Dispatch 07: Beaumont to Council Grove
Today, calamity ensued. Our first dirt of the day was a scruffy piece of double-track through thigh-high ragweed. The path beneath us appeared and disappeared under a blanket of weeds. Suddenly, Jerod dropped in and out of a knee-deep hole. He popped out of the seat like a whack-a-mole. The inertia pitched him back, and he couldn’t help but twist the throttle. It was a full-on rodeo, and Jerod was along for the ride. His motorcycle turned and headed straight for a barbed wire fence. Jerod stopped it just in time. “I thought you were done for,” I said. Jerod looked at me, back to the five wires strung on t-posts, and said, “I was more worried about having to fix that rancher’s fence.”
The Flint Hills of Kansas are world renowned in the sport of gravel cycling, and the UNBOUND Gravel race, which is held every June in nearby Emporia, is the sport’s premiere event. We rode along sections of the racecourse through green crumpled hills that drain into picturesque reservoirs. Occasionally, we encountered small, pronounced grass peaks that looked like they were plucked out of a Dr. Seuss book. Shards of flint clattered under our knobby tires and into our skid plates. Sunflowers lined the sides of the road and slapped against our hand guards as we fought to ride a straight line through the loose rock.
The land pushed us through its rollers and creek bottoms, picking our destiny for us. We found ourselves riding atop a soft ridge, past the pumpjack on Texaco Hill. Trees were sparse and the sun intense. We descended into the dry bottom of Canning Creek for a break in the shade. I sat down and leaned against my bike’s rear tire and instantly knew something was wrong. It was flat. These big motorcycles have chunky, non-compliant rubber. It took over an hour to replace the punctured tube. When prying the tire back on the rim, I pinched the new tube with a tire tool. It took another hour to replace it.
We stopped at Silvia’s Taco trailer in downtown Emporia and ate dinner with filthy, rubber-marked hands. We camped northwest of Emporia along the shores of Council Grove Lake. For a land locked tour, we’ve seen a lot of shoreline.
