Hoosier Pass to Guffey
The euphoria that came with conquering the pass lasted for most of the day. Good thing, too, because the day eventually travelled the interesting passage from the sublime to the ridiculous.
After lunch and an ice cream stop, we headed into the home stretch. We were bound for Guffey, where there was a great hostel/campground arrangement run by a veteran of the original 1976 TransAm crossing. It was described to Roger and Chris by Joy, a rider doing the EastBound route by herself. They had been very impressed with her, and she had waxed eloquent about how great the place was. Keep all of this in mind for later!
About a half-hour after our ice cream stop, we were behind Roger and Chris when a man in a pickup going the other way stopped to mention that "There is a buffalo on the road." Certainly not something you hear every day, and actually we had no idea what to do with that particular piece of information. We headed on to where we could see the buffalo in the distance as well as Roger and Chris stopped in the middle of the road. (Later we realized that they were ready to "send the tandem on first" for lack of a better plan!)
Back in Yellowstone, we had received advice from a ranger about how to deal with moose (act big and agressive and they'll usually go away) and how to deal with bears (act submissive and back away slowly). The only advice anyone ever had about a buffalo was "don't get into a confrontation with one. We were truly stymied, but somehow it felt better that we were there together.
Another cyclist approached from the other direction, and then we were five. We thought of Rick behind us, and hoped that he had been given the same warning. The buffalo was easily 1,000 pounds and obviously upset about something. We decided to try the avoidance route and we all moved to the opposite side of the road. So did he.
We all crossed the road again. So did he. And he was getting madder. A thousand pounds of testosterone and muscle, with a brain the size of a pea is a very bad combination. Just as we were sure we would all die (at least we were together), a cowboy in a pickup came by and said: Get inside the fence and I'm going to try to drive him down the road. (Mind you, we felt safe inside the fence and with someone having at least a suggestion of plan, but this was actually the fence which the buffalo had just crashed through in the first place). The buffalo took off in the direction we had come from, so that helped us, but really made things difficult for the cowboy. Crashing through another fence on the opposite side of the road, he took off to freedom. Question: where does an escaping 1,000 pound buffalo hide?
Happy to escape with our lives (literally) we looked forward even more to the hospitality of '76 Bill and his Eden-like hostel. No one told us that the last mile and a half were up; after the Hoosier Pass, 70 miles in between and the "buffalo incident" as it came to be called, we were exhausted mentally and physically.
The hostel made the "buffalo incident" seem like a logical thing. Rather than Nirvana, we were projected into the Twilight Zone of lodging. Bill and his wife Colleen were aging hippies operating a "museum" which contained mostly animal bones, an antique store which was actually more a pile of junk on the hillside, and the bunks. More about those in a minute.
There was also something advertised as a cabin. We had decided to let Roger and Chris have that since we'd copped the master suite the night before. We opted for a bunk, which was basically a storage barn with a shelf that held a pad to roll our sleeping bags out on. Mercifully, it was clean and safe, although the fact that anyone could come by and throw a bolt that would lock us in kind of spooked me.
The shower that was near us was not operating (almost a mercy, since it was basically a tub out in a field with a water hose attached and an outhouse), so we walked the half-mile or so to the other shower. After showering quickly (we didn't trust the hot-water supply) we went to, yes you guessed it, the town bar to eat.
This is a story which will play much better in person, so I'll save the really gory details.
1 Comments:
A day we won't forget - brilliant description Maggie. We are missing you both - mind you on the flat terrain you would be at the motel by coffee time.
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