North America’s continental or Great Divide has an almost magical significance. Invisible and unmarked, it meanders at altitude for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Fall to one side of it and, if you are a raindrop, your journey will end in the Atlantic Ocean. Fall even fractionally on the other and the Pacific will be where you merge back into the ever-shifting seas. If you are a cyclist on a road-bike in the Rocky Mountains, the great divide switches between a place that gifts nigh on unbelievable mountain panoramas, however hard-won; and somewhere that summons all your past experience of dealing with fatigue and mental overwhelm in the face of sheer, hard, apparently unending slog. On Independence Pass, I felt that sudden, expansive sense of relief; the sense of something usually hemmed in sighing outwards to the distant horizons, mountains behind mountains behind mountains everywhere I turned. On Trail Ridge Road, I nearly lost the plot.
The final big pass (for now at least) turned into a bit of an epic. Trail Ridge Road, one of the most spectacular roads in the world in terms of mountain scenery (allegedly). It started to rain at the foot of the climb and many, many hours later I reached the summit in the rain equivalent of a white-out, with accompanying head-wind. Twelve thousand feet and absolutely no view! Worse, even after the summit, the road kept rising! By this time I was stopping every few minutes to rest, slumping over the bike and found myself talking to the road (always a bad sign). "Just go down! Please, just go DOWN!" My breath was making an odd choking noise that I didn't seem to have much control over and my face ached from the wind, cold and trying not to whimper out loud. Finally the road did go down - thank goodness!! - for about twenty-five miles of cold wet descent into the town of Estes Park where I arrived, in the dark, way beyond drowned rat state. My friend Bill pointed out later how ironic it would be to get hypothermia and frostbite on a global warming trip. Very funny.
The overall shape of this journey was structured as much by one of those semi-random goals that self-propelled creatures like humans like to dream up, as it was by gravity and mountain contours. My plan, hatched in comfort over a kitchen table, was to cycle from El Paso on the Texas/Mexican border to Anchorage, Alaska, following the spine of the Rockies as closely as a human on a road bike can. At 4553 miles and with numerous high passes as I criss-crossed the great divide it was definitely a personal challenge. I wanted this challenge and I was more than ready for time out in the hills. But I wanted to construct a journey with an additional purpose, too. This was 2006, and President Bush was famously declaring the American way of life as not up for negotiation - and climate change a non-problem. The two are related, of course, by oil.
The USA is one of the most oil-hungry, oil-intensive, oil-dependent countries on earth, burning billions of gallons a year and thereby releasing tonnes and tonnes of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There it traps heat, contributing to one of our most urgent challenges: climate change. Bush was often portrayed as the arch-villain of the global climate change drama. But Bush was not the same as his citizens. I hoped to explore attitudes as well as landscapes; to uncover what that most elusive of creatures, the ‘ordinary person’, thought about climate change. And, on the theory that solutions often arise where the problem is most acute, I was keen to find out what positive responses were arising from within the belly of the oil beast. My overall aim was to use the cycling adventure as a communication medium, to help raise awareness and inspire action back in Europe. The adventure would be the hook; would function like a Trojan horse, with a climate change story rendered more engaging by being inside the mountain cycling one.