RAA II

Day 15

Bismarck to Jamestown, ND

106 miles / 3,542 feet of elevation

When we woke up this morning it did not feel like the official "end of summer” was two days away. Outside it was a “wet cold.” We rolled out of Bismarck on “bike trails” to avoid the Monday morning commute on the city’s street. After warming up, our pace was quick which heightened the cold. One way to describe this early morning cold is to think of that cold when you tuck your chin under your jacket collar to avoid the cold on your face – that’s the kind of cold we started with and it didn’t really warm all day.

We traveled on bike trails past St. Mary’s College on the very outskirts of Bismarck and then we transitioned to country frontage roads where the only motorized vehicles we saw all day were pickup trucks and farm equipment. These drivers seemed perfectly at ease with three guys on bikes in the far-right lane.

Later in the morning, the cold temperatures best friends, side and head winds, joined our ride. For the last 70 miles we had stiff side winds, 10-15 mph, with gusts to 20 mph to contend with. The gusts on some of our descents nearly blew us over and when a gust would subside, our "overcorrecting" for the wind nearly had us toppling ourselves. About three quarters into the day, Joe asked me, "Carl, do you see the road all the way out to the horizon?" "Yes," I said. Joe then remarked, "Well we are going two and a half times that horizon before our next break ..." Thrilling riding! We did get to see some thrilling cloud formations today and wicked cool "dinosaur artwork" made from old thresher machines placed on a hill's ridge.

https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/north-dakota/threshing-machine-graveyard-nd/

From a distance, if you squinted, it looked like a heard of Brontosaurus walking along the top edge of the hill.

Popular posts from this blog

Day 8 East Glacier to Shelby, MT 85 miles / 2,800 feet of elevation Montana is the “new Texas” from RAA I, we are in Montana for 5-6 days out of 18. Growing up in Alaska, my “lower 48” geography is a bit off, I truly had no idea Montana was this large of a state! However, happy to be in Montana; the roads and shoulders are good, the drivers courteous and share the road willingly. We have had some trouble with hotel accommodations as the state is not well populated and some towns don’t have hotels for us, so we end up shuttling at the end of the day and beginning of our days. This shuttling is a very slight inconvenience for the beautiful surroundings we are cycling in. We enjoyed wide open roads with good cycling all day long. Montana’s “Big Sky” was a treat throughout the day. Again, we tried to show you this aspect of Montana in some of our photos but our photos just don’t seem to do the real thing justice – at times w...

Day 6 Libby, MT to Whitefish, MT 50 miles / 3,700 feet of elevation / shortened day due to mechanicals and necessary bike shop stop Today’s shortened route took us up and over a beautiful mountain course bounded by a lake to our left (for the entire day!) and a mountain wall to our right. We traversed over gently rolling and sometimes fairly steep hills with long rollouts afterwards. We had fantastic road conditions and very few, perhaps 12, cars / trucks passed us during this entire day’s ride. Near perfect day in the saddle with beautiful scenery all around us. From time to time the tranquility of today’s ride, in sharp contrast to yesterday’s “white knuckler,” was integrated by one of us pointing off the road to deer and wild turkeys. Some of both allowed us to get quite close before they bounded or flocked away from us. Later in the day we visited a local...

Day 14 Dickinson to Bismarck, ND 101 miles / 2,541 feet of elevation Day 14 opened with a beautiful sunrise; this opening, along with wide open no traffic frontage roads, produced a very brisk pace and perfect riding day. We had 80(+) miles of frontage roads where we could sustain speeds well over 20 mph. Then, when we came into Bismarck, we had the city’s bike trail to ride on and this too produced a very quick pace. We had fewer and shorter stops which also assisted with a fast pace. The few photos show our beautiful sunrise, examples of the roads we rode on and, at the end of the day, my Garmin’s ride summary. My Garmin is set to calculate total time from start to finish, not “rolling time.” When you take our break time out of today’s total time to complete the ride, our rolling average speed was just shy of 20 mph or just a little over five hours to complete 101 miles! For us, this is a screaming pace which w...