Zebulon lives!

Spring Lake Inn to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Saturday June 26, 2021

Rained hard overnight, but no flooding in the immediate area. Thunderstorms all day today. Better stay put, or at least go no farther than Prairie du Chien; just 5 miles down the road was a Motel 6 with good WiFi.

Everybody pronounces it Prayer de Sheen, it bills itself as Wisconsin’s second oldest city, it’s where Marquette and Joliet became the first Europeans to see the upper Mississippi. Guess it means “dog meadow” in French, there are no prairie dogs around here. Right across the river is, I kid you not, Pikes Peak.

Lt. Zebulon Pike was commissioned to find the source of the Mississippi the same year as the Lewis and Clark expedition, 1805. He noted a high bluff at the confluence of the two rivers (Mississippi and Wisconsin) that he thought would make a good location for a fort. He proceeded to Cass lake, Minnesota and pronounced it the source, later determined by Schoolcraft to be Lake Itasca, as we have discussed.

So Zeb missed on the source, and the army decided not to build the fort, but they named the bluff in his honor and the next year sent him to Colorado where he named the more famous Pikes Peak, from where Katherine Bates would later be inspired to write America the Beautiful. Zeb himself got promoted to brigadier general, and was killed in the War of 1812.

I’ve toyed with climbing the Colorado Pikes Peak, but the road is closed to bicycles and the trail is 13 miles one way. This one seemed easier, just 500 feet above the river. You have to cross a series of bridges to get across the islands and channels of the Mississippi, and you get this view of the Peak, actually a shoulder of it called Point Ann, above a riverboat casino.

The road up was quite steep, and I was chagrined to have too walk part of it. Maybe don’t have a double hungry man breakfast right before. The guide at the viewing platform didn’t know much of the history, but he did have a spotting scope trained on a bald eagle nest. He said there were many more sand bars and mud flats exposed yesterday, before the big rains.

Old Zebulon may have died more than 200 years ago, but seeing what he saw back then made him very much alive to me.

I found this interesting sign on the way back

and I realized, hey, I’m in Iowa, whose politics is almost as whack as New Hampshire. First time I’d been here since an overnight drive-through in 1977. I’ll be seeing a lot more of it soon, but the storms were brewing, time to get back.

One bit of bike work to attend to. Time to rotate the tires. With more weight on it, the rear tire wears faster than the front.

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So now, after 3,000 miles, it makes sense to rotate them. This is much easier with a floor-style tire pump. There were no bike shops in town but one of those outdoor bike repair stands had one. Great!

Alas, after deflating and switching the tires, I discovered the new-looking floor pump didn’t work. I had to use my little frame-mounted pump after all. Took close to 300 strokes to get each of those big tires up to 85 psi. Oh well, I could use some upper body exercise.

Distance 27 miles, 3,147 total. Time 5 hours with stops. Elevation gain 878 feet.

©️ 2021 Scott Luria