The Monster...

But it wasn't the Anarchist.

If you've read the entries by Tanya or Hillary, you'll have learned that the Anarchist wasn't as bad as we had feared. We hit it fresh in the morning and took it easy right off the bat and didn't get into trouble. Still, it was long, 30km from the front door of the hotel to the summit sign with roughly 1000m of vertical gain. The end result was the longest day in both time and distance.

The monster of the day was the Eholt summit (1028m). Not particularly steep or high, we got onto it at something like 80km in and proceeded to climb for 30km, pretty much absolutely what we didn't need at this point. Two days in a row we hit serious climbs right at the end of the day. For what it's worth, the one we hit at the 100km mark yesterday was called the Richter pass.

The long grind up Eholt was pretty unpleasant. We were fairly tired at the time and were expecting rolling hills, not a long uphill slog. The worst part was that the total elevation gain wasn't overly huge, but the grades were 0.5% to about 2% at most. You can't really go fast up those, but you don't get up very fast either. At least if the climb was at 5% or something like that, you'd get up and you'd feel the pain and be done with it.

On this hill, you'd ride for twenty minutes at a pretty slow pace, turn around and see that you'd had hardly gone up at all. Or gone very far at all. Then you put your head down and do it again. At least with the big passes, you hurt, you go slow, but when you turn around, you see the cars way below you and that is at least motivating. The Anarchist was awesome for this since it switches back on itself a couple of times and after an hour of climbing we could still see our hotel from the night before.... Way below us.

So yeah, mentally tough day.

Then Hillary turned on the juice coming into Grand Forks and I had to struggle to get her wheel. Then she sat up and waited for me and Tanya and when I motioned that she should continue to pull, dropped the hammer again and made us sprint to catch up. That was totally uncalled for.

And for the daily stats:
125km
6:07:00 ride time
20.5km/h average speed

Cumulative:
25:12:00 total ride time
21.7km/h total average speed
549km

Stop location: Grand Forks
Lat 49.02388N
Lon 118.47147W
Altitude: 541m