Day 14 - Island Park, ID to Coulter Bay, WY

Well...we may have bitten off a bit too much today. We spent the evening looking at our route after yesterday's long day and decided we could add another 20 or so miles on today and hopefully beat some t-storms tomorrow.  Perhaps... At any rate, we did another 85 miles today, and we are now a solid 2.5 days ahead of schedule, for whatever that's worth! Tomorrow will bring a short day in mileage, but our biggest climb yet - 9500' over Togwothee Pass, so hopefully things go well! We have a reservation at the Double Bar J Ranch just over the pass to motivate us!

So- today we rode south out of Island Park along the Mesa Falls Scenic Byway - a beautiful 25 mile ride along smoothly paved roads with little traffic.
We got our first glimpse of the Teton range after leaving the Henry's Fork valley and struck off eastward through wide open Idaho farmland.
A series of small farm roads eventually led to a Forest Service road in the Targhee Nat'l Forest that ran over an unamed 7400' pass into Wyoming and the Snake River valley.  The rough gravel road soon turned nearly unrideable, as the spring maintenance crews were actively working on segments of the road with heavy grading equipment that turned uneven but hard packed dirt into soft, fluffy sand/gravel mix that our bikes bogged down to a crawl through. 
We encountered something like 10 miles of this today-- very frustrating! Eventually we made it over the pass into Grand Teton Park at Flagg Ranch, where we headed south on the main park road to our destination for the day at Coulter Bay.
Somewhere in this section, Mike suffered a pretty major mechanical problem with his bike... Still rideable, but sounding like something had died in his rear hub.  Tomorrow he's planning to detour into Jackson for repairs...  Meanwhile, the Kiwis reserved a big cabin (for a small fortune) that we squeezed 6 of us into, keeping the price down considerably, but at least we had a place to stay ;-)  We all the went out for beer and pasta to end a long and difficult day.  We'll see what tomorrow brings;-). Cheers from the GDMBR!


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