I got in late Saturday from the Nebraska trip. We started in Norfolk at the trailhead in TaHaZouka Park where we met Tony from North Fork Outfitting. He got us all loaded up at 8:00 and we headed for Valentine. We got there and got headed out a little before noon. The trail is rough and it's an uphill climb out of Valentine for a good ways. In order to make our first stop we jumped on to the highway after about 17-18 miles. The second day, one of the other guys took a tumble and banged up both knees. One bruised up immediately and the other one was bleeding and he was picking gravel out of it after his front wheel got sucked in by the loose gravel. There were several times I had to fight it pretty hard to keep from going down myself.
I expected the trail to be in better shape than what it was. There were lots of spots that were really soft, lots of holes 6 - 10 inches in diameter, and some of the trail had quite a few weeds growing up in the trail. Because of that, you really couldn't look around at the scenery while you were pedaling. You just had to stay focused on the trail immediately ahead of you. We passed three badgers that were together on one section of the trail. They made it quite clear that they owned that section and we should keep moving on. The badgers might have been what was digging all the holes in the trail.
On the way out to Valentine I read in the paper about the mountain lions that have been spotted in Western Nebraska. When we crossed under an overpass, I spotted what looked like a big paw print. When we had breakfast a couple of days later the waitress told us a story about a big cat treeing her house cat, so I'm pretty sure it was a mountain lion print I saw.
More to come after I get unpacked and get the dirty laundry taken care of.
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