Light day

September 11th/09
Mileage: 84.3 km
Total mileage: 2570 km

A beautiful day of riding south on Hwy 84. Prior to reaching Chromo there is some good climbing, but the ride is almost park like. The road is narrow and winds up through a tight forested valley of white spruce, blue spruce, ponderosa pine and burr oak. Traffic is very light, probably because people just can't go fast enough through here so they choose an alternate route.

Beyond Chromo the valley widens and the valley floor turns into beautiful ranch land. This is high country. Most of the towns we have gone through in the past week average about 7,000 ft in elevation. Chama is 7,800 feet. Lots of people in the mile high club around here.

As a point of interest, just east of Chromo, we crossed the Continental Divide from west to east. Now we'll be going the same direction as all the water on the continent on our way to Florida.

My waterproof Sigma computer/mileage recorder got wet in the rain yesterday. That seems to have been the end of it. Today, although it indicated kms it was actually recording in miles. Understandably at the end of the day we figured out why it seemed to be taking so long to get to where we were going. Now it doesn't work at all. Funny, they put a man on the moon with less computerization than an early Texas Instrument calculator, but they can't make a dependable bicycle speedometer.

Met a young guy when we were leaving Pagosa this morning. Very genuine, simple, humble 20 something year old. Perhaps a young guy who had fallen on some hard times with this recession. He was fishing in the river and we had seen him in this same place yesterday when we arrived in Pagosa. Anyway, we talked and he commented on how disgusting the garbage in the area and along side the highway was. I related to him how I felt the same way.

I told him of our blog and he wanted me to put it out there so that maybe someone would pick up on the problem. I told him I would, so here goes:

For all the good American people we have met along the way, take up the cause and get others to do the same. You have an extremely beautiful country, but amazingly enough it is full of discarded trash. I saw a lady wearing a red, white and blue t-shirt the other day. The t-shirt said , "These colors don't run." Well, I think the colors run together every time I look from my bicycle into the ditch. It hurts! The problem is everywhere, but the worst of the worst that we saw was between Price, Utah and Green River, Utah. I know of one little fisherman in Pagosa Springs who is trying to clean up the country, but he can't do it alone.

Signed - A friend and admirer of the United States.