Day 27. Medora to New Salem, 98 miles (of which I rode 57)

Today was a wild ride of a day. The following is a long story with no pictures and no conversations, so feel free to skip it if that’s not your jams, Alice. It’s a story about the difficulty of riding my bike through North Dakota and the incredible kindness and generosity of strangers who have made it possible so far.

The day dawned bright and clear. Haha no it didn’t. My planned early departure was foiled by the rain starting at 3:30. I woke to it pattering on my tent, and it continued for a few hours. When there was a break around 6:30, I took the opportunity to get myself packed up, breaking down the tent last so I had a place to shelter if it started up again and because it was just going to get stuffed in a plastic bag (three separate ones, actually) and bungeed on my panniers. As Joyce would say, not an Ortlieb model day.

Feeling my rest day mood deflating over the wet tent and headwinds, I finished packing up around 7:45, and as I was about to head out it started pouring. I rode to the showerhouse and huddled under the eaves miserably looking at the weather, texting with Andrew for radar reports since I didn’t have enough service, and revising my miles for the day downward from my planned 65 to 40 miles to Dickinson.

I obviously looked as dejected as I felt, and when the park ranger (manager, as it turned out) rolled up in his pickup and asked in the kindest voice how I was doing, well, um, tears.

He offered to give me a cup of coffee and asked where I was going today; I explained my plan, and he told me he had to drive to Dickinson around noon to get gas anyway (true? I may never know), and if he did would I like a ride? I was feeling pretty desperate to keep on track to meet Andrew in Michigan in less than two weeks, and without the briefest hesitation I said yes. Andrew had texted that the storm cloud was supposed to pass in an hour or so, and I figured maybe I could ride on from Dickinson if the going was good.

Kevin, my knight in a shining white pickup truck, drove me to his park cabin and on the way called his wife to tell her he was bringing a pathetic cyclist for coffee and shelter (my paraphrase). What can I tell you? We got to the adorable cabin, and Kathy took me in and gave me coffee (with fancy creamer!) and warm cinnamon bread and melon, and we were talking like old friends within minutes. I hung out with her as Kevin came and went taking care of business, and she showed me some of their collection of western paintings and had her incredibly adorable and smart dog Yogi perform his repertoire of tricks (he smiles!).

The rain had cleared by 10/10:30, and I was feeling a little dumb, but I still had a stiff headwind and wanted to make the miles, so I waited on the ride. We headed back to the park office, where Kevin and I talked art and North Dakota, mostly me asking questions and getting to learn from a guy who clearly knows and loves the subjects. I learned about sloughs, at last! He said they are due to the way glaciation worked in ND; it left big, clay-bottomed low points, but nothing flows into or out of them—they never get full enough to flow. The clay keeps the water there, and they’re great for fishing, but they are closed systems. Slough is local terminology.

We also talked about the fracking in the Bakkan, and he told me it’s not that the boom is over. The technology has gotten better as they’ve learned, and they’re able to re-frack existing wells a second and maybe third time. This factor combined with the limit on drill permits has cut the number of wells from 300 to 35 (hope I got those numbers right), but they’re producing more oil than 10 years ago. The maintenance also requires fewer workers, so the rough traffic has died down as the number of temporary jobs has fallen.

Kathy headed back to Bismarck, where they live, with an invitation to stay with them if the miles worked out. I got out my tent and set it out in the already-blazing sun to dry.

By the time Kevin finished his rounds, it was dry, and we loaded up my bike and left for Dickinson. It was a great ride, with terrific conversation and that same sense of having just met a friend—warm, comfortable, easy. I wanted to ask him every question I ever had about ND; dude knows A LOT.

He dropped me on the far side of Dickinson around 12:30 with the same invitation Kathy had extended, and I got myself on I-94 due east with the goal of hitting Hebron, 37 miles away.

The riding was WONDERFUL. Not the road—I-94 was loud and busy for ND. But there was no whistle of wind in my ears, no fierce resistance at every pedal stroke. I decided to stay on I-94 for expedience; it wasn’t the most pleasant, but had the same wide, clean shoulders consistently (put a pin in that thought) because it’s an interstate.

The lull in wind on the way to Medora had felt like relief. This was more akin to joy. Maybe there was a crosswind, maybe a mild headwind? I couldn’t tell, and why look a gift horse in the mouth? My mood, as I told Andrew, was tailwind, for the first time in days. Kathy and Kevin did that.

The mile markers sailed by unnoticed, as I passed exits that didn’t seem to go anywhere, that were just ramps and an overpass to the other side (shade opportunity!); I wondered what had been there and why there were exits. Spoiler alert: Kev answers this one too.

After 22 miles, I decided to take a quick break at a closed exit to eat and assess my plans. I was feeling great and digging riding, and Hebron was just 15 miles away. New Salem, which featured both a campground and a motel, was another 20 or so. There was absolutely nothing between them. I decided to ride while the riding was good and get my butt to New Salem. I called the motel to check about rooms and left a message, then moved on. If you’re sensing hubris and meaningful adumbration here, you’re onto something.

The landscape continued to be consistently hilly—the rolling plains, is how one local described it. Though I am still mostly descending more than ascending, there’s a lot of climbing to 2k+ feet to descend to 1600 and the like. You have to go up to go down? One thing I love about riding the country this way is I get an intimate sense of its topography. (It’s also one of the things I don’t love sometimes!)

I knew I was going to arrive on the late end, around 7/7:30, but either option had showers, and it would still be daylight until 9. And then, about 22 miles out from New Salem I began feeling a wobble and a fishtail. Yep. YEP.

I had a slow leak, and my tire was very low though not flat. Setting myself up to fix it—not so quick when my flat kit is arrogantly buried at the bottom of my pannier—I suddenly noticed that I’d made it to Central Time, and by the time I was done fixing the flat and failing to field-diagnose the cause it was 5:40. I knew that it was going to start leaking again since I hadn’t fixed the cause, but I figured I could hand fill it every few miles until New Salem and deal with it there. I also finally heard back from the motel lady, who responded to my text (desperation move) to let me know she had no rooms. Cyclists beware: look at the Yelp reviews and heed my experience and later intel; the Arrowhead Motel is not a reliable bet.

Indeed just a few rolling miles later I had to stop to put in air, and at a rest area 11 miles out from New Salem where I stopped for another refill I turned in earnest to the sleep problem. The campground’s online reservation system said it was full, which seemed crazy for a Tuesday. I called the RV park in town, but they had no bathroom facilities. Fay, the lady I was talking to, suggested the campground, and I told her I’d tried it and the motel, and both were full. My voice was almost certainly trembly by this point, and she seemed sympathetic, but as I said to her, it wasn’t her problem and thank you. She had to go, but said she’d call me back, that we’d come up with something. I briefly considered and abandoned the idea of camping at the rest stop (which did not permit overnight camping) and moved on toward New Salem with no idea where I was going to sleep.

As I continued my late and sad grind toward New Salem, Fay called me back. She asked if I’d had any success, and I said no, I’d tried the one coffee shop she said had a room, but they were closed. She said she was on her way in from Bismarck, where she lived, and I should call her if they truly didn’t have anything at the campground.

Fast forward: I limped into town around 8:15. The campground had empty spots, but an unfriendly-seeming dude told me they’d all been reserved for what turned out to be the enormous annual ND Country Music Fest, taking place in New Salem 7/6-7/9. In despair, I called Fay, who said she was still 10 miles out—the point at which I realized she was driving in from Bismarck for me—and to wait for her there because she didn’t want me wandering around town.

Fay came to the campground and delivered me into the hands of my third/fourth ND angel, Allan, a retired dairy farmer who opened a grocery store in town on his retirement; he drove up as we were talking, responding to her call. He had a room above his garage—as it turned out, one with laundry, a full kitchen, soft beds, and a beautiful shower. Fay drove the mile to his house ahead of me to make sure I got there safely and then took off, and he showed me the place and told me to make myself at home and, at my inquiry, said to pay what I thought fair. I was, as you can imagine, overcome with gratitude and disbelief at my good fortune. I showered and put in laundry, made a dinner of spaghetti-Os (👎🏻), drank two bottles of water, and crashed the heck out.