Cycling in the US - my personal conclusion

I made it safely to California and after having climbed three vaults every day in Nevada the 4,000 ft elevation gain to get over the Sierra at Carson Pass was almost a piece of cake. And then in California there were trees! Real big trees! With shade! And they were everywhere! No more sagebrush, hurray!!!! And I had a nice cycling finale on the American River Bike trail getting into Sacramento with great river views and a fantastic car-free bike path. But now I will stop cycling in the US and take the train to San Francisco.

On a long trip like this not every leg can be fantastic and so it will not come as a total surprise that these last 5 weeks of cycling have not exactly been the highlight of my trip. My personal conclusion is that the US is not the greatest country for cycling. I have cycled several months each over Europe, Australia, NZ, Japan and Korea and each country has been better for cycling than the US. Why? Let me explain my evaluation:

On this bike trip in the US I faced two situations:

Sign on Hwy 50

1. You are on a lonely road through a lonely area (like Highway 50). The good thing is that there is hardly any traffic and lots of public land for free camping. The bad news is that services (and especially water!) are very few and far between. So every day you have to cycle 70 - 80 miles to get to water. That is very doable, but the big problem is that you cannot plan your distances due to weather, especially the wind. I admit that I had very bad luck with the wind and all the locals told me that this is a very unusual year. Still that did not help me with the head wind.... So generally the problem is that you are very often totally exposed to the elements and have to deal with whatever they throw at you: heat waves, snow storms or head winds. I no other country I have felt so helplessly exposed than here.

2. You are in a more populated area with busier roads (like California): The traffic is really bad here, basically because the average American driver is not used to cyclists and has no clue what they are doing. Nobody looks over their shoulder when doing a turn to look out for cyclists. People do not know the dimensions of their vehicles when they pass you on a narrow road. Especially dangerous are seniors in their oversized American RV's pulling their car behind them and double-trailer mining truck who pass you at 70 mile per hour. Most young drivers think it is fun to honk or yell obscenities at you while they pass you. Also the camping situation gets really bad once you are out of public land. Everything is fenced in with hundreds of "No trespassing" signs making camping a real problem.

I have experienced bad traffic in other countries as well but I have always felt that it is "worth" it - like in Japan where I cycled from temple to castle and even the little villages where fascinating. Here there was not really much to "see" en route. The scenery in the Great Basin was fascinating, but did not change for days... and the towns were pretty desolate. In Europe or Japan there were all these nice little stops to check out a church or interesting building - but here there was only sagebrush and fast food restaurants....(Ok, I might be exaggerating a bit here....Salt Lake City has definitely been a highlight.) Also, as I have written in an earlier post the combination between cycling and hiking did not work out very well either.

Bottom line for me: The cycling here has not been a total desaster, but it has not been a highlight either. My original plan was to come back to the US after half a year of Australia and cycle across the country on the ACA Southern tier. I don't think I will pursue that plan any more now. First of all the Euro has weakened so much that the US are not a cheap country for me any more and second I think that I am better off cycling in other countries. At some point in a sand storm in Nevada I was about to send my bike home and give up cycling altogether but I will give it another try in Australia - but this time I have checked the prevailing wind direction before hand. So cross your fingers for me....

But before I start my next outdoor adventure in Australia I hope to spend some leisurely days in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sydney.

Highway 50 and the wind

After leaving Salt Lake City I was working my way down to Highway 50 and the Adventure Cycling Western Express Route. Highway 50 has been called the loneliest Highway in the US and is a major bike route in the US. I was really looking forward to it and meeting other cyclists.

Alas, the weather was not my friend again! I had been warned about this stretch a lot. You cross whole Nevada and the Great Basin on it with no water except in towns and towns being more than 80 miles apart. Temperatures can rise up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit in summer and there is no shade whatsoever.

But the weather decided to be unusual - El Nino style. It rained for the first few days!!!! And that meant it was cold. And it also meant that I had to do 1,000 meter elevation gains every day in my rain gear. All the cyclists will know what that means: You are sweating inside your raingear and eventually you are soaking wet from inside. So when you sit down and have a rest you start freezing.... It was miserable! The ascents took forever and I was wet and cold. I had to take breaks inside the drainage tubes under the highway to stay out of the wind and rain.

The rain stopped eventually, but then the wind came up. My maps had warned me that the prevailing winds are from the west (and I was going west), but they would be very light only. Not this year, though!!! Almost every day I had a head wind with gusts up to 50 miles per hour. That means that you are faster walking than cycling.... During these gusts I had to get off my bike to avoid being blown away! I had to stop cycling at 3 pm because the wind got so strong then. It was frustrating....

And because I was cycling in the desert, there was no shelter from the wind for camping. One particularly bad day I had to set up camp at 3 pm behind some lonely juniper trees. At 6 pm the wind got so bad that my tent collapsed (the tent stakes had come out) and I was in the middle of a sand storm covering everything with fine dust. That night I was in tears for the first time on this trip.... I had to cylce more than 60 miles the next day to get to the next town and water, but could I make that in that wind? I got up at 3.30 am in the morning and started cycling before sun rise to beat the wind. When I was approaching the next town around noon it started snowing on the last pass.... I am not kidding you: snowing and howling winds. I nearly had to push my bike downhill... but I made it!!!!

Same thing happened two days after that: Headwinds with 50 miles per hour and a collapsed tent. I am fed up with it now!!!!! I am at the point where I am thinking of giving up on cycling for the rest of this trip. This wind is draining so much energy from me and is no fun at all. Also the geography has not been very helpful either: The Great Basin consists of an endless succession of basins (flat and wind from the front) and vaults (300 to 1,000 meter elevation gain about 2 times a day) - and I had to day about 80 miles in that every day!

Luckily I am almost out of the Great Basin and Nevada: I still have to go over the High Sierra (I am not looking forward to that elevation gain!), but then I am in California and hopefully then the wind patterns will change. Maybe there is such a thing as a tail wind?