Day 11: Austin to Eureka

A 70 mile day, 5:50am start and 1:30pm finish due to no lolly-gagging, supporting wind and not too much climbing after our first climb out of Austin.  We did have a significant development I’ll talk about later. 

The motel free range grey kitty came over to say good morning before we launched off. 

It took 40 minutes of constant and often steep climbing from Austin before we reached Austin Summit at 7,500’.  This was a nice memorial for someone at the top. Note the stiff  breeze. 

After one more smaller summit it was off across a very large basin on our way to Eureka somewhere towards that distant mountain range. 

Last night as Len and I were going to bed Brad arrived for a room.  The motel manager wasn’t answering her phone so I helped him figure out how to get into one. We ended up riding together off and on this morning until this point, around 30 miles into the day, where he headed off onto the dirt road for a 4 or 5 day ride to Salt Lake City. He’s mountain biking with limited road use like this morning with me.  He has to carry at least 4 days of food and he’s filtering water out of streams when he finds one.  He teaches high school physics in McKenny TX and does a ride like this every summer.  After a few days in Salt Lake City he’s riding on to Kansas.  I’m amazed.  

Since we have no services between Austin and Eureka I’m having a Champs Convenence sandwich I bought last night.  Not so great but it was good enough to fuel my fire for the 32 miles left in the day.  We got very lucky and found a little rest area with picnic table and roof.  At lunch Len told me his rear tire was getting very squeaky and wobbly.  We looked at it and it appeared it had some spokes which were loose and caused the wheel to run untrue.   A real bike mechanic would be required to retrue the wheel.  With limited cell service it appeared there was a bike shop in Ely, NV, which would be our next town, and that they may have a mechanic skilled enough to adjust the spokes, maybe.  We pondered that if his wheel could make it to Eureka Len could catch a ride with someone tomorrow and I’d meet him in Ely and hopefully we’d be back riding together the next day. So that’s what we did.  

The exotic Sundown Lodge in Eureka for the night, checked in by 2pm. 

Settled in for the day Len thought he’d attempt a bit of spoke adjusting to see if he could improve things hisself as a last resort. That was when he realized that the spokes were pulling free from the carbon wheel. There were at least 6 spots where the carbon was fracturing due to too much load on them (I had been thinking that Len might be overeating). The builder of his bike should have specified steel rims.  In any case, this would require finding a shop that would have a rim in stock to rebuild Len’s rear wheel or have an already built wheel and install it.  This would definitely not happen in Ely. The best option was to get to Elko, NV where there was a better chance of repair and/or a rental car to catch back up to me down the road, like Cedar City, UT. The problem was how to get to Elko?

Len leveraged his career as an Omaha policeman and reached out one more time to the Eureka County Sheriff’s Dept.  After explaining his dilemma he got a call back in less than 10 minutes to confirm that Deputy Uder would be driving him to Elko in 15 minutes.  The bike and gear were quickly loaded and within seconds they were talking about new Tazer technology.  Len’s made it safe to Elko now and will know more tomorrow.  It was sad parting with Len, especially with the possibility that he might not be able to rejoin me.  So we hugged our goodbyes and we’ll see how this plays out.  🤞🤞🤞