When I woke my shadowed tent was taking on an eerie golden glow, a sunbeam that had just broken through the morning fog. I blinked away a dream I could no longer grasp — something about K-mart, the 1990 version I could walk to on my own when I was 11 years old. I was wandering the aisles. There was something chaotic about the shelves in the dream, but I couldn't recall. I remembered I was looking for Old Spice aftershave. It was Father’s Day. Today was Father’s Day. It was June 16.
Do you ever wonder what a date meant to you before it became something different, before it became the day everything changed? Dates have been a meaningful marker for me since I was a child. So I thought about it often while pedaling that day — the meaning of June 16 — enough so that I looked up my history with the date after I returned home from this trip. Scrolling through my blog, I realized that June 16 is a dynamic day:
In 2008, I was mountain biking to Herbert Glacier with my dad when my parents visited me in Juneau. In the photos, Dad looks so young. He was 55 years old at the time, the same age my husband is now.
In 2009, I arrived in Lincoln, Montana, during my first Tour Divide.
In 2010, I was loading up my Geo Prism to hit the road south from Anchorage en route to my new job in Montana. I hadn’t realized before that June 16 was my final day as a resident in Alaska.
In 2013, I wrote a Father’s Day tribute to my dad. The post opens with “My dad took a nasty fall on the Pfeifferhorn a few days ago,” closes with “Here’s to many more decades of adventure,” and left me clenching my fists through a sudden flash of anger I wasn’t expecting to feel.
In 2014, my friend Liehann and I arrived in a place called Slaapkranz on a brisk winter afternoon during the Race Across South Africa.
In 2015, I was sick with bronchitis in Montana during my second attempt at the Tour Divide.
In 2017, I was running the Bryce 100. This was the year I timed out because of the lasting health issues that followed my 2015 illness.
In 2019, I was caught in a horrific hailstorm in Butterfield Canyon. I was in Utah for my grandmother’s funeral. This was also a Father’s Day.
In 2020, I was bikepacking over Boreas Pass near Breckenridge with Betsy, Cheryl, and Erika. This was my first time getting together with friends since the start of the pandemic.
The morning fog continued to shift as I packed up my gear. Sunlight spread to the other three tents, and I heard my friends rouse. I am not the early bird in any group and it’s rare for me to be the first one up. I hadn’t planned to wake up early on this day. I had made no plans and carried no expectations. It was June 16, 2024, and I intended to embrace whatever this day had in store.
Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going.
I told my friends I was heading out early and planned to take the longer, more rugged route into the next valley on the Strada del Cannoni. I told them I needed some alone time. I didn’t mention the reason why I wanted to be alone. No need to bum out my friends on such a gorgeous morning.
As I pedaled away from camp, the window of sunshine closed and the road was again enveloped in fog. I climbed and the fog bank continued to billow and rise. Its ceiling always seemed just over my head, giving the gray pall a satin-like luminescence. I thought about my recent history with June 16. Last year, my sisters and I stood on a rock above Bell’s Canyon Reservoir and watched the orange sun slip behind the Oquirrh Mountains. In 2022, I walked with my mom and sisters along Cannon Beach in Oregon. In 2021, I was packing my backpack for a hike I had planned the next day when our landline rang. From a staticky distance, Mom told me that Dad had a fall while hiking. “He didn’t make it,” was all she could say before I threw the phone down. It was and still is the worst day of my life.
This was the first year my family and I weren’t together on Dad’s “angel day” as my sisters call it. It was also the first time the date fell on Father’s Day, which my sisters and Mom worried might be particularly hard. We didn’t make an effort to be together on June 16 this year — Paris was purposefully a week earlier. We all wanted an open day with no expectations so we’d have space to process and reflect. This was my space. I was on a bicycle high in the Italian Alps. It’s the kind of place my Dad would have considered Heaven on Earth if he ever had a chance to see it. I was not going to waste this opportunity.
As I crested Col d’Sampeyre, the fog ceiling finally fell below me. Above the inversion, the sky was brilliantly clear. It’s an exhilerating place to be, riding above the clouds.
Danni and Lora planned to stay on the road and descend directly from Col Sampeyre to the Maira Valley, a shortcut that shaved about 20 miles off the TNR route. Amber planned to follow me down Strada del Cannoni, so I expected to see her soon. For now, though, this ethereal strip of terrestrial Earth between clouds and sky was mine and mine alone.
I stopped often. I knelt on the dirt road and touched the soft pedals of wildflowers — something I don’t usually see in the Alps because I’m here in late summer. I watched clouds flow across the valley, lapping the mountainside like waves.
I thanked my dad for this beautiful morning — the sunshine and fog, the brilliant green mountainside, the narrow ribbon of doubletrack cutting a perfect notch through otherwise formidable cliffs. It’s not that I believe that Dad is some kind of spirit ghost with the power to control the elements. It’s just that, now that Dad is a memory, it feels like he’s everywhere. And because he’s everywhere, he’s in everything.
Strada del Cannoni dipped beneath the clouds and continued its rolling descent. Below treeline, the road became extremely rough — a tight bundle of baby-head boulders with the occasional strip of loose dirt, usually just in time to catch me leaning into a switchback. This type of riding usually feels tedious to me, but I was enjoying the challenge of finding a good line. The focus took me out of my mind for several miles, just when I needed that respite.
Some 5,000 feet lower, I arrived in the village of San Damiano Macra. Traffic was backed up along the narrow main street of the 15th-century village as a procession of several hundred people crossed the bridge over the Maira River. Later, I would learn I had arrived just in time for the Festa di Sant'Antonio, a festival for a saint who died in Portugal on June 13, 1231. According to Valle Maira’s tourism site, Sant’Antonio da Padova was “a master of spiritual doctrine and theology, and recognized perfection in the agreement between the contemplative life and the active life.”
I watched the procession for several minutes, losing my thoughts to pleasant instrumental music from a live band that was somewhere just out of sight. When I snapped back to awareness and realized I needed to cross that bridge to get out of town, I decided it was a good time for lunch. I rode down the main street, found a small grocery store that was miraculously open on a Sunday at noon, and set up my picnic in the pavilion at a nearby park. The park even had outlets where I charged my electronics. The lunch I chose was a large container of strawberries, a bundle of fresh cherry tomatoes, and four containers of yogurt because the store only sold four-packs.
I hadn’t realized that my lips were badly sunburned. I don’t know when they burned — it had been raining for the past two days. The rainy afternoons were probably when it happened because I had dropped the ball on applying sunscreen chapstick every 20 minutes, which is what I need to do to avoid burning my lips during the UV-blasting height of summer. The fresh strawberries and tomatoes were delicious but the citric acid felt like hydrochloric acid on my blistered lips. Tears streamed down my face as I forced down my lunch, but force it down I did. Fresh produce was such a luxury, and I was going to relish these strawberries, damn it.
I pondered the religious procession and who the large crowd might be celebrating or mourning. I hoped it was somebody modern, a revered elder in the community, perhaps. Being in Italy, I also acknowledged that this Sunday event was likely for a Catholic saint. I can’t quite wrap my head around such an elaborate celebration for a person who’s been dead for 800 years, and whose memory must hold more legend than truth. Then again, my father has only been gone three years, and I’m already rewriting the story in my mind to match the memories I hold in my heart.
My lunch break ate up more than an hour. The procession moved on, leaving the Sunday streets empty once more. I figured Amber must have passed me by now, and Danni and Lora were doubtlessly far up our next climb. We hadn’t even planned where to stop for the night, and our means of communication were limited. I still had more than 10 miles to pedal before I reached the point where Lora and Danni rejoined the route, so I raced to make up time. The route followed a meandering but busy road on a gentle climb beside the Maira River. I was back to the sweltering climate at 2,500 feet. The sky was clear and pollen was visibly wafting through the air. My lungs quickly let me know they would not tolerate this hard effort, but I kept pushing.
When I reached Ponte Marmora, I received an InReach message from Danni. She and Lora were having lunch three miles up the road. Of course, that’s when the 9% grades started and the climb commenced. I continued gasping and pushing myself, but they finished their lunch before I could arrive. Happily, I caught up with Danni another few miles up the road. With at least one friend’s location known, I didn’t need to strive anymore. Gratefully, I stepped off my bike.
Strada del Preit is a road that calls for hiking. It’s not just the 16% grades that should force a cyclist off their bike (although I admit they did not give me much of a choice.) Still, this is not a place to waste time focusing on anything but the scenery. Look up, look behind you, look ahead. Rising from the lush cirque are sheer summits of dolomite rock, majestic and formidable.
Danni spent more time pedaling her bike. Still, we kept the same pace. I thought about how I would like to bring my dad hiking here someday, momentarily forgetting what I had been thinking about all day. Momentarily forgetting he was gone.
Danni and I climbed onto the Gardetta plateau, where the summits only rose higher. I snapped away from my bliss and gazed dolefully at where I believed the road continued above the plateau. Massive snow slopes seemed to bury much of the route, which was cut into a mountainside so steep that it would be impossible to find a way around. Danni assured me that the German proprietor of the restaurant where they had lunch assured her that another cyclist had crossed it, but this all sounded like shaky secondhand information at best.
But no. NO! I shook my head to banish the anxiety gurgling up in my gut. The snow was a problem for tomorrow. It was not a problem for today. Today there is the sunshine, the tundra, the mountains, the Gardetta. This is all there is.
Suddenly, like a castle that springs up in the middle of a dream, Rifugio Gardetta appeared before us. Danni and Lora had planned on stopping here thanks to a recommendation from the German restauranteur. Amber arrived after she rode far enough up the road to reach snow, saw no tracks that would indicate we had been through, and turned around to find us. We were back together at this military shelter refurbished as a refuge for hikers and cyclists in 1994.
Danni was excited because she had never stayed in a refugio before. I admitted that I, too, had never stayed overnight in an Alpine mountain shelter. When Beat and I visit Europe, we usually day hike. The closest I’ve come to an overnight trip are the PTL and Tor des Geants, the mountain races that use refugios as checkpoints. But I don’t count those rather harrowing experiences.
Refugios are like hostels in that they offer bunk beds for overnight accommodations, shared bathrooms and showers, and a family-style dinner that guests can purchase. I was expecting a hot, crowded bunk room with too many people and too much noise, but I opted in because I was nervous about how cold it would be at 2,300 meters (Amber and Lora opted to camp outside in cylindrical WWII bunkers that surrounded the property.) The bunk room was strangely empty. Soon it became apparent that we were possibly the only guests that evening.
How could this be? This refugio was nestled in a stunning setting, and it was a gorgeous Sunday evening. We learned that this was the first night of the season they were open. It was also the proprietor’s birthday. She had invited friends up for dinner and dancing to celebrate. It wasn’t long before the wine and beer flowed in our direction. The pours were ridiculously generous.
We sat out in the cold wind, laughing at our own frivolous stories, watching horny marmots beat each other up, and gaping in wonder at this setting we had landed in. How could this even be real? Just as we were beginning to wonder if the refugio owners would ever feed us, they pulled us into their party.
It was already a riotous happening, with the birthday girl dancing on tables while her friends rushed to save dishes and bottles from her wild kicks. Her family and friends did not speak English, but as soon as we arrived, they pulled out their playlist of American music: Born in the USA, Under Pressure, Jolene, Van Halen’s Jump. We did our best to sing along. We twirled, dabbed, and jumped much more than our tired legs would have preferred. It was riotously fun.
We learned we were not Rifugio Gardetta’s only guests that evening. There was also a German couple in their 60s who were on a hiking vacation in search of wildflowers. The man was tall and quiet, with a wide grin as he swirled through the crowd of dancing Italians. I couldn’t help but think of my father. The Italians put on a slow song. It was “Let Her Go” by Passenger. The Italians became distracted as the soft music played, so “Let Her Go” played twice. The only people dancing were the German couple. I watched them hold each other lovingly and felt a well of grief build up in my gut. I turned toward the wall to hide my tears.
Only know you've been high when you're feeling low
Only hate the road when you're missing home
Only know you love her when you let her go
And you let her go
And yet, how exhilerating it is to be alive on this brilliant evening with this broken heart? We drank from the big cup of life that day, a generous pour of cycling and flowers and mountains and dancing and friends and food. If this is all there is, it’s more than enough. After a dinner of three different kinds of meat and polenta, Danni and I settled into the spacious room that we had to ourselves. I leaned from my top bunk to glance out the window. Moonlight rendered the mountains in a stark contrast of black and silver against the star-splashed sky.
“Let Her Go” was still haunting me, so hummed to myself another song that brought me so much comfort in 2021. “Little Joys” by Tom Rosenthal.
When the darkness beats the bright
We'll be alright
We'll be alright
In the finite
Send me into the long night with all your
Little joys, little joys, little joys, little joys
Little joys, little joys, little joys
Little joys of the finite
Torino-Nice Rally, day four
Briançon to Molines en Queyras
28 miles
5,436 feet of climbing
5.8 mph average moving speed
6:13 elapsed time
Torino-Nice Rally, day five
Molines en Queyras to Col d’Sampeyre
36 miles
6,234 feet of climbing
6.4 mph average moving speed
8:15 elapsed time
Torino-Nice Rally, day six
Col d’Sampeyre to Rifugio Gardetta.
42 miles
7,041 feet of climbing
5.3 mph average moving speed
9:40 elapsed time
Beautiful trip, beautiful post. Thanks, Jill. I always feel inspired to plan a trip of my own when reading yours.
Fantastic photos, really sharp and clear. Enjoying following this trip a lot.