Bicycling Montana, Wyoming,
Colorado and New Mexico - 2006

Cody to Meeteetse, WY

June 14, 2006
Distance 31.7 Miles
Climbing Elevation: 2,040 feet

I did not want to get out of bed this morning but Mary Kay was up bright and cheerful. As you can guess, I am a grump when I first get out of bed. We loaded the bicycle, ate a very skimpy motel breakfast and headed out. The first thing we did was climb a steep hill. At the top we stopped at an Albertsons and bought a couple of oranges to eat on the way. We then started pedaling again. Today was another of those days when you feel that you are traveling on a flat road but looking at the altimeter you find that you are going uphill most of the time. The big difference was that we did go down several times during the day.

We knew that we had one long uphill as we approached Meeteetse. Well, we began to see very black clouds moving toward us from the west. Next we began to hear thunder and then Mary Kay saw a lighting strike in the far distance. We continued our ride but we began to be sprinkled on. We continued our ride and the sprinkle became a light rain and the light rain became a medium rain. There was more thunder and more lighting. So we stopped, leaned our bicycle against a guard rail, and climbed down to some trees to take cover from the rain. To our surprise, by these trees a flash flood culvert ran under the road and so we were under cover and dry. The only problem was that our bicycle was still out in the rain. Guess where we stopped, just as the road began the long uphill to Meeteetse. We stayed in that culvert for about 90 minutes.

Finally the rain subsided and we climbed back to the bicycle, loaded everything back on the bike that we had taken to the culvert and started to pedal. 500 feet of climbing later we reached the top which was just 9.5 miles from our destination and the temperature was a lot colder then when we left in the morning. A long down hill at 30+ miles per hour left us just 5 miles from Meeteetse but suddenly we were fighting a 20+ mph headwind. As we continued along at 11mph or less, we saw 4 deer on the right side of the road.

They ran a short distance and then stopped and watched us. The snow plow passed us as we were going up the hill. We thought that was odd until we were about one mile from Meeteetse and we could see the hail piled on the side of the road, looked like snow. When we got into town it was 2:00 pm, the people had not taken their stuff out of our motel room. But the management took all their bags to the office and gave us a downstairs motel room. We appreciated this as we did not want to haul the bicycle up the stairs. We then laid out everything to dry and then showered and headed into town for our first real meal of the day. The post office, museum, visitors center were all closed even though the signs signified that we were not late. We ate dinner at the bar where Butch Cassidy was arrested for steeling a horse. He served two years in prison, doing hard labor, when he came out he formed his gang. He always said it was because of his arrest in Meeteetse that he became a criminal.