The goal of 40 plus miles sounded good, but yeah, that didn’t happen! Why? Well the weather. Mother Nature just had something different planned for us. A long hard 5.5 hour push through gravel, wind, hills, mud, more wind and of course, the snow! The hills got up to about a 10% grade at one point, let us back down the hills at fast speeds only to make us go right back up! You know those hills that make you feel like you are getting somewhere in altitude just to send you right back down to start getting back up again! What a tease! But nonetheless, we continued the days journey.
One of the steeper hills coming down William’s phone flew out of his bike pocket, because of all the bumps on the gravel road. The back of the phone was shattered, but the phone still seems to work! Sheeew. Didn’t want to lose pictures or videos from and for the trip! I mean that’s all it’s good for at the moment. Still NO service, but hope to get some in the next day or two. Especially when we hit Coldfoot, Alaska about our half way point to Fairbanks.
On a brighter note from today’s journey, we ran into some more animals. We weren’t exactly sure what kind of animals they were, but one definitely seemed to be in the family of rams. And the other we would guess the antelope/reindeer family. There were herds of both animals when we saw them. Non-threatening at all just migrating the area or resting.
So on the last leg of our day the weather and the ground started to turn on us. What looked like a paved road ahead was just a bunch of mud and dirt for miles. What a let down because we were looking to cruise. Well we cruised all right at 4-5 mph pulling our tires through all the muck in the road. Felt like we gained another 20lbs! And as soon as the muck started to clear a little bit the wind picked up drastically and gave us a huge snow storm. The winds had to be about 25-30mph. Most of it were cross winds practically blowing our bikes over. So about 3 miles of that we decided to call it quits for the day. We decided the energy we were putting out was just going to hurt us for the next day, assuming it would be better weather. Fingers crossed! And now after a little more food, today being peanut butter and jelly and bean burritos, we are hitting the hay! Til tomorrow Mr. Weatherman.