53: Death Mud / Ghost Ranch
You know those dreams (nightmares?) where it feels like you’re trying to run under water, and the harder you strain the slower you go? This sensation is even more agonizing in waking life than in dreams.
Last night’s heavy rain continued intermittently and into this morning. There’s lots of clay in the soil here. I knew before I even made it out of my tent this morning that the CDT singletrack would be out of the question today, though I figured the hardened surfaces of the two track roads would be passable.
After ten minutes of attempting the muddy, sticky roads, I came up with the brilliant idea of just going cross country. That went great for about ten minutes until the nice grassy meadows ended in scrublands and I spent the next hour bushwhacking through thick bushes on cattle trails (often carrying my bike while ski/skating my way down or up nasty mud) to make it back to a two-track “road.”
Paradoxically, the road was somewhat ridable until the rain stopped and the sun came out, and until the wide swath with opportunity to get out of the mud narrowed into a road channel with impenetrable brush on both sides.
As soon as the sun came out, the surface of the dirt dried just enough such that passing a tire over it would dredge up the layer of mud beneath it, quickly bringing my wheels to a grinding halt.
I spent the next hour in a deepening sensation of that recurring dream… the harder I struggled, the more mired I became. I carried my bike, rolled the wheels backwards, knocked off thick layers of clay with dirty fingers of my feet (observing the bloating of my ruined shoes with clay), dragging my bike laterally for stretches, in desperate effort to escape the mud. Nothing worked.
Eventually, with dark thoughts and profuse profanities crowding my mind, I stopped and found a place to pass the time while waiting for the road to dry. After maybe 1.5 hours of sitting around (good occasion to get out my sewing kit and repair my torn rain pants), I ventured back on the road and found it mostly ridable (aside from a few agonizing sections) until I reached an actual road and suddenly life returned to normal. Following the dendritic structure of ever-bigger roads, I eventually made it to the paved highly, Ghost Ranch, and Abiquiu.
In retrospect, I’d have been so much better off to just wait things out from my campsite.
I have every virtue necessary to complete this route, save for patience. This is the second time that I’ve let a compulsive need to “make progress” get the better of me, rather than just waiting it out for the route to be ridable again. As a more experienced cyclist I suppose it would be intuitive that, when the rain comes, you have to wait. I’m still learning…
This was, by far, the worst experience I’ve shared with a bike.