Day 11, West Yellowstone.

I heard the rain as it hit my tent early this morning. As I rolled over to go back to sleep I just hoped that it would clear by the morning because starting a ride in the rain is just no fun. I was in luck, it turned out to be a beautiful sunrise with mostly blue sky.

Erika, a friend from the 2002 cross to coast ride arrived today to join Jim, Laurie and me for a couple of days of riding as well.

By the time we left Ennis most of the other riders had already departed. The air was very crisp and a hint of possible rain. The ride was mostly south with lighter traffic than yesterday. As you can tell from the photos, we passed many ranches on both sides of the road and mountains on both sides.

The wind started to become a factor with light headwinds.

As you can see from the photos, we had a wonderful view from the lunch stop. It was a heck of a climb to get there, but it was worth it.

After lunch, we had about 30 miles to the end of the ride. We figured that it would be a piece of cake. We were wrong. Under the increasingly warm skies the wind started to blow... the wrong way. A combination of strong headwinds and continued climbing, made the progress pretty slow as we headed east. About 8 miles from West Yellowstone we turned south. Guess what? The direction of the wind was now coming from the South! I'm not sure how that occurred, but by now we were all getting pretty tired of the ride and just wanted to get it over with. We bunched up in a pace line and started to take turns on the lead position every mile and we finally got into town about 3:30. We quickly ran into other riders at a coffee shop and stopped to join them. Since West Yellowstone is a tourist town, coffee and ice cream was easy to find.

Tomorrow we head to Ashton Idaho then the following day we cross the Tetons into Jackson Hole and a day off for the 4th of July.

Wish good weather for us.

Brian