Day 15 - West Yellowstone to Norris, WY

Distance - 30.5 miles




I'm just going to jump straight to the climax of this story for everybody right now because I can't hold it in. I am so disoriented, enraged, confused, flabberghasted, etc by the great injustice of this event that I just don't know what to do! The nerve, the gall, nay the audacity of this creature is almost unspeakable, yet I will still speak of it to you. I'm walking back from paying at the deposit box for our campsite here in Yellowstone, and I cast my eyes towards my bike and the several bags I have pulled out from my panniers and lain around said bike. From the sky, descends a great black bird of Satan, must have been 1,000 pounds. At first I think to myself, huh, maybe he shouldn't be here. Hey, maybe I shouldn't let him hang around all my stuff over there, unattended, unchaperoned. I start running. I'm 20 feet from Hell's raven when he takes off, his dirty theiving beak clutching 0.93 lbs of West Yellowstone colby jack cheese, cheese which has been running through my mind every minute since Sam and I purchased it this morning. I fall to the ground. I break out in tears and hysteria, I'm inconsolable, crushed, out of control.

You ask yourself the same thing we did, what did we do to deserve such negative chi? We may never know, but yea, the cheese giveth, and the raven taketh away.

We presumably had a short day today - 30 miles - to position ourselves for a 100 mile day to CODY, Wyoming tomorrow, but Yellowstone had other plans. We pulled the unprecedented (fl)hat trick today, all 3 of us getting a flat tire at some point, (2 for Sam), racking up a solid 2.5-3 hours of roadside repair time. The curse of the Montana flatland had the last laugh, with James getting his first flat before we even left the hotel in the morning. As Sam fixed flat #1, a buffalo appeared around the bend in the road, just making his trek zigzag across the road, not obeying any rules of the road or street signs, and began to make a line straight for us. Less than an hour before this a sign in a campground bathroom had warned us of bisons' affinity for goring humans to death, so we began to worry. James promised to take pictures if the buffalo started goring me, so I was slightly relieved. Turns out the buffalo had places to be and walked right by us as we scampered off the road. So we were off with a fresh tube in Sam's tire, and as luck would have it, less than 15 seconds later his tire was flat again. I don't know if Wyoming will have enough tubes for the RLPT, so we may begin weaving our own tubes out of buffalo and moose hair.

The bike through Yellowstone was nice and scenic, and the hot mud and sulphur springs tempted our cold bodies, as the off and on rain and low temp weren't helping us much. Luckily we didn't have far to go and we had a little bit of sunshine in the afternoon.

If the flat tires have done one good thing for us, it has been to score us free beer. As Sam and I searched the campground for a family with a stand-up bike pump to finish pumping our tires tonight, we met a nice man from Louisiana who gave us each a beer and we got to sit by his campfire! That's good chi.