Tour Divide 2022 – Day 15 – June 25th, 2022 – Cuba, NM to Grants, NM via the Navajo Nation Reservation and Deino community day

Since I had arrived so late, I was a bit slower getting started, rolling out the door by 6am. Still, the worker who I had talked to at midnight when I resupplied at the gas station was amazed to see me again already. “Didn’t I just see you?” … “Yep, short nap”. I had run in again to get some coffee because this was one of the few lodges I stayed in that didn’t have a coffee maker in the room. And by this point in the race, you definitely need caffeine to wake up in the morning.

The feature picture for this blog (at the top of the post) was the highlight of the day for me — arriving at an unlisted (on my maps) “trading center”, i.e., gas station, grocery store, and laundromat … with free-wifi … at nearly the exact start of the Pokémon Go community day for the somewhat rare dragon Deino. My last experience in this part of New Mexico was racing the 24 hour mountain bike nationals in 2014, and I noted that i had no cellphone data while inside Native American reservations. I assumed this would be the case while continuing the lonnnng paved detour from the previous day. So I was so happy to have wi-fi at the start of a Pokémon Go event I thought I was going to miss. As it turns out, though, I had cellphone data through the entire reservation except for some dips down into canyons where there was no coverage at all. So I was able to play the full three hours of the event, and since I had already been riding for five hours, this took me nearly all the way to Grants.

But before all that, I had overstocked at the gas station leaving town because I had no idea if I was going to be able to resupply AT ALL before Grants (122 miles) as captured in the video below:

I made it to Grants just in time for early dinner, laundry, and resupply because it started to pour down rain while I was finishing up my last errand and getting back to the hotel. That was foreshadowing for the insane day the next day, the most ridiculous and toughest ride I have ever done on a bicycle, but more on that tomorrow…

Strava maps and data

Pickuta photo album

See even more pics from the entire race along with the exact time/location where each was taken on the tracking website I created called pickuta.com. If you are on a phone or small screen web browser, click the “hamburger” triple bar icon in the upper left to slide out the photos and turn on/off the tracking markers: https://pickuta.com/album/258