"Someone once told me that bicycle adventure-touring is 95 percent pedaling boredom and five percent epic moments.  He said that 'pedal-drudgery' dominates a cyclist's day.  He cited riding across flat, boring lands drove him crazy.  He said it wasn't worth it for the five percent of interesting places like Glacier, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon.

"In a sense, he condemned cycling and me for my travel choices.  He diminished my sense of physical, mental and spiritual fulfillment.  I thought about my treks across the endless heat of Australia's Outback, the mind-numbing sands of the Atacama Desert of South America, the waving prairie grasses of the Great Plains of America, and the trackless desolation of the Southwest.  

"Were those meanderings meaningless?  Did they bore me?  How did I find worth in that scant five percent of 'epic' moments after 95 percent doldrums?   After thinking about it, my mind raced over to Captain Cook's epic journeys around the planet on a 150-foot sailing ship. Endless ocean expanse from horizon to horizon! I thought about Ernest Shackleton's two years living on the ice in Antarctica trying to reach the South Pole.  How about Jane Goodall's communication with the gorillas?  Daily boredom or not?  What about Amelia Earhart's quest to fly around the globe?   Nothing but sky 360 degrees  around her!  

What about Reinhold Messner climbing the tallest peaks on all seven continents?  Were they bored during their redundant journeys? 

"In this lifetime, you get to pick your poison, your passion, your moment to create your life.  You get to move toward that path that pulls at your soul.  Along the way, you enjoy the gamut of human experiences: redundancy, monotony, laughter, hardship, excitement, touch, hearing, feeling, love, anger and so much more.  How you handle them at each juncture defines your evolving self.  Therefore, I count all my bicycle travels as 100 percent 'maximum living', 'fulfilling engagement of life', and 'simply the joy of being alive'.  Once you get that equation down, you celebrate every day as a gift.

"In the end, you may choose to ride through the Rocky Mountains and pound up 12,000-foot passes. That's epic with every mile.  But life also thrives crossing the Great Plains with its redundancy, self-reflection and contemplation.  What I find: every mile on your bicycle brings you closer to Nature, closer to yourself, a life of vitality, closer to living a life worth remembering."  FHW

We pedaled out of Choteau around noon the next day.  Nice to take a leisurely sight-seeing journey around the town!  We loved the farmer's market with produce and homemade pies, cakes and cookies.  How do you deny yourself a chocolate chip cookie?  Answer: you buy one, then another, and finally you buy a half dozen. Of course, you gobble them all up.

Up and down, up and down, long pulls and flying descents.   Soon, we rode along a lake that extended on both sides of the road. They made it a huge bird sanctuary with marshland and water grasses for cover.  Tons of birds floated among the green chutes.  Pelicans, cormorants, mallards, Western grebes, black birds, crows and more.  We rode past a roadkill mallard. One second an elegant flying creature and the next, a crumpled and mangled clump of feathers.

For anyone who doesn't know, humans in their cars, boats and planes kill 11 vertebrate creatures every second, 24/7 in the USA. It equates to 1 million road kill deaths a day, and over 365 million annually.  Pretty gruesome stats, and touring cyclists see it every day along the road. My heart goes out to each one of those creatures just living their lives, but falling short because they ran in front of a car.

We pedaled to an intersection that cut left toward Great Falls, Montana.  Flat and straight.  

Soon, tail winds ripped us along with the promise of rain and hail on the dark horizon behind us.  It gathered so fast, and with such intensity, we looked for shelter as soon as possible.    We stopped at an abandoned farm house and jumped under the  eaves.  Immediately, the rain flew past us on the highway horizontally at 50 mph.  We stood protected under the eaves of the house for two hours.  Rain raged across the landscape.  Finally, after two hours of standing and trading stories, we saw a crack in the clouds.

"Ah," David said.  "It's breaking up. We can get back on the highway. I'm ready for a motel tonight.  Work for you?"

"Works for me," I said.

We cranked the bikes under a light gray sky until we reached Great Falls.  We ate a fabulous dinner at the restaurant and retired. Next day, we rolled over to a bike shop and replaced the freewheel on David's bike.  From that point, he enjoyed perfect shifting in all 18 gears.

We visited the fantastic Charles Russell Art Museum.  Just a lovely look at the early west from the paint brush of a master artist.  

When we finally finished looking at all the art, we stepped outside to see two 12-year-old girls riding their bikes around the statues on the front lawn.  Both very delightful as they rode past us, but both without helmets.

"Girls," I said.  "Can I speak with you?"

"Sure," one of them said.

"I would like to share with you that I am a veteran bicyclist," I said.  "And, the first thing I do each time I get on my bike is to strap on my helmet.  If a person keeps riding a bicycle, at some point in time, they will fall off that bike. It could be a dip in the pavement or a few pieces of gravel.  And, when you crash, you can break open your skull.  Is there any chance you two girls could have your parents buy you helmets, so you would be much safer when you crash at some point in the future?"

"Yes sir," one said. "Thank you."

 

We got to talking to a couple who also stepped out of the museum.  About 10 minutes later, the two girls rode around the lot with their helmets on their heads.

"Thank you," I yelled out to the girls.  "You look great with your helmets."

"I'll be danged," I said. "They listened and acted."

"It's great to be us," said David.

For that little exchange, their actions thrilled me. Just amazing what a little talk might do to change a child's life.

We caught another motel that night, and the next day, we visited the Lewis & Clark Interpretative Center on the Missouri River next to the first of the Great Falls.  The rangers gave talks, movies and exhibits showing the difficulties of their 4,100-mile journey to the Pacific and 4,100-mile journey back to St. Louis in 1804-06.  They faced indescribable dangers, grizzly bears, starvation, brutal winters and the unknown.  Absolutely a fantastic historical experience!

Around 3:00 p.m., we loaded up with food, water and supplies.  We headed south out of town.  For 25 miles, we pounded up and down hills. On both sides of the road, we noticed wheat and barley fields growing by the thousands of acres.  We could see the fields waving all the way to the horizon.  This area featured the breadbasket of the West.

Again, a storm chased us from the west. The storm clouds gathered. The rains began.  We raced as fast as we could to an intersection with a rest area.  We found covered picnic tables where we pitched our tents and prepared our dinners.

"Hell of day," said David. "It's GREAT to be us."

###

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-- Frosty Wooldridge

Golden, CO 

Population-Immigration-Environmental specialist: speaker at colleges, civic clubs, high schools and conferences

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Www.frostywooldridge.com 

Six continent world bicycle traveler

Speaker/writer/adventurer

Adventure book: How to Live a Life of Adventure: The Art of Exploring the World

Frosty Wooldridge, six continent world bicycle traveler, Astoria, Oregon to Bar Harbor, Maine, 4,100 miles, 13 states, Canada, summer 2017, 100,000 feet of climbing: