Day 29
53 miles one Massive hill, a Continental Divide and a lot of satisfaction.
We were all a little fearful about todays ride, Monarch Pass at 11,312ft was a scary prospect. We were starting the day at about 8000ft and so we knew we had a hell of a climb ahead of us. We planned it well however, an early start, realistic targets before resting and a good team effort made the whole experience extremely rewarding.
It took us a long time to reach the top but when we arrived I was so giddy about our success that I forgot to reset the camera from an ‘arty’ filter back to normal, hence the odd looking photo at the summit.
Monarch Pass is a point on the Continental (or Great) Divide where separation of the watersheds occurs one way to the Pacific and one way to the Atlantic. This was not hugely relevant to our cycle ride but is non the less interesting.
We coasted 10 miles from the top of Monarch Mountain into Salida. We had considered carrying on to shorten our day tomorrow but we decided as a group to call it a day after the mammoth climb. We found a motel and a Mexican Restaurant which was superb. After a fine meal we returned to the Motel and had a few minutes in a jacuzzi – we earned it today.
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