The ride started at 8pm Friday. This was my first nighttime start. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but nighttime starts are really hard. It’s one thing to wake ay 4am, get dressed, and start riding. It’s another thing entirely to have full day behind you right before you start. I took an afternoon nap. But still, I was up for 36 hours straight. I’m too old for that.
There were just over 30 riders total (down from nearly 150 for the 200k!). We went out at a reasonable pace and hung together pretty well. I ended up in the second group of about ten bikes, including two tandems. All was going very nicely until about mile 35. It was dark by then. Someone up front did something, and people put on the brakes, and Glenn Mounkes, a Davis Bike Club rider I ride a lot with, ran into the back of a tandem and went down. It turned out that he broke his collar bone. Fortunately, a SAG vehicle was only 10 minutes away, and we got him to the hospital quickly. But that cast a pall over the ride. For the next few hours, I kept replaying what went wrong, what we all did wrong, and how we could have avoided the accident. If there’s one thing you have a lot of time to do on a 400 mile ride, it’s think. That’s not always a good thing.
After the accident, we were down to a group of three: Paul Guttenberg, Mario, and me. We rolled northeast across the Central Valley farmland for about 100 miles until we started up some rollers and made our way into Oroville. Larry “The Legend†and Dee Burdick ran this stop. And even though it was about 2:30 in the morning, they acted like it was Sunday afternoon and had had invited us over for lunch. They were making sandwiches and coffee and chatting like it was normal to be entertaining guests at that time. Very pleasant.
From there, we headed across Lake Oroville and up into the Feather River Canyon. Paul dropped back in the hills, and Mario and I rode ahead. The two of us ended up doing the rest of the ride together, which worked out nicely.
Now, I could go on a turn by turn account of the Feather River Canyon, but that’d be kind of dull. It all boils down to this: It’s a spectacularly beautiful canyon that rises into the Sierra Nevada mountains and goes on, and on, and on. I thought it was never going to fucking end. The leg from Oroville to our next control at Tobin was 50 miles, and our first turn after that was another 20 miles on. That’s 70 miles of more or less continuous light climbing. It was torture.
Plus, we delayed our trip by close to an hour due to mechanical issues. My gear shifter cable broke (at Tobin, luckily, where a SAG with replacement cables was sitting), and down the road, Mario split a tire on a rock.
After hours of riding, we finally turned off the canyon road and headed into Indian Valley. It was mid-morning now, and we were both ready for a break. But the next control, in Taylorsville, was still over 20 miles away. As it turns out, we had to bypass a direct route to Taylorsville, and instead, circle the entire valley to get there. That was frustrating, to say the least. So, on the one hand, I was thinking, “This is really an amazingly beautiful place,†and at the same time thinking, “I’m fucking sick and tired of looking at this gorgeous fucking valley.†We were just over 200 miles at the turnaround point here, and I really needed a break. There was a very comfortable looking restaurant in Greenville, the main town. But as we usually do, we passed right by on our quest to make it to our next check point.
Well, we got there and ate and sat around for a while, then, eventually, got going again. Mario made a classic mistake: he tried something new in the middle of a long ride. He drank some coffee to help stay awake, and he’s not a coffee drinker. That decision came to haunt him later in the ride.