Duct tape is king, all hail duct tape!

I have no idea where to start this post, seems like a lot has happened in the last four days, in fact I can't quite believe it's only four days since I was in fairplay.

Anyway first things first. I made the seventy miles to salida in one day. In fact I fairly cruised it and got into town for about three pm. What I do remember about the day though is that county road 53 is a son of a gun of a road when it comes to wash board. I realise I have talked about this before but this time I thought to include some photos of what I'm talking about. You can maybe see why bouncing along on wavy road is no fun with frozen hands...And it's generally speaking no fun on your backside at any time. A bit like getting a rythmical ass kicking, literally.

Anyway washboard aside it was a fairly cool day. It looked a lot like cow boy country again till I got closer to salida. At the top of a little sharp short hill I met Frank McMurry. A seventy five year old cattle rancher with a business card simply saying eat beef. Anyway we got chatting and he said he was out checking some of his cattle. He said he had a state lease on what to my ears sounded a ridiculous amount of land, it may as well have been three billion acres, but essentially every cow I had seen in the last 40 miles had been one of his. It also turns out his daughter was north American mountain bike champion and now a photographer. I saw some of her work in Fritz bar in salida, some cool pics of cool cruiser bikes.

The best bit of that whole day though was coming into salida. I dropped three thousand feet in about six miles or something crazy. Man that was a rush, I was absolutely whizzing along and the views of the valley and the monster fourteen thousand feet mountains that surround salida were just incredible. This was still not enough adrenalin for the slr camera I'm also carrying around though. When I hit a cattle grid my front handle bar bag flew open, and the camera also flew...right over my head. Heart in mouth moment. Somehow amazingly it all still works apart from the auto focus which for some shots I need to do manually. But that's just the lens so thumbs up for Canon camera body engineers!

And so I made salida, which is simply a cool dude of a town. The historic downtown is just lovely and full of cafes, bars, sports shops, restaurants etc. And the whole place is just set up for mountain biking, rafting, and snow sports. I could so live there, although finding any kind of job would be a problem.

Anyway I decided immediately to take a rest day. And that rest day turned into about ten beers plus and I don't know how many random conversations. I guess the bars just drew me in, and in this country staying out of a conversation is harder than getting into one, something brits could learn from. Not everyone is a mass murderer waiting to get us, I promise.

Also Maarten who I had left in Silverthorne as he went to see a friend in boulder managed to catch up which was cool. He was pretty keen to have a rest day though and I had no objections to hanging in salida for another day. Of course it being a rest day and all I couldn't resist the lure of the amazing single track trails they have there I had found out about in one of the bars. So after going to local bike shop and picking up a trail map I climbed up into the hills above the town and the big white S which sits on the hillside overlooking the whole place.

Well the single track was just great. A real blast, with plenty of technical and some damn rocky sections. It was also damn scary at first. Because everything curves around steep mountain country, you feel your always within about a foot of going off a cliff edge. Not exactly like riding Welsh trails!

But eventually after a big breakfast burrito this morning we left town and began the climb of about four thousand feet up to Marshall pass. And once again it proved no problem, but it sure was pretty. Well I say no problem, but in a comedy moment when the grade became pretty steep I changed down to the granny ring and my chain jammed. This combined with me being unable to clip out of the pedal led to perhaps the most laughable and slow motion bike crash in history. Basically I just slowly came to a stop, wobbled for a few seconds then fell over to my right into the dirt while wailing. Doh! I don't think Maarten could quite understand what was going on when he turned around haha! Luckily the truck with ten hot girls in didn't decide to show up at that moment.

So we stormed to the top of the pass, with Colorado continuing its stunning aspen fall foilage party trick and began down a few thousand feet to sargent.

After fifteen minutes an ominous rubbing sound came from my bike. On first inspection I thought the wheel had buckled as it was rubbing the pannier rack. However I soon realised that the rack had completely snapped on one side. Uh oh!

Anyway within ten minutes I managed to jury rig it with zip ties and duct tape. Honestly I think they may be the two most amazing inventions of all time, screw the i-phone five. And somehow it managed to hold together all the way down to the trading post at sargents.

Eventually after some cajoling I managed to get the owner to let me use his phone. Well the bike shop in salida only had old man mountain front racks so I rang the company directly. Now while it's disappointing it broke, this route does put all your kit under some major strain. Anyway on the plus side I got through to Johnny who is at the las Vegas trade show and what customer service. He is going to ship me an upgraded rack to the post office at the next town I hit, Del Norte. The question is can duct tape remain king that far? By hook or crook I will get there though!

Photos: I walked past the two barber shops which were virtually next door and they had me in stitches with their ten dollar cuts and ten dollar cuts fixed signs. I couldn't figure out if it was a scam or one dissing the other.