Today we woke up in the beautiful Aspen Glen campground in a national forest. We biked 10 miles to the highest point of the day: Cameron Pass at over 10,000 ft. The Rockies are definitely not as bad as the Appalachian mountains - instead of building a road straight up the side of a mountain, the roads in Colorado follow the gentle contours of rivers, so much of the climbing today didn't feel bad at all.
Leah was driving today and had to return to Fort Collins, so the 7 of us ate delicious burgers at Moose Creek Cafe in Walden. Leah met up with us soon after and Caralyn and Erin drove to Steamboat Springs. There wasn't much traffic, so to distract myself from the monotony of hours of biking, I listened to Educated: A Memoir, by Tara Westover for most of the day, a fascinating audiobook about a girl growing up in rural Idaho and her unusual homeschool education.
Evan, Edgardo, and I found a quiet lake at the edge of the road 75 miles into the day, so we took a break and I carved a piece of drift wood to help remember our trip (not that I could forget).
Tonight, we stayed in the Steamboat Church of Christ and Pastor Joe brought us delicious ice cream and sandwiches. At 7pm, we all piled in the car to meet up with Stanford Spokes, our sister organization biking the opposite direction across the country! I'd been planning and looking forward to meeting them for months.
Spokes America started in 2013 as a collaboration between MIT and Harvard students, and a few years later, Stanford started their own group that biked the route in the opposite direction, from San Fransisco to DC. Eventually, only MIT students were on the Boston-based team. This year, Princeton started both a new team, and a new route.
We met Asia, Travis, Maceo, Anna, Sean, and Cole at the Strawberry Hot Springs, which were essentially a giant, natural, outdoor series of hot tubs. We instantly clicked and chatted about our adventures and mishaps with biking thousands of miles and teaching middle school students, as most of us were new to both. Instead of teaching in pairs for 3, 1.5 hour sessions for each learning festival, they taught individually for an hour in topics ranging from logic games to cosmology and electrical engineering. We also recounted our atypical routes through flooded paths in Missouri and Asia described the terrain of Nevada (5 miles up, 5 miles down, 10 miles flat, repeat 12 times) that we would face in a few weeks. They seemed so organized (waking up at 5:30am consistently) and faster on their road bikes compared to our gravel bikes.
It was also fascinating to chat about our lives in college, as MIT and Stanford attract similar types of students. Spokes also draws people interested in teaching, STEM, the outdoors, adventure, and a certain pleasure in pain and others thinking we are crazy.
I was disappointed to have to say goodbye to our new friends and I wished we could have spent a rest day together in Steamboat. Stanford - good luck on the rest of your adventure!
(Note: We've made the "There are so many spokes on/in this _____ that we should call it a wheel" joke enough times that Caralyn regrets coming up with it)