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Day 30 - May 24 - Into The Desert

"I used to want to linger. Now I want to move on."

Hi, and welcome back to my bike blog.

Big Nature, Small Humans

I once went to an art gallery with Sarah, and noticed a lot of paintings that really could only be summarized as "big nature, small humans." She told me that these are examples of American Romanticism, and that they coincide with the colonialization of the Americas. In contemporary art circles, this movement is criticized for its portrayal of North America as a pristine wilderness, fertile and ready to be owned by white settlers. The idea being that Nature is the dominant force here, the Frontier to be tamed while completely disregarding the natives who were already there. Today I felt like a small human in big nature.

It's rare, in 2019 to see large expanses of untouched land. Land that looks like it came from an old oil painting in a museum. Today I felt that. Today, I rode through the Wild West. Okay, fine, not exactly, but if I ignore the pavement, the bicycle, the cars, the thing wire fencing, and the sound of the Hardcore Historian podcast calmly explaining how nuclear war is always imminent, and how Truman was exceptionally reserved in using atomic bombs when the U.S. was the only nuclear power, it really does feel like a scene from a spaghetti western.

What amazes me the most is the scale. Today I biked 170km, from Clovis to Santa Rosa, and passed through only two towns along the way (three if you count a post office in the middle of nowhere, and four if you count ghost towns). This means that things need to be planned out well in advance. You better carry enough water, because it's 70km between water sources. That's over three hours of the blaring sun.

And that's just it, it's not just the size of the land compared to the size of me, but it's the time it takes me to cross it. In a car, you are insulated from the scale by the speed at which you pass it. It's only half an hour of driving in a comfortable, air-conditioned pod that transports you between human-charging checkpoints. As a car, you might think that these towns are not very far away, and that this desert really is well-populated. There are no day-long stretches without towns, and in a sense, this ruins the effect of big nature, small human.

The Road from Fort Sumner to Santa Rosa

I got to Fort Sumner in the early afternoon, and took a bit of a break to enjoy the Billy the Kid museum and to eat something before the big, 70km ride through nothing. I refilled water, and had bought two extra water bottles earlier in the day in preparation. I now carry 750mL in my handy water bottle, and an additional 3L in my bags for refills. The hope is to never drop below 1L of water.

Three hours alone in the sun is a long time, and with nothing along the road, the brain gets bored easily. With my low energy, and hills, I expected the ride to take at least four hours. However, fewer roadside disctractions means more concentrated biking. For example, on the first long stretch of today, I only stopped for about 10 minutes to eat about a pound of cherries, before moving on. Until now, I'd always want to loiter around forests, picnic areas, even small towns. But now there's nothing to linger around in, and I just want to move on.

Music helps, podcasts help, but what helps the most in staving off the insanity is talking on the phone. Today, I talked to Sarah and Ethan for about two hours, and it made the long stretch at the end so much more enjoyable. I didn't feel the soreness of my muscles, or the heat on my back. I just enjoyed chatting for a bit, while doing something that just required time, patience, and sunscreen every 90 minutes.

By the time my friends had better things to do, I was about 40km from the end. I was making good time, and would arrive in a campground in Santa Rosa about half an hour before sunset. But I was slower than I thought. The sun had just set when I caught sight of Santa Rosa from the top of a hill. I was still 5km away, and suddenly, I felt the all-too familar difficulty biking in a straight line that could only mean one thing. I had a flat. Now, it seems that my tires get two kinds of flats. There's punctures, and there's slow deflation flats. Many times, I've taken off the tire, checked the inner tube, inflated it to find the hole, and lo and behold, it's working fine, and I removed the wheel for nothing. This time, I ignored the flat, and just reinflated the tire. It held air for about two minutes.

By now, the sun had set, and it was getting dark very fast. Instead of replacing the inner tube, I just reinflated the tire the three or four times it needed to be reinflated between the hill I was on, and the first gas station in Santa Rosa. The gas station was well-lit, and I could get to work. I took off the tire, and was met with two pieces of bad news. The first, was that the hole is right next to the valve, making it unrepairable. The second, was that the inner tubes I had bought yesterday, were too small for my wheels. The label said they should be fine, and tomorrow I might try to stretch the tube out a bit to force a fit, but as of right now, I'm not too sure what I'll be doing tomorrow.

Right now, I put another, well-fitting, but slightly leaky inner-tube into the back tire. I plan to fidget with it a bit, to see if the leak is reparable, but it still got me safely across the highway, and to the first motel I saw.

And so, tomorrow might be a pretty crazy adventure.

The Image Gallery


The first town I passed through, Melrose, where I added to my water supply. Check out this old-timey sign!

An antelope! The guy just hopped around the field for a bit before getting too far away to take a good picture. Ethan claims that this thing is actually a Proghorn.

What kind of cost estimate is that?

Buildings in an abandoned town.



I explored an abandoned church right next to the road.

Signs of water are everywhere. This land used to be waterful, but now it's all dry. This is a big basin I had to cross. Never seen anything like it. It was beautiful!

Ready to go...

As I've mentioned, signs of water are everywhere. Here's a dry riverbed.

Basin crossed. You'll also notice that the sun is getting low.

Desert sunsets are nicer than I thought they would be. It was really amazing how much colder it got once the sun was gone.

At last! After so many hours of biking in the desert heat and the sun and the dust and the road! Civilization! I took this picture just before the flat tire.

The Map

Today I biked 170km over the course of nine hours.

Thanks for reading! See you tomorrow!

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