Dave Reeck of Washington.  AKA "The Guy In Last  Place" and "The Luckiest Man in the World" finally left Ovando Montana today after a 24 hours delay due to a lost wallet.  Karma is with this man.

.......

You couldn't write this scenario for a movie.  So this morning, with red wallet firmly zipped into place, he finally was able to depart our fair township. 

Good Luck Dave. Make last place proud!   You and your Mr. Chicken.  :-) 

Yay! I saw this go down on his FB page. He was totally due for some good luck.

For those that don't know, his first few days were seriously plagued by a bad tire.

Pre-divide, he'd ridden quite a few miles on it so assumed it was still OK to use, but did notice one bead was a bit tighter during install than the other. Chalked it up to slight manufacturing tolerance and thought no more about it.

Then on the first days of the divide he had something like 10 blowouts. The sidewall rubber of the tire was separating from the bead and letting his tubes stick way out and puncture. He used zip-ties all the way around  tire/tube/rim, gorilla tape, etc to try to keep the tube contained in the tire and keep the tire tread and sidewall held down in place around the rim.

Not sure where or how exactly he fixed the problem, but glad to see him moving along and glad to see some luck has found him.

Sorry for the long delay in the final photos from yesterday Jun 14 but my computer and this site were battling for supremacy.  The site won and wouldn't allow me to post.

So here I present photos of:

Alex Frankle of  BC Canada

These two delightful guys who names I don't remember due to a huge brain fart and I apologize.  anyone?

Joseph Hoskins of VA and Jerad Harris of CO

Richard 'Ricky' Jara of NJ

and a view of the common area at the Ovando Inn; subtitled Bike On Inn!

Starting with today's less hectic pass soon.

Carry on.

REALLY love seeing these pics!
But this particular post, I am only seeing the first pic (Alex Frankle), and not the rest of your list.

I'm expecting you'll have one of my friend Dave Reeck from Seattle, WA at some point, perhaps one of the two unidentified blokes.
Let me know if I'm missing something -is everyone else only seeing the single picture too?

Check out Kent's bike blog (google it) and find his description of his ride from Seattle to Banff (he called it the pre-ride or prologue, I think). That should give you a couple of ideas.

When asked about the trunk box, Kent said that it "had too much room"!

Jimmy Livengood
Seattle, WA

I'm new here, but I haven't seen your question answered so I'll take a stab at it.  I can think of a couple of situations where I might take a car ride along the course, only to return to my starting point and get riding again.

Have you ever been on a ride or backpacking and wondered what the trail conditions were up ahead? Are there good camping spots, or should you rest now? Will the trail get worse considering the weather, or is it actually not that bad? This kind of info has real strategic significance, especially if pushing on means the difference between sleeping out Vs. a warm meal in a hotel. If you're already considering resting for the night, why not rest in a heated car while you preview the next day's riding?  And if the trail looks good but the weather is building, maybe you'll get out of the car well rested and push on through the night, safe with the knowledge of what lies ahead and how bad it could be if you wait, with the added bonus of vehicle tire tracks to guide you.

This is just speculation on my part, but that's how I see where an immediate preview of the course ahead could constitute an unnatural advantage. Hope that offers at least one possible explanation.

PS go mountain turtle!

For the record ... I don't think I know better than Matthew Lee, or any of you, what the rules "should" be for your race - and I haven't called for the rules to be bent for the benefit of anyone in this year's race. You could have a rule that a name is drawn out of a hat each day and that person is DQed. Anyone who raced would obviously have agreed to it, so it would be completely "fair to everyone." I'm not arguing with that.

I just asked if someone could give me an explanation for why the rule about traveling forward by motor vehicle on the course exists and explained why I didn't understand it. I'm still waiting for a serious response to that.

If I had looked on this board and seen people saying that Lobeck should be DQed because he accepted a ride in a car and that was against the rules because this is a self-supported BIKE race, that would have made sense to me and I would never have posted here. But when I read that accepting the ride to go and get his bike fixed was fine, but that he should be DQed because of the route the car took, that just sounds asinine. And while I don't think the rules should be made for the benefit of people, like me, who follow the race on the Internet, I don't see how it would hurt to explain the reasons for them to us. If Matthew Lee has a good reason for this rule, that's great. I'd like to know what it is.