Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire On the road again.

The terrain was flat and open, hard to capture the sense of space and grandeur with an iphone camera. But it was obviously wheat season.

The summer up there has a fragile feel to it up here, I heard a rancher planning for TWO HUNDRED DAYS OF WINTER. That's not merely 200 days of just cold, but 200 days, six and one half months, of weather so cold a cow needs to be fed to survive.

Naturally only time for one crop a year, and up there it's wheat, and make it or break depends on a narrow window of time to get the crop in.



These things were everywhere, like giant lawn mowers. Some farmers have their own, others contract out, they ain't cheap. Fire is a major concern too, turns out a combine can be a fire-starting fool, and a whole mature wheat crop in the field can be lost as easy as a forest fire, especially given the usual winds out there in the open.





Tailwind all that first day, so once the shoulder got better and the traffic thinned out away from town I made pretty good time. I don't measure distance in miles on these things in miles but in time. Take the distance in miles, divide it by seven, and you'll prob'ly be there in less than that many hours including breaks. I got three chainrings up front (44-32-22) and a nine-speed cassette in back (12-36), a set-up for climbing on a heavily-loaded bike rather than for speed.

I use the original "friction" shifters on the downtube that came with the bike thirty years ago. A friction-shifter doesn't click between numbered-gears, you find the correct gear by feel, moving the shift lever until you get a gear you want. Knowing which chainring you're on up front is easy; there's only three and they are in plain view between your feet. Knowing exactly which of the nine gears you're on in back is a whole different story, hard to see from the saddle and there's nine. All I know for sure is the top gear (12 teeth) and the lowest gear (36 teeth), never sure which of the other seven in between I'm on.

So I look down at the shift levers to judge my approximate speed ergo time to the next landmark. Shift levers in this position mean I'm on the middle range (32 teeth) chainring and about halfway down the nine gears on the cassette on the back wheel, ergo about ten miles per hour.....



OTOH I already know I'm crawling along at 4 or 5 mph when the shift levers are in this position, 22 tooth chainring in front, 36 tooth cog in back, means I'm climbing a hill, like that firggin' long one coming up from the Marias in the Missouri Breaks to that high point where Merriwether Lewis stood to get his bearings just a bit over 213 years ago.