A LUCKY THING HAPPENED WHEN we pedaled out of Idaho and into Yellowstone National Park—it snowed. The tourists fled the park in droves, leaving it nearly deserted at the peak of the tourist season. It was extremely cold cycling the park. The mountains were covered with snow, and every time we pumped over a pass snowflakes sprinkled down on us. But we had the mud pots, the geysers, the hot springs, the canyon, the deer, the moose, and the rest of the wildlife, almost all to ourselves. We could hardly have asked for more.
It took almost an hour to cycle over the 8530-foot Sylvan Pass at the east exit of Yellowstone. When we came down off the pass and out of the Rockies, we figured we had a long, relatively flat haul to the East Coast. As far as either of us knew, there weren’t any real mountain ranges along our tentative route through Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, lower Ontario, and New York—only flat lands or rolling hills until the Appalachians. No one had said anything to us about Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains, and we failed to notice them on our maps. The first person to mention them was the owner of a sporting-goods store in Cody, where we picked up white gas for our cookstove.
“So yer headed east are ya? Which pass ya figure on tacklin’,” the man asked.
“Pass? What pass? We’re going east, not west,” Larry answered.
“Well, I’ll tell ya folks somethin’. Goin’ east from here, yer headed straight fer the Bighorns. They’re only ’bout eighty miles away, and they’ve got some of the most treacherous passes you’ll find anywhere. Worse than that part of the Rockies ya just came through, that’s for sure. I’d recommend ya turn south up ahead at Greybull, go down to Worland, then head over the Powder River Pass into Buffalo. If ya keep on straight at Greybull, you’ll be headin’ over the Granite Pass road into Sheridan, and that’s a bad stretch in there. Powder River’s a higher pass, but it’s a better road.”
At 9,666 feet, Powder River proved to be the highest pass of our entire journey. In the fifty-five miles between Worland and the summit, the road climbed 5,600 feet, most of it during the switchbacks in the last fifteen or twenty miles.
We started up the switchbacks in the early afternoon on August 24, when the air temperature hovered in the high eighties. For three hours we ground up the grade. The climb was slow, hot, and tedious, and along the way we passed two giant recreational vehicles that had conked out. From the summit we plunged down into Buffalo, then set out across eastern Wyoming.
Two days later we entered South Dakota. We’d heard a lot of stories about South Dakota from other bicyclers.
“Nothing but flat or rolling empty prairie,” one of them had told us. “You’ll die of boredom.”
“I’ve never heard of a bicycler catching a tailwind in South Dakota. Everyone has headwinds no matter which direction they’re pedaling,” said another.
“South Dakota? It’ll test your ability to remain sane and married,” someone else had assured us. “Headwinds and nothing to look at. I read a newspaper article while I was there that said some Russian scientist that was visitin’ South Dakota thought the terrain looked just like Siberia! And there’s lots of mosquitoes, too. They’re the state bird.”
We came into South Dakota at Belle Fourche and followed Route 212, the scenic route, as someone in town referred to it, for four hundred miles, straight across the state to Minnesota. The first twenty-five miles, from Belle Fourche to Newell, weren’t too bad; there were some farms to look at. But the next thirty-five miles, from Newell to Mud Butte, lived up to everything anyone had told us about the state. We had a headwind the whole way and were surrounded by rolling hills so barren there wasn’t a single tree to break up the monotony. I’d never seen land so empty. There were no crops, no livestock, and no vegetation except for short golden grasses here and there. The bare hills rolled, one after the other, for as far as I could see. From the top of each rise, I usually could count eleven more ahead. And so it went for the entire afternoon—up and down, up and down, up and down; boring, boring—boredom at its finest.
It would have been nice to have been able to stop and rest our muscles, or eat a snack, or read a little, to break up the tedium of the empty landscape, but the mosquitoes wouldn’t allow that. When we stopped they swarmed over us. They also determined our speed, because when we slowed down below ten miles an hour, they were on us and biting.
We pedaled nonstop for three long painful hours against the stiff winds and over the low, but steep, hills. To keep my speed up and help block out the monotony and fatigue, I tried daydreaming about South Sea islands. But I tired of that after an hour and went back to staring blankly at the bare land around me and the ribbon of asphalt that stretched on and on and on to the horizon without making a single turn and without passing a tree, or shrub, or animal. When we came into Mud Butte, after three hours in the prairie, the two of us had our doubts as to whether we’d be able to endure another 340 miles of headwinds, mosquitoes, and nonexistent scenery without going completely batty.
Booming downtown Mud Butte, South Dakota (population two), consisted of a rustic coffee shop on one side of Route 212 and a one-room volunteer fire station on the other; if a fire broke out in the coffee shop, the McGillivrays, the middle-aged couple who ran the coffee shop and lived in the cottage connected to it, would, I suppose, dash across Route 212, jump into the fire engine, drive back across to the coffee shop, and put out the fire. As Larry and I stumbled through the front door of their shop, the McGillivrays took a look at our long faces and heavy bikes and shook their heads knowingly.
“The last bicycler that rolled in here hitchhiked out,” Mrs. McGillivray shrugged as she slapped our iced teas onto the counter and straightened her cotton dress. “He dragged in here ’round noon a few months ago, and he was a real wreck. That long dry stretch between Newell and here ’bout drove the poor kid to despair. He was a real nice boy, though. Was bicyclin’ from somewhere on the West Coast to his home on the East Coast somewhere. Boston, I think it was; somewhere big, anyway. And he had his heart set on bicyclin’ the whole way; and up until South Dakota he was farin’ just fine.
“When he pulled in here, he wanted to know how much longer the type of terrain he’d just come through lasted, and I had to tell him that at the rate he was movin’ he had another seven or so days of empty, wide-open spaces ahead of him. I figured seven days was how long it’d take him to get out of South Dakota and into Minnesota, where there’s lots of farms and towns and green grass. When I told him the scenery got even more borin’ east of Mud Butte, ’cause it flattened out and then there weren’t even rollin’ hills to look at, he looked like he was gonna cry.
“From what I hear, it’s real crowded back East—people and buildings everywhere—and I guess folks from back there can’t take to travelin’ for hours and hours for a bunch of days without seein’ anythin’ but rollin’ or flat dirt. In a lot of South Dakota the only time ya see a buildin’ or a tree is when ya come to a town, and a lot of times there just aren’t a lot of those around. I’m used to it though. I like it here. No sir, I wouldn’t want to live back East, where there’s people all over everywhere and everythin’. I need room to move around and be by myself.
“Anyway, me and my husband talked with the kid for a long time. He was all torn up. Didn’t want to get back out again into that ‘lonely emptiness,’ as he called it. But he didn’t want to cheat and hitchhike, either. He sat and argued with himself for hours.
“After a bit, a rancher from over there by Watertown, almost to the Minnesota border, came in for somethin’ to eat. He was on his way back home from Wyomin’ in his pickup, and he offered to give the kid and his bike a lift. Well, I’ll tell ya, that boy hemmed and he hawed a good bit, but finally he decided to take up the offer, and off he went.
“A month later we got a letter from him. He was back home in Boston or wherever it was. Said, after he got to Watertown he cycled the whole rest of the way to the East Coast. Never had to hitchhike again after South Dakota. Guess that says somethin’ ’bout