. The question occurred to me yesterday because the tour is just getting to the hump days where the end still seems a long way away, while the beginning also seems an eternity ago. The tour progress map provides the negative answer quite clearly:
The big red line shows that we're mid way through Colorado. So we are GETTING THERE.
The title applies as well to today's 115 mile route from Grand Junction to Montrose Colorado. If you were traveling as we normally do between these two towns I'm sure you'd wonder what the heck I was talking about:
But we don't sign up for bicycle tours to go the normal way! Our route went this way:
As you can see, we went over Grand Mesa, which went into my personal record books as biggest climb ever. And my moving time (not the fastest in the group by any stretch) was 8:12 instead of the google car route 1:06. So it took a lot of time, like a lot of these rides have, so why bring up "are we there yet?" Here is why:
At the start of the climb the road tilts up to a 5% grade as it turns towards the Grand Mesa you can see in the distance here
I ride for 50 minutes more, almost always pushing 8%-9% and it looks like this
Now I'm over 8,000' so the air is not so thick with oxygen as usual. Took a 10 minute break and continue riding for one hour and twenty minutes and I was grappling with the actual mesa part of Grand Mesa:
And a mere 30 minutes later I've made it to the high point:
Total climb 5,800 feet (1770 meters), distance 21 miles, moving time 3:13.
For comparison, the biggest climb on the Northern Transcontinental was the Big Horn Mountains which was 4700' over 19 miles and topped out at 9430'.
During such a climb it can be pretty discouraging to look at the stats on the bike computer because the only thing that seems to be changing is the time readout. So what can you do instead? Sing a favorite song! Or do an exercise like review in your mind the roads the bike tour has taken on the previous 12 days in sequential order, or harder yet, remember what you had for dinner each night of the tour. This kind of distraction can definitely slow the pace because you aren't paying attention to the riding at all. At the same time it helps the time go by faster.
The last application of the title question is that after such an effort, and after lunch there was still 30+ miles to be ridden across the agricultural valley to get to the night's hotel. Another case were one tends to look more frequently at the odometer than is advisable.
A lot the Colorado biome we've seen so far has been very reminiscent of our time living in Santa Fe. The upper reaches of the Grand Mesa reminded me a lot of the bike rides I used to take to the Santa Fe ski basin, with aspen, spruce and high mountain air.
At the top of the mesa we found ourselves transformed into Leaf Peepers; the reason for that and other images are here for your enjoyment:
First thing this morning, after riding directly east into the blinding rising sun, the road headed through ravine (in the distance of photo below) that contains both the interstate and the river without a lot of room for cyclists.
After getting off this worst-road-of-the-tour, (I-70 with a 2' shoulder) we turned up the Plateau Creek valley. Plateau Creek is about the same size as Big Laurel River back home.
Rachel noticed and captured some base jumpers launching of the canyon wall to the right
Zoomed:
d
On the other side of the mountain we could see the distant range to the south
Zooming in, our route tomorrow will go up the valley toward Hanson Peak on its way to Durango:
