Day 20 Mullan to St. Regis 45 miles

I forgot to report the bad thing that happened in Mullan. The keyboard that makes these long messages possible suffered a non fatal injury. Part of the hinge mechanism came apart. I have been able to work around the problem, but if the key board ever becomes unworkable, I will have to abandon the blog and any long email.

Mullan is six steep miles west of the border with Montana and the summit of Lookout pass. The first two were not bad but then it either got steeper (it is very hard to judge the pitch of a road) or I got more tired or both. In any case I was pretty wiped out by the summit. From there it was down hill to St. Regis. You might wonder why I didn't get further in the day. The reason is the little adventure I had coming down. (No injury involved.) I was coasting along about ten miles from St. Regis when I came to a road repair project. As I got further and further into the situation the shoulders got less and less until finally I came to a place where the two east bound lanes were closed, and all the traffic was using the two normally west bound lanes and the fog line on one side was flat against the guard rail and on the other flat against a row of jersey barriers. There was no shoulder at all. There was no way I was going to ride there. I unloaded all my gear, lifted it and the bike over the jersey barrier into the forbidden east bound lanes and pedaled on, not knowing what I would come to. Though the lanes were closed there was no work going on there at that point. Eventually I met a couple of workers on the project who, after some consideration of my problem pointed out that below us about 60 feet, (we were at moment standing on a bridge.) was a dirt road. They said if I could get down to it I could take it past the closed portion of the highway. Recalling Dwight's tales of carrying bike and gear to places they were not intended to go, I decided to attempt the descent. I backed up to the point where the bridge met the land, unloaded once again, and started down with the bike first. It was pretty steep and pretty loose material, but with dropping the bike only once I made the bottom. The packs were easy after that and the road while rough was beautiful and came out where the guys said it would. A couple more miles and I was in St Regis for the night.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T