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Days 47 through 52

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Day 47 - Grants to Pie Town Leaving Grants the 2nd time I decided to take the El Malpais alternate rather than the main route.  It goes through El Malpais National Monument on pavement.  Although I thought my bike tires could would handle the goat head stickers of road C-42 after being converted to tubeless, I had already seen most of that route and wanted to do something different.  The alternate turned out to be far more scenic and is not the official route only because it is on pavement.  Traffic was light, so I was quite happy with it.   Midway through the day I got back on gravel at Pie Town Road.  The road eventually turned to a pretty rough dirt road but nowhere near as bad as others I have ridden.  Once at Pie Town I enjoyed a couple of slices of pie in the town cafe and spent the night at the Toaster House.  Its a 2nd house that the owner no longer uses and instead serves as a hostel for CDT hikers and Great Divide riders to stay in ...
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Day 45 and 46

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Day 45 - Grants to Grants: Ugh. What started out as a wonderful ride slowly went bad. I was up early and managed to be the first breakfast customer at Lottaburger before leaving town.  I enjoyed a long, gradual climb on gravel roads through rock canyons for about the first 20 miles. After that I turned onto this road: I think it didn't like how casually I approached it and decided to show me who was boss. It was not wet thankfully. It was instead covered with goat head stickers.  The first 15 miles were fine but after that the plant was everywhere.  I had a double puncture in my front tire at 18 miles, followed by another two stickers in my front tire at 24 miles, followed by another front puncture at 26 miles.  After having used up all my spare tubes and realizing that repeatedly patching was going to be slower than walking I decided to try something a bit crazy. Looking back on it I still think it was my only option though.  The rear tire was set up tubeless a...
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Days 41 to 44

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Day 41: Abiquiu to just past top of un-named pass about 30 miles south This day was the hardest of the entire route.  Indiana Pass was a close 2nd.  Because of a flat the day before, and finding out that the glue in both of my patch kits had turned to rubber, I left Abiquiu with pretty minimal options for fixing flats.   Leaving Abiquiu the route has an almost uninterrupted 5,200 ft climb to the top of an un-named pass.  The start is mild but miles 5 to about 10 were very steep and hot.  I rode that section with another rider named Graham, up until the point when I got another flat.  Not sure whether I failed to remove whatever caused the flat the afternoon before or if it was a new issue.  I tried to patch the tube with a generic auto/motorcycle/bike patch kit I had picked up in Abiquiu but it did not work.  The patch clearly was not sticking and just peeled right off.  So I went to a back-up option.  I used the only bottle of seal...
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