Holy Uphill Batman!

TOP: Looking up Douglas Pass...intimidating! You can just see a bit of the road pix center. The climb was something like 25 miles.

2nd: Oh, let's just make the climb even MORE fun

3rd: And this was a high-speed switchback. Some were marked 5mph. Note the stellar road texture also

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The am team caught up to Tom and Larry just at the base of the climb up Douglas Pass. Cliff took the wheel and started hammering up the mountain. Well, hammering in the sense of climbing about 5mph, out of the saddle, and crying in pain like a republican at an obama rally. He said it was the first time he can remember totally running out of gears, and he had on a 27x27 I think.

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Hours later, as he approached the summit, there was FINALLY a turn-out, and the SUV was able to put Karen down for the handoff. She got to pound out the last 2 switchbacks and take the summit; probably deserving, as Cliff just whined too much to really deserve the summit on his own. Since Tom wasn't there to ride out the downhill on the flip side, Jerry took it. 2 hours or so later he was finally into the valley and the team continued cycling through, wondering where the heck their relief was.

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Well, it turned out that the RV could only climb and descend the hill at about half the pace that the bikers could go, so it took us HOURS to catch them. Switchbacks in an RV are not a lot of fun. We finally got to them deep into the valley, just in time for the next major climb. But first, Marco Polo had to go and get lost again, totally missing a turn. In his defense, it was easy to see how he could have mistaken the big SOUTH sign for north, as he headed soutbound towards Mexico. Took some time to find him this round; he had stopped for lunch and bought some pretty rocks from a native woman.

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I meanwhile got the next big mountain, and had good legs all the way to the summit...which turned out to be a false summit, but I'm claiming glory rights anyways. Not often that I actually pull my fat up to the top of anything more than an in-n-out drive through.

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PS>>>Cliff was now a bag of shit for 2 days also. That's apparently the benchmark from these big climbs.

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Summits: Lumpy 1, Cliff 0; not that I'm keeping track or anything.