Tuesday, July 22

Tuesday, July 22

Yesterday, Monday, July 21, we biked from Jordenelle State Park to Duschene. We climbed to 9450 feet in the beautiful Utah mountains with pine forest, flowing streams, and wildlife such as deer and moose on UT-35. However when we turned from UT-35 onto UT-208 the landscape seemed to change from green, stream trickling mountains to rocky, shrubby, dry steam bed mountains. At the celebration service on Sunday a local mentioned that on our ride this week we would see why the dinosaurs died. After peleton, our evening meeting, we were surprised with ice cream as a special treat. It was my dad’s birthday yesterday. I guess the kitchen staff knew by coincidence.
Today we biked from Duschene to Dinosaur. It was already 81 degrees when started on the road at 8:10 am this morning. We were some of the last to leave before the sweep team. Most people tend to leave by 7 am or even 6 am on these long 90 mile days that we have been having back to back.
The first 60 miles of the day seemed to cruise right on by down interstate 40. We rode interstate almost all 80 miles today and we will again tomorrow. It is absolutely breath-takingly crazy when a semi passes by you only about a foot from your shoulder. Pray for safety because these roads are crazy at times. Although the past three evenings we have seen a rainbow in the sky. God must be reminding us that He is with us and watching over us every pedal stroke of the way. As for the last 30 miles they were straight-up grueling for everyone. A wicked side/head wind slowed our pass down to about 10 mph unless you got so sick and mad at going that slow that you just ground out 15 mph tops. We were even going downhill at 10 mph at times because the wind was putting up such a good fight. Phew, was it a joyous thing to see camp!

Hi Rachel. Peter just said you read this blog.

My dad and bother Mark actually decided that they did not do enough biking and biked 2 miles to Dinosaur National Monument. Then they biked up a bluff, 1000 feet, 4 miles, in the park. They said it was a sweet view of the surrounding area. Dinosaur is just another tiny little town. Tomorrow looks like today. Our directions are pretty much 86 miles down US-40. We’ll cross our fingers that we don’t make any wrong turns. There are really no wrong turns to make, because there are hardly any other roads or anything other than wilderness out here.

P.S. Mark ate lots of peppermints today to keep his throat moist.