Great Divide Route and Race

"Getting to the start of the race and home from the finish are possibly the most challenging aspects of this event." In retrospect, the to and from seems to be a piece of cake compared to the race itself. But nevertheless, getting to the starting line was an interesting adventure.

I felt pretty well organized: I had booked my flight to Kalispell (the closest airport) for Wednesday evening and booked a hotel nearby. Chris from Roaring Mouse Cycles had hooked me up with packaging and so I arrived with my bike box at San Francisco International. Checking in was a mild drama (would the box fit into the small commuter plane?), but half an hour and $100 later I was all set.

Arriving in Kalispell, I got my box and started reassembling my bike. While I was busy with that I met the first two competitors: John Nobile and Steve McGuire. A couple of local cab drivers were obviously bored and started chatting with me. During the conversation, it turned out that I wasn't where I was thinking I was. As it turned out, I was at Glacier Park International Airport and not at Kalispell Airport and my hotel was in Kalispell.

By the time I got my bike ready and my gear stowed, it was dark outside. At the airport exit I found a sign giving me some indication of where to go: I was equal distance from Whitefish and Kalispell, about 10 miles each. So I decided to go ahead and find my Kalispell hotel.

It was a pleasant ride through the warmer then expected night (I had seen quite a bit of snow from the plane as we approached Kalispell). Traffic on Hwy 2 wasn't too bad and the shoulder was very wide. On the flat road I made good progress and by midnight I was in Kalispell. I turned into Hwy 93 and went all the way through downtown. I passed a number of hotels my Days Inn didn't appear. As I reached the end of town, I felt something was wrong and called up the hotel which as I was told was at the other end of town. Google Maps apparently hadn't quite figured out the difference between North and South.

The next morning I was riding into Whitefish to meet up with some racers at Glacier Cyclery. A friendly mechanic fixed my front brake - the disk has gotten out of shape during the flight. I parked my bike there and walked across the street for breakfast where I met Rick Hunter of Hunter Cycles and Team DFL which puts on the coolest bike race in town (watch one of Hans Kellner's videos: DFL Cyclocross Race #3). Rick had just stepped off the train after a 2 day journey. Rick had arrived with a cyclocross bike, but with a more appropriate set of gears then what I got on mine.

After breakfast people trickled in and a couple of hours later, six of us started the pre-ride to Eureka. The ride up was uneventful but we got a first impression of the mountain ridge we would cross on Day 1. After we had checked in the hotel, we met for Pizza and hooked up with the British delegation and Aussie Alex Field. All of them had been riding the Canadian prologue of the Great Divide Route.

After a night of nervous sleep, we all meet at Cax's cafe in downtown Eureka for the pre-race meeting. Veterans Mike Curiak, Pete Basinger and Matthew Lee showed up as well as a couple of guys from Adventure Cycling and Joe Polk, he and Tom Purvis manage, transcribe and post the racers' progress reports.

Pete gave a little speech going over the rules again and there were two remarkable points he made:
1. "Never ever get in a pilot car at a road construction side."
2. "If the road is closed due to a wild fire, don't worry you will be safe on your bike."

The first comment created quite some conflict for Pete at about week into the race: " ... there's a three mile, actually maybe even a little less section of road right after the Brooks Lake Road, section of highway where they have a pilot car. And as people know, the rules don't allow you to use a pilot car, and uh, this might be a problem. Anyway, when I got there it was a couple hours after Jay had gone through, and he had just blasted through the stop sign which is great, which is awesome, totally within the rules. Way to go Jay. Well it's a lot harder when you are the 2nd person to arrive because that flagger was pretty mad. Um, I went in circles with her, talked with her forever. I told her I'm just going to go and she threatened to hit me with the sign. Um, I talked to her some more, it was just, it was... I was just completely conflicted because obviously there could be 20 more racers coming back through here and if it's during the times they are out there and they're not letting people go through this section. I mean, it's three miles downhill, what are you supposed to do? ...
I'm being stopped by the pilot car, and this lady is... is livid. You know, Jay had gone through an hour, maybe an hour and a half earlier, and uh, she was just really pissed about the whole thing and telling me about how she'd called all these different highway departments and they have the troopers looking for him, of course they're looking like in Dubois or something like that so he's fine. uh, anyhow, I sat there for about a half hour looking down the road, you can practically see where the pilot part ends. I decided I was going to get in the pilot car, got in the pilot car, took the pilot car. Um, all in all, talking to the lady and everything else it was probably a good 30-45 minutes, like I said it's less than three miles of downhill so clearly there was no advantage. Well, anyway, like a ding-dong I had to ride about 30 miles from that point on, thinking over and over in my head about what I had just done, whether it was legal, how people were going to look at this, am I changing rules in the middle of the race, um, we told people to get around by all means necessary, even if they have to wait until the time when the worker goes home, which is doable, in this scenario. And, after I had got to the top of Union Pass, like I said about 30 miles away, I just couldn't live with myself knowing that what I had done was cheating, and I think someone could easily call me on it. I think it's a rules problem, I think it needs to be changed anyway. So, I turned around, rode 30 miles back, and yeah, I covered the construction section after the pilot cars have gone and all the construction was gone. Um, but ah, I don't know, maybe this is a problem, or a rule error or some logistical thing that needs to be addressed. Because this could be kind of an issue for a lot of people if you show up early in the morning and you have to wait, you know, 12 hours before you can go across. Or, I guess you could always bushwack through the woods, which is not the place to do that. Um, yeah, so I don't know what to think about this whole thing. Except I guess I feel like I made my wrong right, and I don't know what the rest of the people are going to do. And I feel like I'm kind of, so far behind Jay that I'm probably not going to make up that time, but at least I can finish knowing that I'm not going to have a question mark or an asterisk by my time or anything like that. "

I just hope that the second point he made is not going create any problems for him or anybody else.

After finishing up breakfast, everybody did their final preparations and rode up the 13 km (8 miles) to the border for the start.