A character building day

Wednesday 8th July. This character building day began as any good character building day should: Cold and rain arrived right before leaving camp at the top of the Continental Divide - which ensured us and our bikes were cold and muddy within the first five minutes of the day. 

From here, the character building day took a turn for the worse - the weather warmed and things were starting to look a bit easy. But we knew we had the renowned Fleecer ridge ascent/ descent to come which we knew would ensure a good amount of character building remained. 

As we started the climb towards Fleecer Ridge, shortly before midday the situation improved with the arrival of the worst thunderstorm to date, sending heavy hard-hitting hail along with intense thunder and lightning our way. Keen not to end our character building day early due to a mishap of the electrical kind, we took shelter and took the opportunity to take lunch (getting efficient we are).

Once again we were headed for Fleecer Ridge - with only a 0.5 mile climb up a steep but otherwise straightforward looking climb remaining - or so we thought. The damp track turned out to be unrideable, with drive train-clogging mud forcing us into the grass to the side of the track. Huffing and puffing we pushed our bikes up this ridge, pushed and pushed and pushed some more, all good character building stuff. For a good solid hour or so. All for a 0.5 mile climb?

When we had nearly climbed Fleecer mountain we had a rethink. Something was just not quite right. Having thought that we had to climb the entire ridge to go around the other side of the mountain we had somewhat blindly pushed well beyond our route - by almost 1000ft of bike and bob pushing! Yes, quite the character building day. Taking a positive spin, we got a neat 5 minute downhill to make up for our hour it took to make our mistake. 

After tackling the ridiculously steep Fleecer Ridge downhill, we had a mid-afternoon coffee stop at Wise River in our sites and less than five miles away. But this character building day was not to be over quite yet - with the third thunderstorm bringing yet more hail our way and sending us running for cover yet again. But back on our bikes we got, and with the prize for completion being "coffee on IV" we were even able to push on another ten miles to end the day in glorious sunshine.