The Last Climb

Yesterday was the last day of the ride and we had to get out of the valley, from Stovepipe Wells which is below sea level over Daylight Pass at 4,317 feet. It was hot when we started, we had a bit of a headwind, I felt I was struggling and then we came to this sign:

Fifteen minutes into our ride, the voice in my head went completely negative — “You just climbed to sea level and you’re complaining? You are an embarrassment!”. But sometimes the start of a ride can be deceiving. I’ve had days where I felt like a million bucks at the start, only to feel like I was carrying an anvil at mile 10. Yesterday was the exact opposite. A good night’s sleep? The extra piece of French Toast I had for breakfast (the fourth for the record)? Who knows. I just went with it. But I was very bummed as Mary, and a few others in our group, were still under the weather and Mary chose not to ride. She would have crushed this course.

Almost 4,200 feet of our climb was in the last 14 miles until we reached Daylight Pass. Up, up, up we rode out of the valley and into the mountains:

Kevin, Serge and I worked together for a bit and here they are at a rest stop:

After Serge decided to drop (I told him to have that fourth piece of French Toast), it was just Kevin and me. A tough part of climbing a mountain pass is the mental battle of “where the hell is the pass through these mountains?” Five or six times we convinced ourselves that the pass was just around the next corner, only to groan when we saw yet more road to climb. But we eventually made it! Super excited and expecting to be greeted with high fives since we were the only two in our group to do the full ascent, we were instead met with a demand that we pee in a cup to prove that we hadn’t slipped some steroids into our morning coffee. It was a climb I will never forget and I could not have done it without working with Kevin. Here’s the view from the top looking east with the Nevada state line halfway through the flats:

I was so stoked about the climb that I forgot to eat at the top. The final seven miles were five miles of flats into a stiff headwind and a two mile uphill. I completely bonked, the lights went out on the uphill and I wobbled to the finish of an amazing six days of cycling at a speed that would have lost a race with a three year old riding a tricycle.

One reason this week’s cycling was so fantastic was the near complete absence of cell service to distract me with work emails and calls. I knew, though, whenever we hit a pocket of coverage as my phone started to explode with irate texts from Heather, my law firm’s Business Development Manager, who helped me set up this blog. “No one cares about cycling. U need to promote Kelley Drye” was one of her G-rated texts. Give me a break Heather: you could have gotten me a Kelley Drye cycling jersey if you wanted me to be a billboard.

I did, though, think a lot of my law firm’s https://www.kelleydrye.com preeminent Advertising Law practice https://www.kelleydrye.com/viewpoints/blogs/ad-law-access since I am thinking about suing the National Park Service for false advertising. Does “Death Valley” fairly represent a landscape of steep and unrelenting ascents?

A more accurate name for this place would be “Death Valley and Really Steep Mountains National Park”. Perhaps the mountains are encompassed in the “Death” part of the name, but wouldn’t an ordinary consumer associate “Death” with the heat and desolation vs. cycling torture. Unfortunately, try as I did to recruit class action plaintiffs, the best I could do was have a few of my Westport friends agree to be listed as “John and Jane Does” on my lawsuit caption.

Well folks, the cycling has been wonderful and the pictures in my posts do not capture the full beauty and grandeur of Death Valley National Park. Our tour operator, LIzard Head Cycling Guides, is known for tours in outrageously beautiful parts of the West with a lot of climbing. But there are plenty of other tour operators that will give you the pleasure of the American West without the Lizard Head cycling pain.

Another tour operator, Backroads, was on Daylight Pass yesterday; those folks took the van to the top and cycled down, many on ebikes:

I thought that was great since they too will bring back priceless memories that I am convinced you will not have traveling at 55 mph in a car. I hope this blog encourages all of you to get out there on two wheels. Until our next two wheeled adventure….