Hopkins 4K for Cancer

July 10, 2007

by Peter Dewey
Wake up today was at 3am for our 95 mile day into Capitol Reef National Park. To make life even more exciting we got to have powdered milk for the first time with breakfast!!!!!!….yeaaaaaa. The early start to the day let us beat the heat of the Utah desert, I think temperatures were up to 106 by the end of the day, which feels like you are biking into a blow dryer at that temperature.

The biking for the day was very tough. The road was gradually uphill for most of the day with a constant head wind into our face. Team Moab (Drew, Logan, Tom, Jerome, and myself) road fast today, until Logan got tired, but we didn’t slow down, we just made Logan miserable, mission accomplished.

These parts of Utah are pretty barren, fortunately there is a nice waterfall that we swam upon at the end of the day before entering the park. The road seemed to never end, and when we got to the end there was a glimpse of a preview to the next day, a 3 mile 8% grade hill. Morale was very low at this point, but in typical 4K style we found an oasis in the desert….homemade pies and ice cream. Instead of being sensible and splitting the pies amongst our group, we each had a whole pie. I tried the blackberry variety and it was delicious.

Camping that night was fun. The campsites were very nice and located next to apricot fields where we ate lots of fruit. The team got firewood and made s’mores that night before nodding off early because we knew the hardest day of the trip was coming.