After the bike riders had splashed in the creek, rinsing off the sweat and dust of the morning, they filled every water container they had. They knew that this might be the last water they would encounter over the next 20 rugged mountainous miles. Dave made sure his water bladder was brim full. Only a half mile further and they would be leaving the gravel road paralleling the creek, to start the long dry climb to the continental divide.

There are three ‘Bannack’ or ‘Bannock’ passes in southwestern Montana. Bannack is an old Celtic word meaning a rough unleavened bread, such as that eaten back when Europeans were just settling the west. It is also the name of a tribe of Northern Paiute Native Americans that inhabited eastern Idaho. The Bannock Pass which Dave was climbing was not one of the ones from Idaho over to the ghost town of Bannack, the old capital of territorial Montana. The pass they were on today was the old route that mule trains had used on their way to the silver mining boom town of Butte during the closing decades of the 1800’s. At least that’s what the historians say. The unbelievable part was that any team of mules could possibly have pulled a wagon up this incline.

The track up the dry ridge seemed an interminable climb. The small group of mountain bike riders had started to become scattered along the climb, as the difficulty began to separate the men from the women. In front, alternately attempting to ride and then again pushing their bikes, were the women. The men lagged behind, pushing their bikes and stopping every hundred feet to breath. It was too steep to ride, Dave decided, and the rocky surface way too loose. He could see why four wheel drive ranch pickups were the only vehicles using the track these days.

The top of this climb would signal the upper limit of the watershed for the Snake River, which from here flows south, then west, then north to the Columbia, and thence west to the Pacific. On the ridge top would be the beginning of the Missouri river drainage down the other side, the clear water of which flows north, then west, eventually making its way into the muddy Mississippi and on down to the Gulf of Mexico. Somewhere close to the top would be the hiking and horse trail that sporadically follows the divide’s zigzag spine from Canada to Mexico; the Continental Divide Trail. Even a few bike riders take the CD trail, though most of them cautiously choose to parallel the divide at a lower elevation, on dirt roads mapped by Adventure Cycling as the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route.

Dave wiped the sweat from his eyes. The fierce high-altitude summer sun was directly over his shoulder. Looking back he couldn’t see anyone beyond the curve of the hill below. Far ahead he could see the distant heads of the amazon women, just disappearing where the track rounded another rise. He shook his head and laughed at himself. “Damn, those ladies are strong.” And he was very right.

A drink of water, a piece of hard candy, and he continued the push. Unlike the riders ahead of him, Dave didn’t have GPS. In fact, the only map he had was a fuzzy copy of a copy, on which each inch of map represented 10 miles of complex mountainous terrain. Dave walked with his eyes on the ground, following the tire tracks of the women ahead of him, who were now totally out of sight. At times, he could still see Rod behind him, pushing his recumbent mountain bike, a couple hundred feet of vertical below and a quarter mile back. He put his head back down and pushed on. The climb continued much further than he had guessed it would, but the tire tracks kept going, so he did too. Up the winding track he went.

Eventually, the heat of the day started to ease as the sun moved down toward the western horizon. Dave felt a refreshing little breeze, stopped and looked around. The ridge ahead climbed into timber. Off to the north was a very broad and long valley, perhaps 15 miles across, with a complex jumble of hills, ravines, sagebrush flats and broken terrain scattered throughout. He couldn’t see any roads or buildings, though the map seemed to suggest that there were a couple of ranches somewhere out there. To the south, he could almost see back to the basalt and sand of the Snake River Plain in Idaho, across distance made hazy by forest fire smoke blowing in from Oregon. To the west he could see three mountain ranges. The big one with the snow dappled peaks was the Lemhi Range, the northern terminus of which marked the big bend to the west of the Salmon River. Back below him was an inactive mine or quarry of some sort that he had passed earlier, the obvious reason for some of the traffic that had made the twin track he had been following. Above the mine the track has become much fainter. The bike tire tracks he was following now showed only infrequently and indistinctly in small patches of dry dirt.

From this vantage point he had a better sense of the land. Still, the trail and the map still didn’t seem to jibe. The bike tracks were the main thing that made sense, and the fact that they and he were on a twin-track, which he knew was what they were to follow across the divide and down into the big valley. He climbed on.

Then, with no preamble, the twin tracks stopped. Puzzled, Dave scanned ahead. There he saw only a single-track trail. This was not right. Then he saw, nailed to a post, a sign; “The Continental Divide Trail”. A jolt of adrenaline went through him. This was all wrong. He wasn’t supposed to be here.

He knew then that he had been sidetracked. He just didn’t know how or where. It looked like it had been a long way. He stood for a little while, breathing, trying to make sense of the situation. Then he started slowly backtracking, scanning for what he might have missed.

He followed the track back down past the mine. It took quite a while to reach the saddle where he could see back down the way they had come. It was there that he finally realized what had happened. He had been following the tire tracks of the women and missed where they had continued on north down the other side of the saddle. A couple of CD Trail bike riders, with similar tire patterns, had very recently crossed from west to east where the CD Trail intersected the Bannock Pass road, right at the saddle. The four way junction was indistinct, and the similar bike tire tracks and their direction of travel a very confusing coincidence.

He moved a little way down from the saddle toward the north, and saw where Rod’s track emerged from the rocks, dust and confusion and continued down to the north, and now he knew for sure. For a minute or two, then, it seemed that things were okay.

Then he took stock. He had some water, but not a lot. He had the water filter he had been sharing with Rod, so he was set, though Rod was not, if he came upon some water of any sort of quality. Marty had his sleeping bag. Rod had extra food, but he did not. The sun was lowering in the west. He was going to have to catch them. He was not equipped to spend a night out, not at this elevation, where temperatures could drop into the 40’s at night, even in midsummer.

Dave took out his cell phone. Even here on this almost-8,000 foot high ridge there was no service, and he knew there would be none for another day or two through these remote mountains. He took a photo of himself, stowed the camera, mounted up and headed down the rocky track toward the north and the valley.

Fist size cobbles over much of the track demanded close attention. He resisted hurrying; being thrown could easily launch him 30 feet down the hill, and there might not be anyone passing by for days to recover him if he broke a leg out here. He occasionally glimpsed a bike track in dusty patches; Rod’s especially were distinct and easy to recognize.

Light was fading from the sky. As he lost elevation, he descended into cooler air pooling in the big valley, and coasting downward, began to shiver. He put on his light jacket, and brought out the headlamp. He hoped he wouldn’t need the lamp, and still felt somewhat confident that he would meet up with the others before long.

By the time he reached a junction of the track with another twin track, it was getting dark. He followed the joined tracks down and down until the track met up with a gravel road. By now it was quite dark and he was riding by headlamp. There were no signs to tell a traveler what or where anything was. There were no road signs, no arrows. He could no longer see the surrounding topography in the dark, so could not guess by context where the roads might lead.

He tried holding his headlamp at a low angle in order to make out whether bike tracks could be seen in the gravel, but saw no clues; he could not tell where the bike riders had gone.

He studied the map. There were almost no clues there either. The web of tracks was not shown, only a single dashed line. Which of these, if any, was that dashed line road?

He thought it over and over. He held the map upside down to get a different perspective. He tried to remember what anyone had said about the route. Nothing worked. ‘I am NOT doing this again without GPS’, he told himself.

Finally, he realized that he had to get moving. He was starting to shiver, and that didn’t help him think straight. He chose the road that seemed to have the most going for it, because it seemed to be going down and because it was obviously more traveled, and started riding.

There was no moon. Occasionally he would stop and shut off his headlamp, and a thousand stars would quickly become visible as his eyes adjusted. He tried riding by starlight, but was startled by some sizable animal which he couldn’t make out running across the road, and decided to keep using the lamp.

Somewhere around 11 o’clock he simply had to stop. Immediately he started to shiver. He knew he had to have a fire. He hadn’t seen trees for hours, but there was sagebrush everywhere. He found his lighter, broke branches off of the sage next to the road, and made a pile the size of a loaf of bread in the middle of the road. The shredded bark of the sage lit easily. He hunkered over the fire, alternately warming and scorching himself, and trying to keep the smoke out of his face. He wanted to lie down and sleep, but the fire could not keep him warm except in rotisserie mode.

He kept the fire burning while considering what to do next. It was so hard to think. He had been tired in the late afternoon; now he was absolutely exhausted. He could tell by the star Polaris which way was north, but that was the only hint to tell where he was. When the fire burned out, he wearily mounted his bike and headed back the way he had come. In making that decision he enacted the old Chinese saying; “However far you have gone down the wrong road, turn back.” He felt defeated. ‘Is my will filled out?’ he wondered.

Another thing ran across the road on the edge of his vision, its shadow huge from his light. He was befuddled, and not alert and cogent enough to make the obvious deduction that it was a jackrabbit. Maybe it was an antelope. It could have been a coyote, or, to his simplifying mind, a chupacabra.

He passed right by the junction where he had hit the gravel road without seeing it in the dark. It was well past midnight. Once he stopped to investigate a piece of wood that might be a sign (which wasn’t) and found that he just couldn’t talk himself back onto the saddle. So he walked, pushing the bike. As he walked, he settled into a rhythm.

He walked for hours, moving slowly. It had been a long and challenging day, and a long and arduous night on top of it. It was early morning, and he didn’t have much left. His movements were automatic. A little jingle played in his head over and over like a vinyl record with a skip in it.

He walked. He turned off his light, and turned it back on. His mind seemed partitioned into two; the part that hummed the jingle, and a part that listened to the other part humming. He turned the light off, and back on. He walked.

He was running on air. On empty. He had eaten his last candy and drunk his last water many hours ago. He stopped to let a jackrabbit cross the road, but it would not, even after he scolded it. In his confusion he called it a ‘stupid beaver’. When he walked up to confront it, it vanished. That it would vanish did not seem all that strange anymore.

He walked on. He was very, very thirsty. The rhythm was faltering. A third part of his mind started to wonder aloud what the second part of his mind was listening to. To distract this obnoxious new part, he wheeled his bike in a big circle across the roadway, which successfully shut it up for a while. Whether he had done one full circle, or one and a half, or two, and in what direction he was now going, were not questions that he managed to consider or even formulate. He only knew that he had to keep moving. He walked on.

There was a box in the middle of the road, wearing a nametag, and it was named ‘Dave’. ‘My name is Dave, too’, part of him thought, while the other part tried to insert the name ‘Dave’ into the jingle it was repeating. My name is Dave, he thought again. He chuckled, then laughed out loud. Something was funny, though he wasn’t sure what. The box said nothing. It seemed to be waiting and smiling mysteriously, as if it had a joyful little secret, one which it really wanted him to figure out.
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Rod opened his eyes. The stars were amazingly bright still, though the first glow of the morning sun would be appearing soon. Something had woken him. Raising his head from his sleeping bag, he looked around. There was something. It was a dim point of light making little circles out in the darkness. He could hear someone humming out by where he had left the box on the road, and someone else speaking in a demanding voice. He jostled Marty, and they listened to the voices. Then someone laughed, and they recognized the voice. It was Dave. He had made it! And they hurried out to bring him in.