Kurt Refsnider knew whatever he was seeing wasn’t supposed to be there. It didn’t seem possible.

Because it was red.

In an endless landscape of snow, dirt and rock.

Kurt Refsnider, shown here at the bottom of the Grand Canyon following a long portage while racing the Arizona Trail last May, discovered the Baffin Island expedition’s gear in 2009. (Photo courtesy KURT REFSNIDER)

Refsnider was 180 miles from the nearest village, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 1,700 miles north of Maine, in the middle of Baffin Island, one of the most remote corners of the already far-flung Canadian province of Nunavut.

And there, where he was far more likely to see yet another polar bear than come upon anything remotely human, he was seeing red.

Refsnider didn’t know it, but he was closing the distance between two parallel existences from different times. He was finally about to connect with someone whose adventurous ethic he shared and whose audacious path he had unknowingly followed — for more than 2,500 miles, on a mountain bike, over mountains and deserts, along the Continental Divide.

Someone he had never met.

And never would.
YMIS and those who have it

Emergency room technicians and Grand Teton National Park rangers share an acronym, YMIS, for something they often encounter in their lines of work: young male’s immortality syndrome.

Mike Moe had it.

Mike Moe, left, and his brother Dan Moe: adventurers who never backed away from the challenge of the great outdoors. (Photo courtesy MARK JENKINS)

So did his brother, Dan, younger by one year. So did many of their buddies in Laramie, Wyo., a town nestled between the mountains’ siren call and the howling winds of the prairie.

They were always outdoors, testing themselves against the elements and their own limitations in every way imaginable. By the ninth grade, Mike and Mark were climbing into the Medicine Bow Mountains on winter campouts, often choosing the coldest, stormiest weekends simply to maximize the prospect of adventure.

“We got through a lot of things by the skin of our teeth,” recalls author/adventurer Mark Jenkins, Mike Moe’s best friend since their high school days. “And we loved that.”

During one of their winter excursions the temperature in Laramie plummeted to 56 below zero, worrying their parents back home. The boys? Relatively cozy inside the snow cave they had dug.

And Mike was probably chuckling.

“The worst things got, the more he made jokes about them. That was his signature,” Jenkins says. “The stickier it would get, the more fun he’d be having.”
Seeking out adventure

Kurt Refsnider wasn’t born to adventure, but he was weaned on it.

His dad, Ron, would go cross-country skiing near their Minnesota home with little Kurt, then too young to walk, nestled into the pack on his back. As soon as Kurt could stand, he was on skis, and not long after that he was backpacking, canoeing and skiing.

When he began riding bicycles, it was only when he left the pavement — heading out on mountain-bike trails or even places where trails didn’t exist — that he was hooked. At 12, he told his mother he thought he was addicted to bicycling.

Kurt Refsnider was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota-Morris when he discovered rock climbing, first on an indoor rock wall and then on trips into the Black Hills, where he found the climbing “pretty phenomenal.” (Photo courtesy RON REFSNIDER)

Kurt began, as his father says, to “seek out adventure that probably goes beyond the edge of danger.” Extreme mountain biking. Elite-level competitive cyclocross racing. And, later, rock climbing.

One afternoon early in his freshman year of high school, he stumbled into the family home pushing his mountain bike, having no idea how or why he was in so much pain.

“He said, ‘I can’t remember, but I think I crashed,’” Ron Refsnider says. “He had no short-term memory. We took him to the emergency room right away, and for two hours we were wondering if he was going to get his memory back.”

Kurt got most of it back, but much of that day remains a blank page. He doesn’t remember crashing, or pushing the bike home, or even having that conversation with his parents.

“What I remember about that day was being wheeled around on a gurney going in to have a CAT scan,” he says. “It was one of those weird accidents. Nothing else was really messed up.”

Oh, except for his bike helmet. That was smashed.
Moes cross the Divide

In 1982 the Moes and a couple of friends traveled the Continental Divide, on foot and only occasionally on an established route. “Less than 100 miles was actually signed as the Continental Divide trail,” recalls trek participant Bill Kuestner. “For most of it, we just made up the trail as we went.”

Two years later, Mike and Dan Moe completed that rugged route again, this time on mountain bikes.

Brad Humphrey and Mike Moe hustle a bike-and-sled get-up across an icy stream while crossing Baffin Island during the 1995 expedition. (Photo courtesy TIM BANKS)

They were two guys on fat-tired bikes that were no doubt heavier and less trail-worthy as those of today, doing something no one else had done, well, just because. Mike Moe recounted the trip the following year in two articles, accompanied by Dan’s photographs, in now-defunct Bike Rider magazine.

Like Pacific Crest Trail through-hikers to their west, the Moes were in a race against time, needing to complete their journey before the early-winter snows covered their route.

In the desert, they hit the trail by 6:30 a.m. to beat the brain-baking heat. They bathed in windmill holding tanks in the desert, avoided elk thundering past, marveled at a strolling family of peccaries and removed a tarantula from one of Mike’s sidebags after a rest break in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest.

Once in the mountains, they pioneered trails that didn’t exist over long miles of seemingly impassable terrain. “Some people might view this as a real headache. We prefer to see it,” Mike Moe wrote wryly, “as ‘the charm of the Divide.’ ”

With the mountain-biking boom not yet born, this seemingly aberrant behavior was not lost on people they met along the way. When they asked a Montana storekeeper about a route they wanted to follow, he laughed and retorted, “Well, ya sure as hell can’t go there!”

Well, they sure did.

Mike and Dan Moe didn’t know it at the time, but they were blazing the route of what two decades later would become the Tour Divide — a 2,700-mile mountain-bike race that annually attracts a few dozen hardy, adventurous souls.

In 2009, one of them was Kurt Refsnider.
Refsnider crosses it, too

After moving to Colorado to pursue his doctorate in geology, Refsnider discovered endurance mountain-bike racing.

He heard about and became fascinated with a race called the Grand Loop, a circuit in western Colorado and eastern Utah that was “360 miles, one little town with a general store along the route, and that’s pretty much it. Route-finding is a huge challenge on that. Supposedly there’s posts every mile marking the route, but most of them are missing.”

This was 2008. The Grand Loop drew a grand total of four entrants that year, including Refsnider, and there was so much snow at the higher reaches of the route that two of the other three dropped out before the end of the first day.

Kurt Refsnider honed his taste for longer bicycle adventures in mountain-bike races like this one — that’s Kurt out in front of the pack — and competitive cyclocross racing. (Photo courtesy RON REFSNIDER)

Still, Refsnider pushed on, despite riding into “snow drifts (that) were up into the trees. I didn’t even see how you could follow the single-track up there, much less navigate it.” His body began to betray him the next day, no longer willing to survive on Clif Bars.

“If you can’t eat, you can’t ride,” Refsnider says, looking back. “It’s just this downward spiral. And I wore the wrong shoes, so my feet were hurting so much after all that hike-a-bike.” He finished the race at 1 a.m., the broken portions of his bike now held together with duct tape, and swore to himself he would never do anything like that again.

Instead, the next year he did something far more physically and emotionally daunting: He took on the Tour Divide and finished in 18 days, 11 hours and 13 minutes — making him the second fastest rider in the history of the race.
Making one’s life count

Refsnider’s refusal to drop out of the Grand Loop and his subsequent willingness — fervor, even — to take on the Tour Divide would have brought an approving nod from Mike Moe.

“Mike was very hard-core, and just never wanted to turn around unnecessarily,” says Diana Kocornik, who married Mike in 1988.

But where she and Mike were living when they fell in love speaks volumes about them both: They were in the African country of Swaziland, Kocornik teaching high school and Moe working for CARE, a humanitarian organization fighting global poverty.

For people who knew Moe, that was nothing new. His 1986 trip to Mount Aconcagua in the Andes was a fundraiser for Save The Children, and he organized numerous hunger-awareness projects in Laramie. By the mid-1990s, he was executive director of the non-profit Wyoming P.A.R.E.N.T., dedicated to improving the well-being of the state’s children and families.

“That was all rooted in faith. He was a Christian,” Kocornik says. “He didn’t want his life to be all about experiencing the outdoors. He wanted it to count in other ways as well.”

Still, the Moe brothers were most at home when immersed in outdoor adventure, whether together or with other friends. In 1987, while Mike was in Swaziland, Dan Moe mountain-biked the Continental Divide of Australia. And in 1991, Mike and three friends — including Jenkins — traveled to the headwaters of Africa’s Niger River in order to kayak the river from its source to the ocean.

A passage in “To Timbuktu,” Jenkins’ remarkable book about the Niger expedition, perhaps best describes Mike Moe’s spirit.

A harrowing descent through a particularly dangerous stretch of whitewater had left two of the men questioning whether the end was worth the extraordinary risk. One of them — his voice “quivering with rage,” Jenkins wrote — objected, “This isn’t boating!”

Jenkins’ next paragraph:

Mike can’t stop grinning. He turns to me and says quietly, “Nope. This is exploring.”

Bears, scares and something red

Though he rode through hundreds of miles of prime grizzly bear territory on the Tour Divide, Kurt Refsnider never saw one. Ironically, his biggest scares along the route came from the three porcupines he nearly ran over — “these harmless little animals that just kind of came out of nowhere,” he chuckles.

Graduate assistant Chance Anderson and Kurt Refsnider’s doctoral advisor, Gifford Miller ponder the strange collection of bikes and sleds the geology researchers found in summer 2009, stashed near the Barnes Ice Cap. (Photo courtesy KURT REFSNIDER)

Three weeks after completing that race spanning the full length of the Continental Divide, he was back on Baffin Island, where he had already spent parts of the previous two summers doing doctoral research on ice-sheet erosion.

And this time, bears were the ones creating those heart-pounding moments.

Numerous daily polar bear sightings convinced Refsnider, his advisor and a graduate student to switch from camping outdoors — which they did for the first few nights — and retreat to a small hunting cabin. Their first night there, a bear spent five minutes trying to break in, clawing and pounding on the wall of what Refsnider described as a “weak little structure.”

“We stomped and yelled, trying to scare the bear away,” Refsnider wrote later. “But we must have smelled pretty dang good.”

But that wasn’t what Refsnider, then 27, will recall most vividly about that 2009 summer on Baffin Island.

That moment would come further inland, while Refsnider was crossing a boulder field next to the Barnes Ice Cap, a 90-mile-long hunk of ancient ice that spanned the horizon. “As far as you can see to the north,” he recalls, “and as far as you can see to the south.”

And in that vast, desolate landscape of white and brown and gray, Refsnider saw something else.

Something red.
On their way to Baffin

Mike Moe had the heart to take on any challenge, any mountain. But his lungs were another matter. As far back as 1980, when he and Mark Jenkins set out to climb Mount McKinley (Denali) in Alaska, Moe had been susceptible to pulmonary edema at high altitudes.

He got only as high as 14,200 feet on McKinley — still 6,000 feet below the summit — before fluid buildup in his lungs forced him to turn back. It happened again six years later at Aconcagua, and again seven years after that, on a 1993 expedition to ascend unclimbed peaks in Tibet.

“He really wanted to do big mountains, and I think it was a major disappointment to him that he was susceptible to pulmonary edema,” says Tim Banks, another Laramie friend and climbing buddy. “He was the man of boundless enthusiasm — the kind of guy who thought, ‘You can push this, you can adapt, you can make it happen.’

“When he came home from Tibet, he was really bummed.”

But unbowed. It wasn’t long before he, his brother and his friends were planning another adventure. Navigating a major whitewater river on Asia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, perhaps. Finding something challenging in the northernmost parts of Alaska at the coldest time of the year, maybe.

The destination they eventually came up with? Baffin Island.
The mysterious find

Kurt Refsnider pointed for the others at what he was seeing.

“My advisor is red-green color-blind. He couldn’t see it,” Refsnider recalls.

It wasn’t on the route they were headed, but the mystery was intriguing enough to make it worth the detour. So they made their way toward it.

It was very slow going. “It takes a long time to get anywhere,” Refsnider says, “because you’re hopping from boulder to boulder.”

The red object, whatever it was, was atop a steep, little hill, perhaps only 20 meters tall. Refsnider and his two companions scrambled to the top and were very surprised by what they found.

The red that had caught his eyes was a fuel canister. Next to it were four bicycles he recognized as being mid-1990s-era vintage, and three sleds rigged up with aluminum conduit to be towed behind the bicycles.

Also in the neat pile — which clearly had sat unseen and untouched for many seasons — were two ice axes.

Painted on the handle of one, in what looked like silver nail polish, was something Refsnider decided must be initials:

M  O  E

The boats that never came

Upon reaching that small rise in August 1995, Mike Moe, Dan Moe, Sharon Kava and Brad Humphrey had just completed history’s first bicycle crossing of the Barnes Ice Cap.

Facing the same boulder fields that would make such slow going for Kurt Refsnider’s team a quarter-century later, the quartet decided to leave behind the bikes and sleds. Carrying shotguns to ward off the polar bears, the foursome hiked the rest of the way to a fiord on Baffin Island’s east coast.

Mike Moe had made arrangements for two Hobie Cats — small, twin-hulled sailboats — to be shipped to the town of Clyde River. An Inuit outfitter was to deliver them to the fiord and the group would then sail back, two per boat, to Clyde River and their long flights back to the United States.

But when they radioed the outfitter, the boats had not been delivered.

They waited. For days. Something was holding up the boats’ delivery to Clyde River. Their food ran out, and they resorted to picking berries for sustenance. Finally, with no telling when or even if the Hobie Cats would arrive, the group radioed the outfitter to pick them up for the final leg of the trip.

They never made it to Clyde River.
The singular coincidence

Back at camp, Kurt Refsnider used the research team’s satellite phone to make a few calls, hoping to find what bike-riding Baffin Island explorer might have the initials M.O.E. One of his calls was to his father.

Some online searching led Ron Refsnider to an Outside Magazine article written by Mark Jenkins, which explained in poignant detail what had happened to Mike and Dan Moe and their friends.

This past summer, he found the same article reprinted in “Cordillera,” a Tour Divide literary journal edited by Eric Bruntjen of Yakima.

This time, though, Jenkins’ story was prefaced by an editor’s note that explained the Moes’ unbreakable connection to the Tour Divide.

Upon reading that, Ron Refsnider understood the singular nature of the coincidence. “The hair on the back of my neck,” he recalls, “was standing up pretty high at that point.”

His son, one of only 65 people in the world to have completed the 2,700-mile Tour Divide mountain-bike race, had come upon the belongings of the two men who had pioneered it.

And those men are gone.
Tragedy on the icy seas

The Inuit guide’s small aluminum motorboat was two miles from shore in calm water when the group came upon a pod of a 10 to 15 bowhead whales. One surfaced directly under the boat, flipping it and tossing the guide and his four American passengers into the icy water.

While the guide had a well-insulated survival suit, the others had only life jackets. Their survival suits were to have been delivered with the Hobie Cats, which had never arrived.

The guide survived the ordeal, and his wife related his version of the Americans’ final hours in some detail to Jenkins.

In water only a degree or two above freezing, most people succumb to hypothermia and die within 90 minutes. Dan and Mike Moe survived the longest, holding onto each other —  “hands clasped over the hull,” Jenkins wrote — for a seemingly impossible six hours. When Dan finally slipped away, Mike couldn’t hold onto his younger brother.

Two hours later, he joined him.

The final connection

In 1996, Mark Jenkins, Tim Banks and another friend of the Moes climbed a rock face in the Medicine Bow Mountains to mount a plaque commemorating the four adventurers who died in the waters off Baffin Island.

Last September, Kurt Refsnider and the woman he’s dating went into the Medicine Bows in hopes of seeing the plaque, but couldn’t find it.

He’s OK with that.

“I don’t think (the Moes’ friends) left it there for other people to find,” he says. “Maybe it was just for themselves.”

He and his friend camped two nights there, experiencing the once-upon-a-time stomping grounds of Mike and Dan Moe, where they had stoked their passion for adventure. He felt drawn there, “which is strange. I normally don’t have compulsions like that.”

Going where the Moes had gone, he says, “just felt like something I needed to do.”

Of course, Kurt Refsnider had been doing that for most of his life. He just hadn’t known it at the time.

• Outdoors editor Scott Sandsberry can be reached at 509-577-7689 or ssandsberry@yakimaherald.com

State may have a third wolf pack

A 50-pound gray wolf pup recently trapped and radio-collared by state wildlife officers earlier this month near the Canadian border in northern Pend Oreille County indicates the state may be home to a third breeding wolf pack.

“We don’t know at this point whether the den where the pup was born was in Washington or British Columbia,” said Harrier Allen, who heads the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s endangered-species section. “We plan to monitor the pack next spring to determine the den location.”

A successful breeding wolf pack is documented by locating a breeding pair of adults with two or more pups that survive until Dec. 31, Allen said. The state already has two documented wolf packs — the “Lookout Pack” near Twisp in Okanogan County, first discovered in July 2008, and a pack that was verified a year later in Pend Oreille County, though further south than the recently-collared pup.

The Lookout Pack’s status is uncertain; state biologists haven’t seen the female adult wolf since mid-May and no new pups have been found, though the male is still being monitored. The first Pend Oreille pack moves between Washington and Idaho.

Earlier this year, biologists radio-collared a yearling wolf in Oregon south of southeast Washington’s Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness Area in the Umatilla National Forest.

‘Pick up a Mountain’ set for this weekend

If you’re a motorized trail user who wants to help keep those trails clear, this is a good weekend to get proactive. The Pacific Northwest Four Wheel Drive Association is inviting the public to Jim Sprick Community Park in the Nile to take part in the third annual annual Pick Up a Mountain, from Friday through Sunday.

Various events will be going on at the park in conjunction with the clean-up project, with folks with a roll-up-the-sleeves work ethic will be in great demand. To participate, check in at 9 a.m. at the park to register and pick up litter bags, then head to your choice of trail system, campground or road to pick up the garbage.

For more details, contact Pam Remley at 509-658-2496 or e-mail to mtnrubi@wildblue.net, or Kelda Hagemeier at 509-698-3703 or sk_hag@fairpoint.net.

Tour Divide rider to discuss race book

Eric Bruntjen, the Yakima mountain biker whose exhausting 21-day effort during 2009’s 2,780-mile Tour Divide race raised enough money to buy a specialized wheelchair for an injured Iraq War veteran, will talk about his adventures and a Tour Divide book this Sunday evening.

The book Bruntjen will talk about and possibly read from is “The Cordillera,” a literary journal of Tour Divide tales for which Bruntjen was the editor and also one of the contributing writers.

Inklings Bookshop (5629 Summitview Ave., Yakima) is hosting the event and will have copies of “The Cordillera” available for purchase, but Bruntjen’s presentation itself will be held at the adjacent Oak Hollow Frame Shop and Gallery (at Chalet Place, 5631 Summitview).

BIRD ALERT

Hundreds of violet-green swallows with 50 or so barn swallows, a dozen Vaux’s swifts and a half-dozen common nighthawks were noted from a Konnowac Pass residence this week. Also seen were Townsend’s solitaire, western tanagers, western wood pewees, Wilson’s warblers, red-breasted nuthatch and a Cooper’s hawk. The next day, another 48 species were added to the list.

There was another adult common tern at Wenas Lake, where one birder also added two red-necked grebes — species that are fairly easy at Priest Rapids but unusual in the county away from the Columbia River.

A manmade waterfall and creek in a Yakima front yard attracted 15 bird species, including red-breasted nuthatch, black-capped chickadee, MacGillivray’s warbler, evening grosbeak, Cassin’s finch and pine siskin. Water features in yards are irresistible to birds.

A Parker Heights yard produced an astounding 48 species in a single morning, including Anna’s hummingbird, purple finch, barn owl and western screech-owl.

A group of birders walked south from Sherman Park to Yakima River and tallied 25 species including wood duck, warbling vireo, violet-green swallow, barn swallow, Bewick’s wren, cedar waxwing and western tanager.

Please call your bird sightings into the Yakima Valley Audubon phone line at 248-1963

— Kerry L. Turley

AROUND AND ABOUT

FISH FESTIVALS, PART I: The 20th annual Wenatchee River Salmon Festival returns Saturday and Sunday to Leavenworth, where family-friendly events will include Native American storytelling and traditional dancing; an animal costume parade; “Reptile Man” Scott Petersen; concerts by Dana Lyons (of “Cows With Guns” fame) and Cody Beebe and the Crooks; and, on Sunday, the Salmon Run — 5K and 10K races, plus a “Small Fry” obstacle race and a “Smolts 1K” event. For information, go online to salmonfest.org. Much of the event schedule is centered around the Icicle Creek Hatchery.

FISH FESTIVALS, PART II: The 14th annual Sturgeon Festival, featuring such attractions as the Portland Audubon Birds of Prey, “Creature Feature” reptile zoo, and Eartha the Ecological Clown, is set for 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at Vancouver’s Water Resources Education Center (4600 SE Columbia Way). Visitors can also learn about composting, recycling, water safety, watershed stewardship and sturgeon anatomy.

ONLINE FEEDBACK: The state Department of Natural Resources is looking for public input related to public recreation on DNR-managed lands. All this week through Friday, the DNR is posing recreation-related questions — “conversation starters” — on its blog site in hopes of generating feedback, suggestions, questions and even complaints. To check it out, go to washingtondnr.wordpress.com.

ON THE CALENDAR

TODAY: The Cascadians’ “Tuesdays” will hike up to McCall Basin in the Goat Rocks Wilderness, a hefty 14- to 15-miler with some 2,000 feet of elevation gain. The group will meet at 7:30 a.m. at the 40th Avenue Bi-Mart and carpool from there to the trailhead. Bring lunch, lots of water, sturdy boots and clothing for a variety of weather.

WEDNESDAY: The Mount Adams Cycling Club’s weekly Naches Loop ride, a 24-miler, begins at 6 p.m. at the Fed Meyer/Key Bank parking lot. For more on the club and its schedule, go to www.mountadamscycling.org.

THURSDAY: The Cascadians’ Pokies will do a “Moxee/hops hike/kiln tour” — which means a trek through Moxee highlighted by a hops-industry guided tour. For meeting time and place, call Diane Gillan at 576-8975.

SATURDAY: A Cascadians hike will head to Third Burroughs Mountain in Mountain Rainier National Park, an eight-miler with 1,400 feet of elevation gain. For meeting time and place, call Maurine Peck at 453-4244.

MONDAY: Members and guests of the Mount Adams Cycling Club will take off at 5:45 p.m. for their regular Monday loop ride, either a flatter 30-miler or a hillier 23-miler.

Last summer, when he completed the rugged Tour Divide mountain bike race in honor of a Selah veteran injured in Iraq, Eric Bruntjen’s heart was clearly in the right place.

Eric Bruntjen

This summer, though, his knee wasn’t.

Nearly halfway through the 2010 Tour Divide, Bruntjen was on pace to improve dramatically on his 2009 performance over the 2,780-mile course along the Continental Divide between Banff, Canada, and the New Mexico-Mexico border.

“I was really racing well,” said Bruntjen, a 39-year-old information-technology specialist and Yakima resident. “My head was in it, and my heart was in it.

“But I just really overdid it.”

Bruntjen had ridden the 2009 race to raise enough money to buy a specialized all-terrain wheelchair for injured Army veteran Evan Mettie of Selah. His goal that year was to go the full distance, because the pledges he had collected were based on how many miles he rode.

This summer, Bruntjen was in the race strictly to compete, and he was churning out 150-mile days and running nearly 31 hours ahead of his 21 1/2-day 2009 pace by the time he reached the Teton Range in Wyoming. But he was paying a steep price. The harder he pushed himself, the more the muscles, ligaments and tendons securing his patella — his kneecap — tended to pull it out of place.

The issue, called patella tracking disorder, is often hereditary and related to the knee structure itself. It can sometimes be caused by failing to stretch properly prior to exertion.

Bruntjen knows he wasn’t stretching properly. He was in a hurry. Every day.

“I’ve had it in training before and I’ve always been able to stretch my way out of it. This time it didn’t stretch off,” Bruntjen said. “The crazy thing is I had no pain walking — I could walk just fine. I’d get off my bike and walk for a while and I’d think, ‘OK, I’m cured, I’m fine,’ and I’d get back on my bike and start again and my knees would be in agony right away.”

Bruntjen pulled out of the race on the eighth day near Jackson, Wyo., and although he regrets not being able to complete the race — and, of course, improve on the time from his 2009 Tour Divide debut — he doesn’t have any second thoughts about his decision.

“It was super frustrating for me, but it was actually clear-cut. I didn’t waffle about it,” he said. “I was just mechanically unable to go any further.”

Another Tour Divide racer, a 37-year-old Vermont resident named Dave

Blumenthal, died after he was struck by a pickup truck near Steamboat Springs, Colo. Bruntjen had gotten to know Blumenthal earlier in the race, when the two were both camping at Wise River, Mont.

“He was this 6-foot-7, just towering guy — a nice guy,” said Bruntjen, who had already left the race and returned home when he heard about Blumenthal’s accident.

Despite the rough going in the 2010 race, Bruntjen said his Tour Divide days may not be over.

“If I have enough time to train — and to stretch,” he added, laughing, “I might do it again. There’s nothing like it. You feel like you’re a superhero out there, like a cowboy out in the wild west. It’s so remote out there. No one can help you, no one can save you, and you’re trying to go as fast as you can.

“I’ve never found a sport like it, or like the feeling you get in that race.”

YAKIMA, Wash. — That phrase (Literature from the World’s Toughest Bike Race) is the subtitle for the inaugural edition of “The Cordillera,” a just-now-published 90-page collection of “stories, essays, interviews and poems” written about or inspired by the Tour Divide and Great Divide mountain bike races.

If you don’t know about the Tour Divide, you clearly weren’t following this blog last summer, when Eric Bruntjen of Yakima did the grueling 2,745-mile mountain bike race from the Canadian mountain resort town of Banff to the U.S.-Mexican border at Antelope Wells, N.M. For three weeks, Bruntjen pedaled roughly 130 miles a day over some of the country’s most arduous mountainous terrain, overcoming injuries, exhaustion and terrible weather conditions to finish the race, placing ninth among a record field of 42 riders.

He did it to raise enough money in pledges to pay for a specialized all-terrain wheelchair for injured veteran Evan Mettie of Selah, a goal Bruntjen was able to achieve. He also generated a lot of interest in the Tour Divide mountain bike race with all of those personal reports he gave us all along the way.

If you were one of those people who couldn’t get enough of following Bruntjen’s journey on this site and on the Tour Divide leaderboard website, “The Cordillera” might be worth a look — especially when you see that the compilation’s editor (and one of the authors) is Bruntjen himself.

All proceeds from “The Cordillera” will go to the Adventure Cycling Association, which created the Tour Divide and Great Divide events. And while the book will be available from Amazon.com soon enough, if you purchase it directly from the printer (for $10.50), Adventure Cycling will get a bigger cut of the proceeds.

And in case you’re curious, as I was, according to Wikipedia a cordillera is “an extensive chain of mountains or mountain ranges,” which sounds like a pretty apt title for a book dedicated to competitive mountain bikers whose course roughly follows the Continental Divide which, of course, pretty much follows along the Rocky Mountains.

I get tired even thinking about it. Maybe I’ll stick to reading about it.

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — Anybody who followed Eric Bruntjen’s arduous cross-country, Canada-to-Mexican-border mountain bike ride in the Tour Divide race a couple of months back will have an opportunity to hear all about it this Friday.

Bruntjen rode the nearly 2,800-mile race to raise enough money — through per-mile donations — to be able to purchase a specialized all-terrain wheelchair for injured veteran Evan Mettie of Selah, who was profoundly injured by a bomb while on duty in Iraq. He has invited the people who supported that effort to a slide show at 7 p.m. Friday at the Media Works theater, upstairs at Glenwood Square (5100 Tieton Dr., Yakima), with seating for 100.

Along the way to finishing a solid ninth out of 42 starters, Bruntjen encountered bears, cougars, snow-covered mountain passes, torrential rains, freezing temperatures and sweltering desert heat, while overcoming will-killing exhaustion over 21 days of riding.

I know he has lots of pictures to show and a ton of fascinating tales to tell. And I’m still in awe of what he accomplished and admiration for why he did it.

– Scott Sandsberry

Steelhead limits go up today at Hanford Reach

With the huge steelhead run coming up the Columbia River, fishing enthusiasts have been peppering the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Region 3 headquarters in Yakima with the big questions: Would the Hanford Reach open earlier than the usual Oct. 1 start date, and would the upper portion of the Reach finally be part of the fishery?

The answer to both questions is yes.

Beginning today, Columbia River anglers will be able to catch and keep up to three hatchery steelhead throughout the Hanford Reach, where steelhead have been returning at more than double the 10-year average. And that includes the upper half of the Reach from the old Hanford townsite power lines to Priest Rapids, a stretch that hasn’t been open for steelhead retention since 1996.

“This is big,” said WDFW regional fish program manager John Easterbrooks. “We’ve been getting lots of calls wondering if we’d be able to open early and maybe open the upper area, and we’ll be able to.

“This is a great opportunity for anglers to catch some terrific fish under ideal early fall weather conditions, while also helping to prevent hatchery steelhead from crowding out wild fish on the spawning grounds.”

The upper stretch is scheduled to be open for a month unless fish managers decide there’s been too pronounced a mortality impact on wild steelhead; for the area below the power lines the fishery will remain open through the winter by permanent regulation.

In both areas, only hatchery fish measuring at least 20 inches that are marked for identification with a clipped adipose fin and a healed scar may be retained.

More than 30,000 summer steelhead had been counted at Priest Rapids Dam through mid-September, compared to the 10-year average of 12,500.

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Here’s a photo op for salmon lovers

The fascinating life cycle of a salmon — which spends its entire life getting strong enough to spawn, finally does so and then dies — will be the focus of a guided walk and presentation this Saturday on the Cle Elum River’s Salmon Viewing Trail near Ronald.

The event, set for 10:30 a.m., will be hosted by biologist and colorful educator Bob Tuck, a former state wildlife commissioner who now serves as director of the Yakima Basin Environmental Education Program.

To reach the ADA-accessible trail, travel northwest on the Salmon la Sac Highway out of Ronald and turn left onto Lake Cle Elum Dam /Lake Cabins Road, about two miles out of town. Travel southwest on Cle Elum Dam/Lake Cabins Road for less than a mile and follow signs to the Salmon Viewing Trail.

There are two parking areas for the trail. The upper parking lot is reached by a dirt road that is easily traveled by passenger vehicles, but visitors who park there must walk down a short stretch of rough, steep road to reach the trailhead. A high-clearance, four-wheel drive vehicle is required to reach the second parking area and the start of the trail.

For more information, call 509-281-1311, or go to www.midcolumbiarfeg.com.

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Klickitat Canyon site grows by 1,500 acres

A 1,500-acre expansion of the Klickitat Canyon Natural Resources Area was the highlight of last week’s 36th annual conference of the National Natural Areas Association.

With the state Department of Natural Resources hosting the three-day conference in Vancouver, Commission of Public Lands opened the event by signing into effect the expansion of the Klickitat Canyon area, most of which lies within Yakima County.

The expansion adds significantly to the nearly 500 acres currently in conservation at the site, which was originally established for its geologic and scenic qualities — the dramatic canyon with the Klickitat River below. Recent analysis has determined the area also has rare plant species and serves as habitat for the state-endangered sandhill crane, as well as black bear, bobcat, deer and bald eagles.

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Anglers, put this one on your calendar

If you’re a fishing enthusiast and would like to have a say in the process, put Wednesday of next week (Sept. 30) on your calendar. That’s when the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife will hold a public meeting in Yakima to discuss sport-fishing rules proposals, and the state folks will be listening to what you have to say.

The meeting is set for 6 to 8 p.m. at Carpenters Hall, 507 S. 3rd St.

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BIRD ALERT

Migration is in full swing and lots of our winter friends, such as dark-eyed juncos and white-crowned sparrows, are showing up at bird feeders around the Valley. From Terrace Heights came a report of a golden-crowned sparrow joining the mix, as well as sightings of a Townsend’s solitaire and a small flock of cedar waxwings feeding in a flowering dogwood tree.

Raptors noted on a trip this week to the top of Timberwolf Mountain included turkey vulture, sharp-shinned hawk, Cooper’s hawk and red-tailed hawk. Other birds of note were hairy woodpecker, Clark’s nutcracker, gray jay, and mountain bluebird. Black swift, a noteworthy find in Yakima County, and Vaux’s swift were spotted in the valley between Timberwolf and Bethel Ridge.

An American three-toed woodpecker was spotted on the Mesatchee Creek Trail at the American River and around 80 Lewis’s woodpeckers were observed at Fort Simcoe, many of them immature birds.

An immature Anna’s hummingbird is hanging around a yard southwest of the Yakima airport and a Rufous Hummingbird was noted in the garden in Terrace Heights. From Wapato and Sunnyside come reports of adult California quail with downy chicks following along, this is pretty late in the season for such young chicks.

Wenas Lake is still the hot spot for shorebirds with killdeer, spotted sandpiper, western sandpiper, least sandpiper, and Baird’s sandpiper all working the mud along the receding shoreline. Also of note here were wood duck, American wigeon, northern shoveler, northern pintail, green-winged teal, eared grebe, double-crested cormorant, belted kingfisher and American pipit.

Please call your bird sightings into the Yakima Valley Audubon phone line at 248-1963

— Kerry L. Turley

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ON THE CALENDAR

TODAY: The Cascadians’ Tuesday hikers will head to Melakwa Lake. Tuesday hikers meet at 7:30 a.m. (though they’ll move to 8 a.m. next week) at the 40th Avenue Bi-Mart parking lot and carpool from there after breaking into faster and slower groups.

WEDNESDAY: Just a heads-up here for anyone expecting that weekly Mount Adams Cycling Club loop ride — there won’t be one today this week. Sorry. Next week (Sept. 30) will be the final Naches loop ride of the season.

WEDNESDAY: Yakima Valley Audubon will host a morning bird walk beginning at 8 a.m. at the parking lot on the east end of Valley Mall Boulevard, the south end of the Yakima Greenway.

THURSDAY: The Cascadians’ Pokies will hike to Government Meadows. Call Eleanor Hungate at 972-3427 for meeting time and place.

SATURDAY-SUNDAY: The Cascadians will host a Saturday hike to Colchuck Lake and Aasgard Pass, the gateway into the Enchantment Lakes area of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. On Sunday, the Cascadians will head to Grand Park. For meeting time and place on either hike, call Ted Gamlem at 697-5051.

OCT. 9: This is just a way-ahead heads-up for anyone who followed with interest Eric Bruntjen’s three-week Tour Divide mountain-biking ordeal along the Continental Divide in order to generate enough money to buy a specialized wheelchair for injured Iraq War veteran Evan Mettie.

Bruntjen will host a slide show at 7 p.m. Oct. 9 in the Glenwood Square Media Works Theater (5100 Tieton Drive, Yakima, upstairs), and will be sharing some of his experiences from his nearly 2,800-mile ride. If you think “lions, tigers and bears,” you’ll be at least two-thirds right.

YAKIMA, Wash. — In case you hadn’t heard or read about it on the Herald-Republic’s sports site on the Internet (sportsyakima.com), yes, Eric Bruntjen finished his long ride for Evan Mettie.

Bruntjen, a 38-year-old Yakima information technology specialist, had entered the 2,780-mile Tour Divide mountain bike race from the Canadian Rockies to the U.S.-Mexico border in order to generate pledges toward the purchase of an all-terrain wheel-chair for Mettie, a profoundly injured Iraq war veteran from Selah.

He finished his ride late last Friday night, completing the arduous journey in slightly over 21 days and 11 hours — a good three days faster than the goal he had set for himself. He was the ninth finisher out of 42 starters, with 19 riders dropping out during the race due to injury, bicycle issues or simple exhaustion.

It looks like Bruntjen achieved his other goal as well: raising the more than $10,000 it will take to purchase the specialized wheelchair for Mettie. If all of the people who pledged during Bruntjen’s three-week trek, as much as $12,000 might go into the “Evan Mettie Donation” fund at U.S. Bank.

Mettie’s parents have said any money beyond what’s necessary to purchase the wheelchair will be donated to an organization that serves local injured vets.

More than $3,000 of the amassed donations came from Northwest Farm Credit Services, where Valley employees combined to donate about $1,500 and the company’s Spokane headquarters made a matching donation.

YAKIMA, Wash. — Many of you who were following Eric Bruntjen’s arduous 2,780-mile mountain bike in the Tour Divide race may remember the Herald-Republic story on the good folks at Northwest Farm Credit Services’ Valley offices, who decided to step up to support Eric’s efforts to raise money towards the purchase of an all-terrain wheelchair for Selah’s Evan Mettie, an injured Iraq war veteran.

Just to catch you up if you haven’t: Michael Gibbons, who works for NFCS’ Yakima office, read in the Herald-Republic about what Bruntjen was doing. Gibbons didn’t know Bruntjen and didn’t know Evan Mettie, but has a special place in his heart for our country’s veterans; he himself has a son on his third tour in Iraq. So he sent an e-mail around to the people at NFCS’ offices in the Valley suggesting that they all donate to Eric’s cause.

Almost all of them did.

And  not only did the local NFCS employees step up in a big way, combining to donate more than $1,500, the NFCS corporate office folks in Spokane said they would match whatever the employees generated.

On Thursday, Gibbons was working with Bruntjen to arrange a time when NFCS could present a check (or checks) exceeding $3,000 toward Evan Mettie’s wheelchair.

With so much bad news out there, that — a group of people reaching deeply into their own pockets to support a truly worthy cause — is the kind of good news that warms the heart.

So next time you run into somebody from Northwest Farm Credit Services, I hope that’s one of the first things that comes into your mind: “Hey, aren’t you the good folks who …?”

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — Eric Bruntjen’s voice when he called in on Saturday morning, about 12 hours after finishing all 2,780 miles of the Tour Divide mountain bike race in just about 21 days and 11 hours, sounded pretty chipper.

And why not? He’d finished the race and he is also confident that enough pledges have come in to buy that specialized all-terrain wheelchair for injured Iraq war veteran Evan Mettie of Selah. He was so confident, in fact, that he said somebody should call Denise Mettie, Evan’s mom, to say she should start checking out those wheelchairs, because one will be on its way.

But let’s hear it from him:

Hi. Eric Bruntjen, Tour Divide rider, calling from Deming, New Mexico. All done with the race. Finished up last night on the 3rd, at 10 o’clock exactly. I think it was 10 o’clock and 18 seconds when I pulled into Antelope Wells.

Big day, about 175 miles, I think one of the other riders was saying, so I feel pretty good about that. Mother Nature gave us one last tweak and put some rain on my head — and a pretty stiff headwind, too. But when the sun went down, the moon came up, the rain stopped, the headwind calmed down, and I just let my legs go one last time.

So, good race, boy, thank you to my wife Melanee and my mother-in-law Fran … and my mom for watching the kids, for letting me go crazy on this … my buddy Frank for being remote support … Stephen Gleasner, wow, man, everything you said was right. Who knew that safety and security smelled like a moldy, wet, muddy bivvy sack, but you were right about everything. We’re going to commission a piece of art from you, I think — one of those plywood landscapes. Those are awesome. I’m going to commission one from you, inspired by the Tour Divide. So I’ll get in touch with you about that.

I think last night there were eight finishers. There were a lot of people there at Antelope Wells, a lot of family, and Kevin from Tucson was there, and all the racers that were coming in that day. So it was a special night at Antelope Wells, for sure. It’s an amazing race.

And there’s only one thing left to do, and that’s to thank all my sponsors. Holy cow. You know, I talked to some other racers who were raising money, but listen, nobody’s family and nobody’s hometown stepped up like mine. So, thanks to everyone for sponsoring me, and I think that we definitely raised enough money to get Evan a new all-terrain wheelchair. So congratulations to you. And someone call Denise, tell her to start looking for a chair, because we made it.

So I think I’ll be back in Yakima in a couple of days. Taking off tomorrow from El Paso. Thanks to Matthew Lee for putting on such a terrific race. It’s really an amazing adventure. So … I’m out. Bye.

For everybody who pledged to support Eric’s ride for Evan Mettie by sending your pledge e-mail to tourdechair@gmail.com, I salute you — now don’t forget that other part: to make out a check in your donation amount to the “Evan Mettie Donation” fund at any U.S. Bank.

Kind of fun to go along for the ride on something like this, huh? Thanks to Eric Bruntjen for bringing us along.

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — The headline is true, and in a good way.

Twenty-two days ago, Eric Bruntjen, the 38-year-old information technology specialist from Yakima was one of 42 endurance athletes from around the world in the Canadian Rockies tourist town of Banff at the starting line of the 2,780-mile Tour Divide mountain bike race.

He was riding in hopes of generating enough per-mile pledges to purchase a specialized all-terrain wheelchair for profoundly injured Iraq war veteran Evan Mettie of Selah. For those three weeks and one day, people have been sending e-mails to tourdechair@gmail.com, with all pledge donations going to the “Evan Mettie Donation” fund at U.S. Bank.

Whether or not Eric Bruntjen reached that first goal won’t be known for a few days, until everyone who pledged to donate actually does so. (Or for anybody who has so far missed out on that part of this adventure to join in the party.) I think it’s going to happen, but for now that goal is still out there.

But tonight, Eric reached his other goal: He rode into Antelope Wells, a border crossing at the U.S.-Mexico border, slightly more than 21 days and 11 hours after he began. I believe he finished in eighth place – out of 42. None too shabby.

I imagine we’ll be visiting with Eric in a few days, after he’s had a chance to catch his breath, reconnect with his wife and two children and catch up on some well-earned sleep.

But right now, I think I’ll just tip my hat, raise a glass, offer a toast and say congratulations. If anybody has ever earned a Fourth of July worth celebrating, it’s Eric Bruntjen.

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — Even after a couple of days of struggling with mechanical issues (and out of communication for most of that time), Eric Bruntjen is still competing in the Tour Divide. Not just riding. Competing.

He spent several hours in Grants Pass dealing with a tire issue that made it all but impossible to ride. He called his buddy and logistical aide Frank Hieber in a telephone call, was “sliced open.” It was really too bad, because Eric had that morning caught up with a couple of the five or six riders he had been gaining on for several days, which you know if you’ve been following the Tour Divide leaderboard.

We got a call-in this morning from Eric Bruntjen, which I’ll be posting below, but first I want to pass on something you might enjoy seeing — a photograph or two (if a technically challenged blogger such as myself can manage it when there are no IT guys around) — taken of Eric by an Albuquerque gentleman named Gordon Stalgren. Gordon, who had also been following Eric’s race progress online, drove over from Albuquerque to Grants, hoping to be able to say hello and perhaps raise Eric’s spirits a bit. The photos were sent to me by Gordon’s son, Glenn, an old college buddy of Eric’s who has been following Eric’s adventures both on the Tour Divide site and on this blog.

Photo courtesy of Gordon Stalgren

Thanks to Gordon Stalgren and especially to Glenn, because I’m sure people who have been following Eric’s trials and tribulations will be glad to know he can still smile. I’ll pass along some insights from Glenn below, but for now, without further adieu, here’s what he had to say (listen) when he stopped long enough in Silver City, N.M., to give us a call.

Hey, Eric Bruntjen calling in from Silver City.

A couple of real quick technical things. First of all, I know my brother’s following the race on the blog, so I want to wish him a happy birthday and I hope he gets better. You shouldn’t be riding those Jet Skis, Warner, you should be doing something safe like riding the Tour Divide with your little brother. [EDITOR'S NOTE No. 1: It sounds like Warner on the message, but if I heard it wrong and have the name wrong, sorry, oops.]

The other thing is, it occurred to me riding in the desert the other night that I hope I didn’t break the rules in Kremmling by accepting a ride in a car, borrowing that guy’s car. I talked to some other racers, they said no, that

Photo courtesy of Gordon Stalgren

was OK because I was off-route. Kremmling’s a couple miles off-route, and my bag was in the kind of dirt below the chipper plant there. But that’s on the other side of the river from where the route takes off, so … I think I’m good. But if anyone out there wants to check the Web site, read the rules and put my heart at ease, that’d be great. [EDITOR'S NOTE No. 2: If you haven't been following along over the past three weeks, don't worry, Eric wasn't cheating and using the car to get further along the course. He was backtracking on distance he had already ridden, to find a rucksack that included his tent and sleeping bag and had fallen from his bike (thanks to a broken clip) as he rode in a driving rainstorm.]

Other than that, I limped into Silver City with a busted front wheel. Just about everything bad that can happen to a tire and a wheel happened at the Wal-Mart in Grants. But I’ve got some tape on it and I’m limping to the bike shop to get a new wheel right now.

Spent the night last night up in the mountains with a Tour Divide fan named Kevin who drove from Tucson to come see the racers. And there were three other racers that I’ve been chasing since pretty much since Montana and Wyoming, were in that campground with Kevin. Pulled in there real late last night, came off the ridge chased by a lightning storm. Pretty wild ride down into the dark canyon. But everything turned out OK. Anyways, this thing’s not over until it’s over, but I got about 125 miles to go, I’m hoping to do it today, and finishing up.

I think I’m good on everything. I’m not eating as much, but that’s a good thing, and my next call will be from Antelope Wells. Bye.

If he finishes tonight as he believes he will, Eric will have finished this 2,780-mile beast of a mountain bike race in 22 days — three days faster than he’d hoped and a good week faster than I’d believed he could do it. Very impressive for a 6-foot-6, 225-pound, 38-year-old man.

But what I have learned over these three weeks, both from listening to Eric’s regular updates and from hearing from his friends, is that Eric is no ordinary guy. For one thing, not many other people I know would decide to take on such a profoundly physical and time-consuming challenge in order to raise money to buy an all-terrain wheelchair for a local veteran he had only read about in the newspaper.

Glenn Stalgren told me that Eric — who Glenn calls Brunch, a shorthand version of Eric’s last name — had asked him to do this Tour Divide race with him. Glenn, who has a 1-year-old son at home, didn’t think he could be away from home that long. “Of course, similar circumstances didn’t stop him,” Glenn wrote. Glenn also added a couple of little tales from their past history that should help give people yet more insight into how unstoppable a force Eric Bruntjen is. These are Glenn’s words:

In 1997 we rode from Canada to San Francisco on bikes, camping out along the way. Brunch saw the Pacific Coast, I saw his butt (I drafted off him the whole way). I guess that would’ve been against the rules in this race.

Another story about Brunch… He got in a bike wreck a few years ago. He cut his leg pretty bad and hurt his wrist. Finally after three or four days he went to see a doctor because the gash wasn’t closing. “That could’ve used stitches,” the doctor told him. “But’s it’s too late now. You’ll just have a big scar.” (He does). “That was quite a wreck. Hurt anything else?” Brunch mentioned his wrist, only after being asked. The doctor poked his wrist in a few spots and at one Brunch yelped. The X-ray confirmed the doctor’s suspicion. Brunch had a fractured wrist. Before he left the office, the doctor told Brunch, “You’re tougher than the average bear.” I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought the same thing returning from one of our adventures — him bounding and wanting more, me dragging myself from a hot shower and into bed.

That’s great stuff, and I’m very thankful to Glenn for passing it along, as well as the pictures.

I just checked the leaderboard and see that Eric — tire problems and all — has caught three of the six riders he’s been chasing for four states. They were 100 miles ahead of him a week ago. Now they’re eating his dust. Holy moly.

Kind of inspires you to want to donate a penny or two per mile toward Evan Mettie’s wheelchair by e-mail to tourdechair@gmail.com, doesn’t it?  I’m not sure enough have yet enough donations have come in to make that wheelchair a reality quite yet. And that would be a real bummer if, after all he’s been through over the last 22 days, those of us sitting here at home didn’t step up to the plate and do our part.

I’m just sayin’.

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — Before this whole Tour Divide adventure began, Eric Bruntjen told me he was hoping to be able to complete the 2,780-mile mountain bike race — which basically follows the Continental Divide, crisscrossing it at times to generate a daily average of 10,000 vertical feet of climbing — in 25 days.

At the time, I thought he was crazy. He’s 38, which is a young man in many ways but not by elite-level endurance-athlete standards. He’s 6-foot-6 and weighs 225 pounds, which is not remotely the typical tale of the tape for a mountain biker, much less for an endurance athlete. I looked at some of the finish times from the last couple of years in the Tour Divide and thought no way was he, as a first-time competitor, finishing in 25 days. I could 27, maybe, or 28. If at all.

Clearly, I misjudged Eric Bruntjen. Today is his 20th day. And unless he has some major mishap, it looks like he’ll finish by Saturday night — his 23rd day. Despite suffering a badly sprained ankle a week into the race. Despite heavy rains that hammered him for probably 14 or 15 days of his ride.

Holy moly.

He called in Tuesday afternoon from Cuba, N.M., about 5:45 p.m. his time. He still had several more hours of riding to do, but here’s what he had to say:

Hey, Eric Bruntjen calling from Cuba, New Mexico. Been a pretty good day today. I spent the night in the desert outside of Abiquiu yesterday and rode back up to 10,000 feet today. New Mexico is tough riding — a lot of rocks, pretty technical. But it’s just a terrific state. It’s so beautiful, and the riding’s been a lot of fun — challenging but fun.

On a technical note, right now I’m going to take an approved alternate. It’s the only alternate you can take in the race so I’m going to be on pavement to avoid some dangerous areas if there’s a storm between Cuba and Pie Town.

Something kind of interesting in the mountains today, there’s a rainbow gathering. It’s thick with hippies; they say there’s 2,000 of them up there, and I rode right through their camp. So for a little bit today I wasn’t the only funny-dressed, stinky guy in the woods today. So that was quite an experience, to ride through the hippies like that.

Other than that, I’ve been chasing ghosts all day, just tracking down these tire tracks that I see. It’s been fun but challenging. So tonight I’m going to be out in the desert. Tomorrow, Grants. And keep heading south.
I’m feeling pretty good. Bike’s hanging in there. I’m optimistic right now, but there’s a long ways to go before this thing ends.

Eric has been steadily gaining on about six riders for several days. A week ago, they were 100 miles ahead of him. This morning, he’s within 30 miles of them. If you want to see if he’s gaining on them, you might check out the leaderboard on the Tour Divide site.

On another note, pledges have slowed down in recent days in Eric’s ride for Evan Mettie, the Iraq war veteran who was profoundly injured by bomb shrapnel. He’s been riding to raise money for an all-terrain wheelchair for Evan, with people supporting this effort by making per-mile pledges to tourdechair@gmail.com.

If you pledge a penny per mile, you’d be pledging to make a donation of just under $28 to the “Evan Mettie Donation” fund at any U.S. Bank.

And that would put Eric that much closer a goal every bit as big to him as the finish line.

– Scott Sandsberry

The 2,780-mile route of trails and rugged roads that make up the Tour Divide mountain bike race aren’t exactly the Yellow Brick Road, but the “lions, tigers and bears” refrain isn’t far off.

Eric Bruntjen

Three-quarters of the way through the race, Eric Bruntjen’s checklist of beasts he has seen that would have sent Dorothy’s “Wizard of Oz” friends into a frenzy goes like this:

Lions. Check. (A cougar is a mountain lion, after all. He surprised one Sunday morning while barreling up a mountain pass in southern Colorado.)

Tigers. Not yet.

Bears. Check. Black and grizzly.

Oh my.

If you’ve been following Bruntjen’s progress online on the Herald-Republic’s “Out There” outdoors blog (sports yakima.com/out-there) or on the Tour

Divide site (tourdivide.org),

you already know why he’s doing it — to generate enough financial pledges to buy a specialized all-terrain wheelchair for injured Iraq war veteran Evan Mettie. You also know that that he has proven to be a far stronger competitor than perhaps even his staunchest supporters expected.

He is, after all, a 38-year-old information technology specialist from Yakima, who stands 6-foot-6 and weighs 225 pounds — not exactly the tale-of-the-tape one might expect for a guy competing against top endurance athletes from around the world.

The 42 riders in this year’s Tour Divide field came from England, Germany, Italy, Austria, Canada and all over the United States; 14 have already dropped out, felled by mechanical issues, injuries, logistical nightmares, day after day of terrible weather or a simple failure of will.

Not Bruntjen.

This morning he will begin his 19th day on the trail, having already ridden about 2,100 miles — across parts of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, across Montana,

Wyoming and Colorado. He spent most of Monday climbing and descending from passes in the San Juan Mountains of northern New Mexico.

Yes: He is in New Mexico. One state to go.

Over the last week, his journey has taken him to great highs and terrible lows.

On Thursday night, he rode into Kremmling, Colo., in a torrential downpour. Not only had a day of rain and deep must cost him his bicycle’s rear brake pads — which he’d just had put on hours earlier in Steamboat Springs — he found that a snap on his rear rack had broken and his tent, sleeping bags and his only dry clothes were gone. They had fallen out somewhere on the road.

But a night motel clerk pretty much said, “Hey, here’s my car key, why don’t you drive back the way you came and see if you can find your stuff?”

And, remarkably, he did.

Then, on Saturday, he was slammed by a huge thunderstorm that made him seek refuge. He ended up going several miles off the route to try to find somebody that would put him up, and finally he pounded on the door of a rancher who gave him a place to stay for the night.

“For 40 wet and moldy and muddy dollars,” Bruntjen recalled in one of his semi-regular call-ins to the Herald-Republic, “I got a room, no lights, no water, no heat but a working roof and what I swear to God was a horse-hair mattress. It just felt like heaven, though, compared to the weather at night.”

And the next day, he charged up and over four mountain passes, including Indiana Pass (elev. 11,910 feet). That night, when he pulled into the tiny town of Platoro, Colo., he pulled his bicycle up in front of the local bar — “It’s a one-bar town,” he noted — there were three people on the deck actually awaiting his arrival.

The bar patrons had been following the race on the Internet and knew he was getting close, and he was welcomed in like an arriving dignitary and asked to sign the leaderboard printout they had hanging on the wall.

And, of course, the reason Bruntjen is doing the trip is to generate enough per-mile pledges to tourdechair@gmail.com to be able to purchase that specialized wheelchair for Evan Mettie. (You can write a check to the “Evan Mettie Donation” fund at any U.S. Bank.) While heading up Boreas Pass in Colorado, he had a nice little experience that touched him.

He happened to come along alongside a mountain-biking couple heading up the same pass, and because they were friendly, he rode along with them for a while. On the climb, he told them about the race and what he was doing.

At the top of the pass, before Bruntjen left them behind, the couple handed him a $20 bill.

“That’s for Evan,” the man told him.

So is Eric Bruntjen’s ride.

YAKIMA, Wash. — Eric Bruntjen has been hitting the trail long and hard as he gets closer to the finish — and closer to the leaders as well. He called in this morning (Monday, June 29) at 4:43 his time, already about to hop on his mountain bike for another day of the Tour Divide mountain bike race.

Without further adieu, here’s what he had to say:

Yeah, hi, Eric Bruntjen calling from Platoro, Colorado. Pulled in last night, pulled my bike up in front of the local bar — it’s a one-bar town — there was three people on the deck waiting for me. They’d been watching me on the Internet, and I pulled in and they said ‘Come on in,’ and they made me sign a leaderboard they had printed out on the wall. There were a couple lumberjacks in there, fishing guides, they all had laptops open watching the race and talking about it. I’ll tell you, if you ever forget this is a competition, the locals will remind you. There’s no other race like this. Matthew Lee’s out front, he may be shutting this thing down today, there’s no telling. But anything can happen — I think there’s at least three or four guys that could catch him.

There’s only one Italian left, or I should say there was only one Italian left. I caught him for the last time day before yesterday outside in the desert between Salida and Del Norte. He was pushing his bike with a broken seat post — just snapped clean in half out there in the desert. Just shook his hand and left him there; nothing I can do. His race is over, I think. I guess I don’t really care what they’re saying on the Internet; that guy, he’s got guts. If you don’t speak English and you come from a different country to do this particular race, boy, your guts are bigger than the Montana sky, because this is a tough, tough race, even if you know the language. And it was great fun racing against him.

I guess I got about eight guys ahead of me. They told me in the bar yesterday they’re at least half a day ahead of me, which is probably too much for me to make up, but you never know, so I’m gonna try. I’m getting an early start today to try to beat the afternoon thunderstorms.

Things are going pretty well. Not too many mechanical issues, my body’s still holding up, starting to feel a little fatigued at the end of the day but I’ve been having some big days. The day before yesterday not so big, but I got chased back about four miles off-route by a big thunderstorm. Knocked on a rancher’s door and he let me stay in the bunkhouse; for 40 wet and moldy and muddy dollars, I got a room, no lights, no water, no heat but a working roof and what I swear to God was a horse-hair mattress. It just felt like heaven, though, compared to the weather outside.

Then yesterday had a really terrific day — four passes, two 10,000-footers and then the mack daddy, the biggest one of the whole race — Indiana Pass, 11,900 feet. Came out of Del Norte, which is I think below 8,000, and just climbed up a monster hill into the storm. But I just had great lucky yesterday with the weather; I just followed a little hole, had sun most of the way, only had to stop and hide under a tree once. When I got to the top of Indiana Pass, there was a little notch there, and the wind was blowing so hard I had to push my bike through it. But other than that I had pretty darn good weather. And then there was Stunner Pass after that, which was a little smaller one.

Coming up Conejo Pass yesterday morning, came up behind a cougar. That was … I came up right behind him, he didn’t hear me until I went over some rocks. I still had my bear bells on, and the bear bells shook and he took off into the woods. Having a great race so far, hopefully today will be another big day. Today I’m going to make it into New Mexico. Bye.

Also, on Sunday, I got an e-mail from Stephen Gleasner, the Maine artist whose 2008 Tour Divide race experiences were featured in the Herald-Republic last month to give readers an insight into just how big a challenge Eric Bruntjen would be taking on. Gleasner has been following the blog here and Eric’s leaderboard page on the Tour Divide site and has been impressed with Eric’s fortitude since the beginning. His Sunday note simply reiterated his confidence that Eric would go the distance:

Eric’s last call-in confirmed my suspicions that nothing will stop him now. He will see the border shack at Antelope Wells. It certainly ain’t over yet. There are many miles to go yet, but whatever comes up, stands in his way, he has a toolbox full of stuff to deal with whatever it is. He will see Mexico.

And that means Eric will have gone 2,780 miles — actually more than that, considering that he’s been off course at least twice and had to backtrack, and considering that it looks like some of the trail in the northern part of New Mexico has been wiped out, possibly by a flashflood, and the first two riders to reach that area have either gotten lost or been forced to go many miles off the original course in order to reach the next checkpoint.

That means that, in the next few days, Eric will have done his part to raise both consciousness toward the issues facing injured veterans and money to improve the quality of life of one specific veteran — Evan Mettie of Selah, who is left with “locked-in syndrome” as the result of bomb shrapnel during his tour in Iraq. Eric’s desire to raise money to purchase Evan’s family an all-terrain wheelchair that would allow Eric to appreciate the great outdoors once again led him to take on this tremendous challenge, and pledges have been coming in.

Not enough of them, though. In less than a week, Eric will have gone the distance for Evan Mettie, while hoping others will do their part in pledging something to tourdechair@gmail.com — a penny per mile, a nickel per mile, whatever you can afford — that will go directly to the “Evan Mettie Donation” fund at U.S. Bank.

If you’ve already done that, I salute you and Eric thanks you. God willing, perhaps one day Evan Mettie will be able to thank you himself.

If you haven’t pledged yet, well, here’s your chance.

Go the distance.

– Scott Sandsberry