Day 34: Colter Bay to Togwotee, Wyoming

The Grand Tetons

After a large breakfast, I left Colter Bay Village feeling full, but relaxed. Looming ahead of me was Togwotee Pass, a 9,600 foot pass, the biggest bastard I had yet faced, and the second highest on the entire route.



The first miles passed quickly as I retraced part of the route that I'd ridden with Vernon and Andrew, before veering east away from Jackson Hole. The Tetons shrank behind me, paradoxically offering a better sense of scale as they receded into distance. It was 17 miles before I began climbing, though the climb wasn't as steep as I'd feared. The weather was hot, but bearable. I took it a mile or two at a time as the Teton National Forest spread wide and dense below me like a pine carpet.



During one break I took a seat on an old pine root that raised like a bent knee, and soon found myself covered with ants and termites. When I leapt up to brush myself down, I found that I was also covered, butt and feet, with sticky pine sap. I turned back to the safety of the road, but my left cleat was so gummed with sap that I couldn't clip in to the pedal. While I was picking sap out of my shoe, the golden late afternoon sunlight revealed clouds of termites blowing with the breeze. I fled up the mountainside as the termites were joined by vicious black flies, and rode through two miles of dense insect fields before they began to thin in the cooler evening altitude.



It was just a few miles up that I encountered heavy road construction. I'd been warned about this by the four cyclists who helped patch my broken chain. The road up Togwotee was being entirely replaced, and bicycles were being shuttled through construction zones in the pickup beds of pilot cars. A car was leaving just as I arrived. I gratefully heaved my bike up into the truck bed and climbed in alongside it, then rode at the head of a long column of vehicles being led through seven miles of earthworks and heavy equipment.



It was 6pm when we reached the far end. We'd passed, a mile back, the lodge where I'd figured on overnighting. I asked the driver what to expect up ahead: 12 miles more to the top of the pass, and "they're going to be blasting tonight". It sounded like a recipe for a bad ride, and I wasn't in the mood to punish myself. The driver agreed to drop me off a mile back.


The view from the truck

At the Togwotee Mountain Lodge, I hissed air through my teeth when I was quoted $179 for a room. While I knew exactly what I was getting into at Old Faithful, I was caught by surprise here. I should have known that any hotel with the word "lodge" in its name will automatically charge twice the price. But once again, I was stuck. I asked the two young guys behind the counter if they had anything cheaper, and I was about to ask if they had any campsites, when one of them, perhaps prompted by my obvious discomfort, offered me a room for $99. It was that or 12 miles uphill with blasting. I was happy to take it. And, if hissing got me an $80 discount, I wondered if crying might have brought the rate still lower. I resolved to try it in the future.