RT66 Day 8: Crossing the Continental Divide!
Clear skies, light breeze, and sunny day. Its a good day to be alive.
Day 8: Grants, NM to Sagar, NM; 79 miles, 3,199 feet elevation gain
Day 8: Planned on Ride with GPS
Intraday Stops:Conoco (49.7 miles), Family Dollar Sagar (26.6 miles)
There’s no milestone quite like riding over a mountain or crossing a high pass. You are literally surmounting an obstacle in your path.
Today, I rode over the Continental Divide.
It sounds dramatic and impossibly high, but what exactly is it? The Continental Divide is a mountain ridge that separates major river basins, determining which direction water flows across a continent. On one side, rivers flow east; on the other, they flow west. In the Americas, the divide stretches from northwestern Alaska, following the Rocky Mountains southward, all the way to Patagonia along the Andes. Water west of the divide ultimately drains into the Pacific Ocean, while water east of it flows toward the Atlantic, Arctic, or Gulf of Mexico.
For this ride, the Continental Divide also represents the highest elevation I’ll reach: 7,882 feet.
For someone who lives in the Bay Area and grew up in Houston, exerting myself at this altitude was something I couldn’t realistically train for. Thankfully, the gradual elevation gain over the past week seems to have allowed my body to adapt naturally, and so far it hasn’t posed much of a problem.
After about a week on the road, I’ve settled into a surprisingly comfortable routine.
I wake up around 5:00 a.m. feeling genuinely energized and — perhaps even more surprisingly — focused. I usually linger in bed for a while, doing light full-body stretches followed by repeated piriformis stretches on both sides. Whenever I bike heavily, I develop a deep tightness through my glutes, which I’ve been told originates from the piriformis muscle.
Around 5:30 a.m., I finally get dressed and head downstairs for coffee in the hotel lobby. Like any athlete preparing for a long day of exertion, my primary goal each morning is simple: poop.
Coffee in hand, I return upstairs and settle into a stretching routine that dates all the way back to my ballet days. Meanwhile, the Weather Channel drones in the background, delivering what feels like a wildly exaggerated forecast every single day. If there’s a slight chance of drizzle, they present it like a once-in-a-decade natural disaster from which survival seems unlikely unless you evacuate immediately. It reliably scares me every morning, and then, once I finally start riding, the weather turns out perfectly manageable. Every day I swear I’m going to stop watching it. Every day I turn it back on.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
I usually stretch for 30–45 minutes before and after riding. I can’t scientifically prove this, but I genuinely believe flexibility is the reason I’m able to complete long-distance events like this with relatively little training and minimal injury.
Most hotel breakfasts begin around 6:30 or 7:00 a.m. Midscale hotels actually tend to offer fairly decent options: hard-boiled eggs, plain yogurt, oatmeal, fruit. Naturally, I gravitate toward scrambled eggs, biscuits and gravy, and occasionally a waffle.
While eating breakfast, I also assemble two egg burritos to bring along for the ride. I pack my own tortillas. During the first half of this journey six years ago, I would stop for lunch somewhere and buy two meals — one to eat immediately and another to stash away for later. This time around, the breakfast burritos function as both my “second breakfast” and lunch. I rarely snack much in the afternoon anymore before heading straight into an early dinner. If we were in Spain, it would probably still count as lunchtime.
I’ve noticed that with age, I simply don’t eat as much as I used to.
The terrain east of the Continental Divide is absolutely gorgeous — quiet, expansive, and largely empty. There are very few services or water stops along this stretch, which is one of the reasons my dad wanted to accompany me on this section of the trip.
Unfortunately, our meeting logistics did not go smoothly.
We initially planned to meet at a trailhead, but his GPS directed him to the wrong one. Then we agreed on a Conoco gas station, only to discover that it was closed. Consider this a warning to future riders: carry enough water and food because there is very little available out here until the Family Dollar, roughly 75 miles from Grants. Thankfully, there are dedicated bike paths in and around Ramah.
The weather, at least, cooperated beautifully. The morning began with almost no wind at all, while only mild 8 mph winds were forecasted for the afternoon. I’ve learned quickly that it’s wise to get riding as early as possible before the stronger afternoon winds arrive.
Eventually, I stopped at the Winfield Trading Company, still twenty miles short of Gallup. It sits uphill from the Family Dollar in Sagar, where I had originally intended to stop.
Truthfully, I still felt great physically and probably could have kept riding. My dad, however, looked awful.
He’s been sick for several days and was running a fever back in Albuquerque. Today he looked utterly exhausted, like he simply needed sleep more than anything else. I’m worried about him because in two days he plans to drive back to Houston — a fourteen-hour drive that will realistically take him at least two days.
Did I mention he’s 85?
So we decided to shut things down early for the day, check into our Airbnb, and let him sleep. Tomorrow morning, he’ll drop me back off at Winfield Trading Company before returning to rest while I bike the remaining miles back into town. Hopefully he’ll recover enough strength to start the drive home the following day.
Meanwhile, tomorrow night, Dan — the soulmate of my soulmate — arrives to escort me onward to Flagstaff.
Peter Pan always tries to catch his shadow. I’m just trying to keep up with mine.