pi11wizard
Likes Dirt
Not many people can say they rode a Fargo until it broke. I think you have a new source of pride.
The "holy f*#k that's a long way to ride a bike" bike packing thread.
- Thread starter C Dunlop
- Start date
So it seems everyone at Salsa has broken hands and are unable to pick up the phone. 4 days, lots of calls from both me and the LBS, an email, 4 phone messages (with call back numbers)... Both the public numbers and through the QBP switchboards.
Fuck this shit, I'm hitching to denver with the broken beast in tow and looking for a welder who can zap it back up. Failing that, I'll get another (non-salsa) frame. Having a dud frame is one thing. Not picking up the phone is another. Having the whole office fuck of to interbike is pretty much bullshit - i've been able to get through to plenty of other bike companies to check stock levels and find dealers.
Fuck this shit, I'm hitching to denver with the broken beast in tow and looking for a welder who can zap it back up. Failing that, I'll get another (non-salsa) frame. Having a dud frame is one thing. Not picking up the phone is another. Having the whole office fuck of to interbike is pretty much bullshit - i've been able to get through to plenty of other bike companies to check stock levels and find dealers.
tomacropod
Likes Dirt
Take lots of photos of the crack before you weld it so you can still get a new one later if you want. Also bear in mind, if you get a new one it will use the new fork. You'll need to swap crown race and cut the steerer too.
- Joel
- Joel
I think "cracking the Fargo" could become a new catchphrase.
The Walsaworks fargo
Cheers Wayne, sent you a PM.
I think they're all at interbike. Meh.
Big up to Walt Wehner who did a great job zapping the thingy up. He makes neat bikes in his garage and is a nice dude to boot. I'm happy, I get to ride today and as far as I am concerned it is just par for the course. Was half expecting the bike to do the blues brothers thing where all the wheels and doors fall off at the end of the movie anyway.
Cheers Wayne, sent you a PM.
I think they're all at interbike. Meh.
Big up to Walt Wehner who did a great job zapping the thingy up. He makes neat bikes in his garage and is a nice dude to boot. I'm happy, I get to ride today and as far as I am concerned it is just par for the course. Was half expecting the bike to do the blues brothers thing where all the wheels and doors fall off at the end of the movie anyway.
DW-1
Dirt Works
for those that are following...
I got a reply from Salsa overnight. Passed Craig's details onto them. Passed their warranty managers email onto Craig.
Just spoke to Craig. He seems in good spirits. Apparently Bobby @ Salsa called him and left a message on his phone so that's a good sign.
Keep riding guys. Keep riding.
Elvis.
I got a reply from Salsa overnight. Passed Craig's details onto them. Passed their warranty managers email onto Craig.
Just spoke to Craig. He seems in good spirits. Apparently Bobby @ Salsa called him and left a message on his phone so that's a good sign.
Keep riding guys. Keep riding.
Elvis.
Once we stopped playing phone tag with each other the level of service from both Salsa and Dirtworks has been ridonkulous. Its the weekend here and i am rarely in an area with cell coverage, but it looks as though Salsa will ship a frame to me somewhere down the road and before I head into Mexico.
I had a tough few days riding back up the hill from Boulder. Boulder is at about 5500ft, and you seem to go up 3000ft then back down 2000ft, then up 3000, then back down 2000 all the way up to Breckenridge, which is at about 10000ft. Took about a day and a half. Finally hit my straps again today and put in 110 miles to get into Salida. Amazing riding, and the last 20 or so miles was particularly cool with views of the collegiate peaks (14,000ft+) towering above the arkansas river valley. I tried to take photos, but they were actually too big to fit in the frame, so I guess I'll have to suffice with having it burned into my memory forever.
I am taking a day off here. I had a bunch of stuff stolen at the hostel in Boulder. All random stuff that I use a lot that was in the top of my bag by my bed - bike lock (they didn't take the key?) camp fuel bottle (that only works with MSR stoves) and SPOT tracker (which is actually a real pain) as well as a few other odds and ends like my mulit-tool and a brake cable. so I'll see if I can get replacements here, except for the spot, which is pretty much just too exxy to replace. Pisses me off mostly because it is almost certainly useless to the person who took it. Selah.
Basically just really glad to be back on the bike again and getting my riding in. Gonna see to some chores tomorrow (grocery shopping, emails, phone calls home...) before the nothingness of new mexico. As amazing as Colorado has been, I'll be glad for the change of scenery I think. 750 miles to go, I think, about a week if all goes well. Really mixed emotions about it when I think about it, as once I get over to LA, it'll basically be cruisy riding down Baja - kind of a proper holiday on a bike with lots of tacos and beer, as opposed to slugging it out with 12,000ft passes in the rain.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/sports/othersports/08cycling.html?pagewanted=all
An article my brother sent me... not that I spend half my day wondering just how fast I could go on a roadie... just how flat all these passes would seem on a bike that weighs less than I do.
I had a tough few days riding back up the hill from Boulder. Boulder is at about 5500ft, and you seem to go up 3000ft then back down 2000ft, then up 3000, then back down 2000 all the way up to Breckenridge, which is at about 10000ft. Took about a day and a half. Finally hit my straps again today and put in 110 miles to get into Salida. Amazing riding, and the last 20 or so miles was particularly cool with views of the collegiate peaks (14,000ft+) towering above the arkansas river valley. I tried to take photos, but they were actually too big to fit in the frame, so I guess I'll have to suffice with having it burned into my memory forever.
I am taking a day off here. I had a bunch of stuff stolen at the hostel in Boulder. All random stuff that I use a lot that was in the top of my bag by my bed - bike lock (they didn't take the key?) camp fuel bottle (that only works with MSR stoves) and SPOT tracker (which is actually a real pain) as well as a few other odds and ends like my mulit-tool and a brake cable. so I'll see if I can get replacements here, except for the spot, which is pretty much just too exxy to replace. Pisses me off mostly because it is almost certainly useless to the person who took it. Selah.
Basically just really glad to be back on the bike again and getting my riding in. Gonna see to some chores tomorrow (grocery shopping, emails, phone calls home...) before the nothingness of new mexico. As amazing as Colorado has been, I'll be glad for the change of scenery I think. 750 miles to go, I think, about a week if all goes well. Really mixed emotions about it when I think about it, as once I get over to LA, it'll basically be cruisy riding down Baja - kind of a proper holiday on a bike with lots of tacos and beer, as opposed to slugging it out with 12,000ft passes in the rain.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/sports/othersports/08cycling.html?pagewanted=all
An article my brother sent me... not that I spend half my day wondering just how fast I could go on a roadie... just how flat all these passes would seem on a bike that weighs less than I do.
Macr
Likes Dirt
6 degrees of separation. Tuft has just signed on with the Australian Team, GreenEDGE.
DaGonz
Eats Squid
I found a used one at a second hand outdoor shop in Salida for $30, called SPOT, told them what happened and they linked my account to the new tracker. They also disabled the old one. Technology...
I've taken a few cruisy days off-trail out of salida. I really wasn't looking forward to the passes over into New Mexico, and a guy at the hostel suggested that I could take the road to Crestone. "What's in Crestone?"
"Hippies and wierdos, too much tie dyed clothing, a nice bar, awesome mountains, good food, and the highest number of UFO sightings in the United States."
So... Crestone, or Summitville? Aliens and hippies or an environmental clean up site... exactly.
Spent a cool night in a yurt there and ate breakfast in the greenhouse. They give you a bowl of yoghurt at the cafe, and you go and pick whatever fruit you want from the greenhouse and garden. Wierd but awesome little town.
Rode through the Great Sand Dunes National Park. Apparantly there is some kind of magnetic to the place charge due to there being a lot of iron in the substrate. Of course, the locals at crestone think that the dunes are an alien recharging station. ummm, ok.
This is pretty much the thing that I have disliked about the divide route. There is so much more to see within 30 miles of the route than there is on the actual route, and you feel slight pangs of guilt for not following that little red line on the map, all in all it has actually been my least favourite part of the trip. Still great, but I had a much better time when I would just get to a new state, get a highway map and then decide where I would go each day, with a vague notion that I was heading west.
So now I am in Alamosa, near the Rio Grande headwaters, which is at the northernmost point of 16th century Spain's reach, put in 80 miles yesterday, so hardly pinning it, and will roll into New Mexico tomorrow. The hispanic influence is more and more apparant, and it is kind of refreshing to be out of AWP ski areas.
I am also being completely soft and moteling it. After two months straight since a proper break, sleeping in a tent has pretty much lost its charm, and as I am going through a lot of national parks, camp sites cost, like $20 anyway, so if I can find a $35 motel then i'm pretty much taking it. It's also monsoon season, so I pretty much get saturated at about 6pm every evening, and going to bed dry is a fine thing. So flat, so tired, so looking forward to kickin' back in SoCal for a week or so after the divide. Times like this I want to be "touring" around europe, wine, baguette, cheese and credit card in tow, with a nice little B+B at the end of the day. Oh well, I suppose a slice of pie in Pie Town in 3 or 4 days will have to suffice.
That's pretty much all the news I have for now Gladys.
Craig
I've taken a few cruisy days off-trail out of salida. I really wasn't looking forward to the passes over into New Mexico, and a guy at the hostel suggested that I could take the road to Crestone. "What's in Crestone?"
"Hippies and wierdos, too much tie dyed clothing, a nice bar, awesome mountains, good food, and the highest number of UFO sightings in the United States."
So... Crestone, or Summitville? Aliens and hippies or an environmental clean up site... exactly.
Spent a cool night in a yurt there and ate breakfast in the greenhouse. They give you a bowl of yoghurt at the cafe, and you go and pick whatever fruit you want from the greenhouse and garden. Wierd but awesome little town.
Rode through the Great Sand Dunes National Park. Apparantly there is some kind of magnetic to the place charge due to there being a lot of iron in the substrate. Of course, the locals at crestone think that the dunes are an alien recharging station. ummm, ok.
This is pretty much the thing that I have disliked about the divide route. There is so much more to see within 30 miles of the route than there is on the actual route, and you feel slight pangs of guilt for not following that little red line on the map, all in all it has actually been my least favourite part of the trip. Still great, but I had a much better time when I would just get to a new state, get a highway map and then decide where I would go each day, with a vague notion that I was heading west.
So now I am in Alamosa, near the Rio Grande headwaters, which is at the northernmost point of 16th century Spain's reach, put in 80 miles yesterday, so hardly pinning it, and will roll into New Mexico tomorrow. The hispanic influence is more and more apparant, and it is kind of refreshing to be out of AWP ski areas.
I am also being completely soft and moteling it. After two months straight since a proper break, sleeping in a tent has pretty much lost its charm, and as I am going through a lot of national parks, camp sites cost, like $20 anyway, so if I can find a $35 motel then i'm pretty much taking it. It's also monsoon season, so I pretty much get saturated at about 6pm every evening, and going to bed dry is a fine thing. So flat, so tired, so looking forward to kickin' back in SoCal for a week or so after the divide. Times like this I want to be "touring" around europe, wine, baguette, cheese and credit card in tow, with a nice little B+B at the end of the day. Oh well, I suppose a slice of pie in Pie Town in 3 or 4 days will have to suffice.
That's pretty much all the news I have for now Gladys.
Craig
Last edited:
Done
I think the last time I wrote anything here was in Southern Colorado.
Riding into New Mexico was nice, with a super sudden change of scenery. I had a really crap day and pulled up stumps and fell asleep in a camp ground at 6pm, and woke up feeling better than I had in ages. I got to Abiquiu lake on the first night in NM, which was also the friday of labour day weekend, so the campground was packed. Some nice people gave me fish tacos for dinner. Then they asked where I had been riding and did the usual pause-and-then-utter-profanity-in-disbelief response. They watched me destroy some food and then asked if I had ever been jetskiing. So I took a day off while they fed me and went wakeboarding and jetskiing. fun.
I rode on the road to cuba and visited chaco canyon. This is a really, really cool ruin from 850-1250AD. The road in absolutely destroyed my wrists through (25mi or corrugations each way) but got into grants dry, once again threading the needle between thunderstorms.
The next day I set off in the drizzle for pie town. I have never been so miserable. Literally 4 inches of mud caked on to my bike, hail, 2x 5-mile hike-a-bikes through claggy, clay mud. Gross. I woke up the next day at 11 and pretty much just ate pie and drank beer all day. That night, another muddy figure appeared on the doorstep of toaster house (trail angel place to stay in pie town) and it was the guy that I met in Eureka on my first day on the trail. I rode ahead of him and never saw him, but the distance I made up, combined with my giardia and broken frame resulted in him catching me. It seemed serendipitous, so we decided to roll out the last few days to Antelope Wells together. We were forced to take the highway to Reserve and Silver City, meaning we missed out on the ride through Gila NF, which was a bit of a bummer, as I have heard it is amazing, but I just was not in the mood for 160mi of mud and damp. (the 32mi on the pie town road took like 8 hrs, and conditions in gila were worse).
As we rolled out of Silver someone asked if we had seen Jay Petervary, who was co-incidentally about an hour behind us. He was doing an ITT record attempt (which he bagged) and a bunch of peeps were following his spot.
The ride out of silver was fast, on nice buff fire trail. Me and Matt met up at Separ (he stopped to fix a flat) and as we were riding out we saw Jay sitting on the c-store porch stuffing a few thousand calories down. We talked, and he had ridden the past 500mi with only 5 hours of sleep (that's over 4 days!) and seemed decidedly like he was on meth. But he had a lift from the border, and so we decided to push it out and ride to the border that night. I was happy about that and it would make for a 120-130mi day, and I was glad to finish with a bang.
Jay caught us up with about 30mi to go, and I rode with him all the way to the border. We got there close to 10pm and matt rolled in about 10min back. We pretty much hauled arse to get there, sitting on ~23mi/hr. I wish I had Jays setup, 31lb vs. my ~150lb... I was hurting trying to spin out the big ring with him, but it was an awesome, memorable way to finish.
We took the requisite photos and loaded up our bikes. We all pretty much passed out in the truck, but were chipper as we got back to Lordsburg. We found a $35 motel, dropped our gear off and went to the 24hr dennys. We stank like death. I got a glimpse of myself in a mirror and I pretty much looked like death too, and the waitress was very confused at these 3 guys who ordered two lumberjack breakfasts and a chocolate milkshake each at 1.30am.
Passed the fuck out having had the best day on a bike I've ever had. I kept saying to myself "I can't believe I rode to mexico... mother fucker, everything hurts."
Jay got a lift out to Tucson at 7am, Matt had a coupler bike and threw it into a box he got from the grocery store and got on greyhound at lunchtime to get back to Denver. I called Amtrak and found that I can't get luggage on the train at Lordsburg or Deming, so I took another night at the motel, stayed in bed, had a shave, ate some food and had a bath. Checked out this morning and am going to ride to Tucson, Arizona to sort out transport to LA. 157mi, so 2 days of easy highway riding.
I'm glad I'm done, I feel like the whole trail is a bit of a blur of tiredness, happiness and fun. It seems kind of dream like. Now I'm awake, I'm a little bit like "did that really happen?" but I am looking forward to getting to california. I need to rest. Then I have a few weeks of easy, flat, sea level riding down Baja, where I can eat tacos and drink beer all the way to La Paz.
I think the last time I wrote anything here was in Southern Colorado.
Riding into New Mexico was nice, with a super sudden change of scenery. I had a really crap day and pulled up stumps and fell asleep in a camp ground at 6pm, and woke up feeling better than I had in ages. I got to Abiquiu lake on the first night in NM, which was also the friday of labour day weekend, so the campground was packed. Some nice people gave me fish tacos for dinner. Then they asked where I had been riding and did the usual pause-and-then-utter-profanity-in-disbelief response. They watched me destroy some food and then asked if I had ever been jetskiing. So I took a day off while they fed me and went wakeboarding and jetskiing. fun.
I rode on the road to cuba and visited chaco canyon. This is a really, really cool ruin from 850-1250AD. The road in absolutely destroyed my wrists through (25mi or corrugations each way) but got into grants dry, once again threading the needle between thunderstorms.
The next day I set off in the drizzle for pie town. I have never been so miserable. Literally 4 inches of mud caked on to my bike, hail, 2x 5-mile hike-a-bikes through claggy, clay mud. Gross. I woke up the next day at 11 and pretty much just ate pie and drank beer all day. That night, another muddy figure appeared on the doorstep of toaster house (trail angel place to stay in pie town) and it was the guy that I met in Eureka on my first day on the trail. I rode ahead of him and never saw him, but the distance I made up, combined with my giardia and broken frame resulted in him catching me. It seemed serendipitous, so we decided to roll out the last few days to Antelope Wells together. We were forced to take the highway to Reserve and Silver City, meaning we missed out on the ride through Gila NF, which was a bit of a bummer, as I have heard it is amazing, but I just was not in the mood for 160mi of mud and damp. (the 32mi on the pie town road took like 8 hrs, and conditions in gila were worse).
As we rolled out of Silver someone asked if we had seen Jay Petervary, who was co-incidentally about an hour behind us. He was doing an ITT record attempt (which he bagged) and a bunch of peeps were following his spot.
The ride out of silver was fast, on nice buff fire trail. Me and Matt met up at Separ (he stopped to fix a flat) and as we were riding out we saw Jay sitting on the c-store porch stuffing a few thousand calories down. We talked, and he had ridden the past 500mi with only 5 hours of sleep (that's over 4 days!) and seemed decidedly like he was on meth. But he had a lift from the border, and so we decided to push it out and ride to the border that night. I was happy about that and it would make for a 120-130mi day, and I was glad to finish with a bang.
Jay caught us up with about 30mi to go, and I rode with him all the way to the border. We got there close to 10pm and matt rolled in about 10min back. We pretty much hauled arse to get there, sitting on ~23mi/hr. I wish I had Jays setup, 31lb vs. my ~150lb... I was hurting trying to spin out the big ring with him, but it was an awesome, memorable way to finish.
We took the requisite photos and loaded up our bikes. We all pretty much passed out in the truck, but were chipper as we got back to Lordsburg. We found a $35 motel, dropped our gear off and went to the 24hr dennys. We stank like death. I got a glimpse of myself in a mirror and I pretty much looked like death too, and the waitress was very confused at these 3 guys who ordered two lumberjack breakfasts and a chocolate milkshake each at 1.30am.
Passed the fuck out having had the best day on a bike I've ever had. I kept saying to myself "I can't believe I rode to mexico... mother fucker, everything hurts."
Jay got a lift out to Tucson at 7am, Matt had a coupler bike and threw it into a box he got from the grocery store and got on greyhound at lunchtime to get back to Denver. I called Amtrak and found that I can't get luggage on the train at Lordsburg or Deming, so I took another night at the motel, stayed in bed, had a shave, ate some food and had a bath. Checked out this morning and am going to ride to Tucson, Arizona to sort out transport to LA. 157mi, so 2 days of easy highway riding.
I'm glad I'm done, I feel like the whole trail is a bit of a blur of tiredness, happiness and fun. It seems kind of dream like. Now I'm awake, I'm a little bit like "did that really happen?" but I am looking forward to getting to california. I need to rest. Then I have a few weeks of easy, flat, sea level riding down Baja, where I can eat tacos and drink beer all the way to La Paz.
singleminded
Likes Bikes
Well done on reaching your goal. This has been a great read all through, thanks for sharing it with the rest of the world!!
Beers all round. :very_drunk::clap2:
Beers all round. :very_drunk::clap2:
TysonRomero
Likes Bikes
Top work Craig. Thanks for posting the updates - it's been great to follow your trip. Very inspiring stuff...it's got me planning my first tour in nearly 10 years.
You, sir, are Batman!
Let me know when you do this and I'll give mine the slip too. Far horizons here I come!