The day started this morning in Jackson at a much warmer 45 degrees. We followed the Snake River valley for many miles. That area is very scenic and this morning there was a lot of fog hanging over the river. I took as many pictures as I could to show you how that looked this morning.
Once we left the Snake River valley, we entered an area that was much more arid. There were plenty of farm fields but we noticed that most of the fields that had crops in them were being irrigated.
While at lunch, it suddenly got really cool and cloudy. Susan, one of the Pactour owners, said something about possible bad weather coming so we got going quickly to hopefully avoid it. About three or four miles after leaving, we looked back behind us and there were huge dark clouds forming. We had a long climb to tackle and as we were slowly moving uphill the clouds kept getting closer and darker. We had just started down the descent going 40 mph when George Jahant, one of the Pactour support people, rolled up beside me with his window down and said there was a really bad storm right behind us with hail and lightning and we needed to keep moving to avoid it. We moved along the next 10 miles between 30-40 mph and just barely caught the south edge of it and had about five minutes of light rain. When we got to Montpelier, we found out that everyone behind us had been caught in the hail and lightning storm with most of them luckily still under shelter at the lunch stop. According to my roommate, Ethan, the temperature dropped 27 degrees in 10 minutes. We were very glad to have avoided all of that. Riding in those conditions is possible but not recommended if you can avoid it.
Tomorrow is another short day of less than 100 miles to Evanston Wyoming. With any luck the winds will cooperate and we won't have the headwinds we had today.
No comments:
Post a Comment