we had our first rain. about 2:30 in the morning, jim wakes me up and says there is thunder. he's putting the rain fly on the tent. i look up, see stars, and say 'you're crazy'. fifteen minutes later, i'm scurrying, putting on my fly and stowing my stuff out of weather as a few drops fall. we ended up with some thunder and maybe 5-10 minutes of light rain. wake up at 4:45 (so jim tells me) and everythings good. so we're up and riding by 6:00.
today's destination: hell's gate. you gotta love that name. it's an area around the upper snake river, where lewis & clark journeyed and the nez perce hid from the us cavalry.
the first part of the day took us 35 mi to pomeroy. we stopped at tania's for breakfast. there were two guys in there, the only two at the moment, who were locals riding recumbant bicycles. they insisted we try them and out, so we drove them around the lot. then a couple a pair of bikers came in, and finally a solo cyclist. the cyclist is one of the first we've met who's going west to east, with the wind. chris is from chicago and he a serious rider. he's averaging 17 or so mph and doing 120 miles in a day. he is going to meet his wife in lolo pass at the hot springs, before heading up to glacier national park. anyway, we did exchange some info about routes through hell's gate area. we're going to act on that tomorrow to by-pass parts of rte 12.
after breakfast, we had a few miles of uphill before we started the decent to the snake river. the pass was at almost 2800 feet, really more of a plateau with wheat fields. remember i said i was a wimp on steep decents? oh, yeah. the road signs talked about 'next 5 miles', and 2 miles to the runaway truck ramp. jim later said it was 13 miles down, the first 6 were with brakes on almost the whole way. enough so that my hands hurt. my left hand fingers actually went numb at one point. maurice has told me that you have more control if you drop to the lower handle bars. i have to admit that i do not enjoy those dcecents. and we just kept decending. About 2000 feet total. i've done more and i've done as steep. what madce this particularly challenging is that it was straight down. bends and twists help, but there wasn't much of that.
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