Monday Day 11 – Rochford to Hill City

Another beautiful morning dawned and we were on our way. This stretch of the Mickelson Trail featured tunnels and bridges that the original trains would have taken. A couple of the tunnels still had smoke on the ceiling from them. We had beautiful clouds forming and even had a 10 minute sunshower while we were resting at the Mystic shelter. Castle Creek followed our trail, marked by many signs of gold mining all along it. We had a 7 mile steady incline from Mystic towards Hill City. Karen M. was bummed because just after she crested the hill and was enjoying the ride down to Hill City, her tire blew. We didn’t have much for phone coverage and her tire wasn’t going to budge off, so I ended up biking 8 miles in 20 minutes (I’m pretty proud of that!) to meet Ron in Hill City and get him over to Karen. Her bike is in the shop and should be ready to go by tomorrow. I marked 31 miles on my odometer by the end of today.