One of the first things I do when I get up in the morning is to check the weather and the ride profile for the day. Looking at my “Ride with GPS” app this morning I saw a lot of red on the ride profile, which indicates a climb – and the darker the shade of red then the steeper the gradient of the climb. For a guy that lives 11 feet above sea level, I knew it was going to be a long day. I came into Rapid City this afternoon pretty much on fumes, over the last 4 days, we’ve covered 392 miles and 22,619 feet of climbing. My quads are shot.
The day started a little later this morning with breakfast at The Millstone Family Restaurant next to the Best Western Black Hills Lodge in Spearfish where we slumbered last night. For me, it was I think the first time I ever stayed in a room that had 2 doors – Room 122 included one door that opened to the parking lot. We had an 8 AM start and since it was a little warmer this morning at 59 degrees, I was surprised that some people showed up wearing jackets and rain pants. Yes we were expecting some rain today but we also knew we were going start climbing almost right away so I was able to dissuade some of them to ditch the outerwear.
Today’s ride was a relatively short 76 miles through Spearfish Canyon, but we also had over 5,300 feet to climb. Spearfish Canyon was beautiful and the word is that the canyon is “12 times older than the Grand Canyon” – I am not so sure about that but that’s what the geologists say. So our route had us climbing up through the canyon against the flow of Spearfish Creek for about 20 miles at about a 1-2% gradient which was easy enough. But at the 15 mile mark my GPS starts chirping away indicating a climb ahead – and all I could see was red on the climb profile – and that pretty much happened all day as we started chipping away at that 5,300 feet of elevation gain.
The misty rain started soon after our first rest stop and it had us taking gear off and putting it back on depending on if we were climbing or descending. Doing a 1,000 foot climb, I shed my arm warmers and sweated through my jersey, but when you’re above 6,000 feet in altitude, you would be smart to put that all back on with a rain jacket because the sustained descent will really have you shivering cold if you don’t.
Our Trek guides did a good job of placing our SAG stops at the the top of the longer sustained climbs that we completed and by the time we got to our lunch stop at mile 47, it was 12:30 PM and we had done most of the climbing for the day. But still had over 1,300 feet to go over the final 29 miles. With the final SAG stop at mile 62, we were looking forward to getting the Doubletree Hotel in sight in the final 14 miles. Rapid City seems like a nice “outdoorsy” town and the final 3 miles were on the bike trail system which took us to the door step of our hotel. I crawled in at about 3 PM after a little over 6 hours of ride time. We all met up for a social hour and dinner at the hotel late this afternoon, but off to bed we soon went.
I think I was glad to find out that some of our stronger riders are as beat up as I am. I guess misery loves company but the past 4 days have been great – it was our opportunity to do some character building. Tomorrow is our 2nd rest day and we’ve crossed 40% of the country and completed over half of our overall climbing. Knowing that, I will sleep soundly tonight!