Arkansaw High Country Race Day 4 / Rich Mountain to Mt. Ida / 101 miles

 

I packed my stuff, loaded my bike, took a caffeine pill to stave off the impending no-coffee headache and rolled from the cabin at 4:38 a.m., set on making it to Hatfield some 30 miles distant for breakfast. Waiting for Steve to start breakfast at the store at 7 or timing my passage by the state park lodge for breakfast would waste too much time and put me behind schedule for the day. My calorie deficit immediately started to tell on me as I pedaled up the paved climb to Queen Wilhelmina State park. I had no power, energy, or snap in my legs and my breathing was labored. Regardless of how much I had eaten the night before or how much I had rested, the extreme lethargy of early morning was to be a trend throughout the race[1]. It seemed like my legs always needed a couple of hours of steady pedaling to wake up and function properly. 

 I took the obligatory selfie at the park sign and continued along the flat pavement of Highway 88 to the point where the course diverged onto the steep and beautiful downhill gravel of Skyline Drive/Rd. 100 that drifts over into the state of Oklahoma three times between Highway 88 and Hatfield.

No disrespect to the great state of Oklahoma. I was just surprised to look up and find myself there.

Except for a 500-calorie portion of Spiz powder that I kept in the bottom of my seatbag as an emergency ration, at this point I had eaten nearly all the packaged nutrition that I had brought. During the planning back in Texas, I determined that a resupply in the early days of the sparsely supported southwest section of the course would be very helpful, so I packaged up a box of gels, bars, and Spiz and mailed it to myself at the post office in Hatfield. I was careful to take note of the Hatfield P.O.’s hours during the week and on Saturday. As fate would have it, the morning I passed through Hatfield during the race was, you guessed it, Sunday. It would be real food and whatever I could buy at convenience stores for the rest of the race.

Hatfield appears to live and thrive with the vicissitudes of the lumber industry, and it is served by TJ’s Country Store, which functions as gas station, restaurant, convenience store, and meeting place. My heart leapt within me when I saw that the store had not just sausage biscuits wrapped up under a warming lamp, but a full breakfast counter in operation with two ladies working the grill like they were delivering fire to mankind. I may have become a little emotional looking at a menu that included a three-egg western omelet and breakfast burritos. One of the cooks rested a thick forearm tattooed with script from wrist to elbow and took my order with a pencil and pad. I ordered the western omelet with hash browns and biscuits and gravy. She peered at me through impossibly long, thick eyelashes and asked, “Do you want mushrooms in that omelet, darlin’?” “Oh yes, ma’am,” I breathlessly answered, trying to suppress the excitement in my voice. The meal they brought to my table completely covered a larger-than-standard sized plate, and I gratefully dug in while checking my phone. I took the time at the store to take care of everything I could since I would not see any support until Mt. Ida, some 70 rough miles away. I ordered three sausage egg and cheese biscuits to go and put them in my musette.

The stretch of the course that runs east of Hatfield takes you over the rugged roads that roughly parallel the beautiful Cossatot River, through the Caney Creek Wilderness, past the Little Missouri Falls and through the abandoned Albert Pike Recreation Area.

 

Folks were out enjoying a Sunday on the river and along the trails. There were no sustained climbs between Hatfield and Mt. Ida, but there were many short, steep sections that required my 36x46 granny gear or hiking. I had my bike computer charging through the morning by USB cord connected to the back of my sinewave light that was powered by the SON dynamo hub in my front wheel. Seeing that my computer was fully charged, I decided to take the opportunity to charge something else. I forget now what that something else was (probably my phone), because when I dug through my half-frame bag for my Ziplock bag of charging cables I was horrified to realize that it was missing along with my external battery. I had apparently left them on the counter in the kitchen of the cabin back at Rich Mountain. That meant no proprietary iPhone cable, no extra AAA headlight batteries, no cable that connected my charging brick to the back of my dynamo headlight, no wall plug, no battery pack, and no spare USB to micro-USB cable. I was in a bad way. Fatigue and the magnitude of a multi-day race like this can make us catastrophize situations like this, causing us to lose hope unnecessarily. I calmed myself and took account of my situation. As long as I still had my USB to micro-USB cable (and I still had the one I had used all morning) I could charge my bike computer and taillights, and those were the most important things. In a couple of past episodes, I have let my inability to charge my phone become a problem, unnerving me during a long race in one instance and causing me to truncate a multi-day training ride in another. I resolved not to let it be a no-go in this race. People have been doing ultradistance bikepacking races since before there were cell phones and electronic maps on bike computers, after all.

Before I left home for Arkansas, I told Margaret, “Look, if my phone craps out, I’m not stopping. You’ll still be able to follow my spot tracker and I'll call you from someone else's phone if need be. If my bike computer fails, I have a spare. If that one craps out, too, I have the paper maps. If my bike breaks and I can’t fix it, I’ll get someone to take me to get it fixed, then get transported back to the spot where I had the breakdown and I’ll continue.” She understood and was supportive, trusting me to address my problems, take care of myself and come home safe and sound.    

The fact that I was arriving to the decent-sized town of Mt. Ida during daylight hours gave me an opportunity to at least partially fix my problem. I would surely be able to buy a phone charging cable, although my experience with non-Apple phone cables was hit and miss. First, I passed a Subway sandwich shop where I bought two footlong sandwiches. Then I hit a Tiger Mart gas station where I was able to score an overpriced iPhone cable and a USB to wall plug adapter. “Do you have any external batteries?” I asked. The second clerk behind the counter intervened and said, “Yeah, we have ‘em, but you don’t want one. They don’t work.” He paused and  said, “Look, I have a spare one of those batteries that I used when we all lost power for a long time this winter. I don’t need it now. It’s in my truck. You can have it.” This was a big, strapping, serious-looking guy with long red hair rubber-banded at the back of his head, precisely the kind of guy you would think would be prone to get aggressive with you in his pickup on a shoulderless road. He returned a couple of minutes later and handed me the battery. I asked him how much he wanted for it and he said without fanfare, “Nothing. You can have it.” Here was the second time in two days where an Arkansawyer kindly solved a major problem for me and asked nothing in return.  

I checked into the Dogwood Motel on the main drag of Highway 270. If you are fan of the old-school U-shaped 1-story motels where you pull your car right up to a wood-paneled room that immediately evokes the 1970’s, the Arkansaw High Country Race will provide you with several opportunities to sample the best motels the way-back machine can offer. Everything in this room was clean and functional, though, and I was glad to have it. I connected my new cables and batteries to my phone and taillight and was relieved to see them charging. I ate one of my sandwiches and prepped my gear to roll out early the following morning. A check of the weather on my phone showed an expansive, ominous blob of yellow-orange-green marching toward my blue dot at Mt. Ida. 

I had just enjoyed my last dry day of riding.

 

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[1] I would encourage anyone doing an ultradistance bikepacking race like this to adopt a policy to not make a decision about abandoning a race during the first two or final two hours of a stage on the bike.