DAY 3, JUNE 17, 14:24:15 MDT: Hey there, Matt McFee here. It's about 2:15 on Sunday.... We hit a lot of snow up over the pass, which I'm sure you'll hear more about. Got borderline hypothermic.... Fun, fun day. Wake up in the rain, ride up into the snow, down into the slush, can't feel my hands. See you.

There's a saying in the GDR: "If you're gonna be slow, you'd better be tough."

Some of us are just slow. Montana issues two forecasts—one for the east side of the Divide, one for the west. No prognosis is made for the crest, and the snow is coming down. The leaders are greasing up with sunblock as the chase group digs for anything dry against the wet.

Last night, on Richmond Peak, the route could have been in Scotland; on a full stomach, I might've called the mist romantic. Now, at 8 a.m. on Day 2, we switchback up into fog and hear the bleat of Brit Bruce Dinsmore's bear whistle. Then the drizzle turns to snow—Christmas in June! Steve McGuire, a 49-year-old art professor from Iowa, and I follow the fresh snake-belly tracks of the Brits' Nano Raptors, telling jokes and generally enjoying Mother Nature in full frolic. What throws ice water on the party is the little mountain of grizzly scat on the singletrack, right between us and the Brits. The poop is so warm that snow won't stick to it. This is disconcerting—that bear will need the same trail we do. I suggest to Steve that we allow Kevin Montgomery, a new Brandeis University grad who's been whining about the cold for some miles now, first chance at the blind corners.

No bear. As we descend, creating our own windchill, the crying begins: "I think I'm in the early stages of hypothermia," says Kevin. Dave Nice, the Don Quixote of the GDR with his single-speed bike, homemade whiskey, and soybean chain lube, sits with his feet on the handlebars of his fixie, letting his cranks spin like a dough mixer as he shoots down the back side of Richmond. The contraption looks ridiculously dangerous; even the buffalo soldiers ran freewheels.

The GDR is full of strategic choices. Seeley Lake is two miles off-route, but there isn't another town until Ovando, 50 miles south. Seeley will have a laundromat, or at least a warm filling station. I choose the laundry and spend the rest of the race chasing the bloody Brits, who've pushed on with the same brand of aplomb that enabled them to take India.

The laundromat feels like a last-minute party at someone's house—we survived the storm!—and there's pizza in the gas station across the street! The race's 25th rider, a carrot-topped Albuquerque high school teacher named Jeff Kerby whose single-speed bike showed up on a Greyhound three hours after everyone else left Roosville, catches us here; he's wearing a clear trash bag cut into a poncho. "Yeah," Jeff says. "Give Lance Armstrong a mountain bike and a bunch of maps and see if he can come close."

Riders are already starting to drop out. One of the first, a Georgia bike-shop employee named Scott Hodge, pulls the plug on the second night, hobbling around the Holland Lake Lodge bar with a sore Achilles and a Corona in each hand. Andreas Vogel, a German transplant from San Francisco who logged more than 10,000 miles in training, is fini in Ovando. Where the hell do you rent a car out here? No one knows. Meanwhile, Jay Petervary is almost to Idaho, with Matthew Lee, Pete Basinger, Rick Hunter, teched-out second-time GDR attempter John Nobile, and an Aussie road racer named Alex Field on his rear tire.

"That squirrelly guy, from the race meeting?" Jeff says, shaking his head at Petervary's time. "He's on something."

"Trucker's speed," I say, joking.

"Something."

We are bound for Lincoln, home of the Unabomber, then Helena, then Butte. I leave the guys at a café in Lincoln and then, riding alone, shoot over Stemple Pass and down the back side, an exhilarating descent until I realize I've veered eight miles off the route and will have to climb those eight miles back. I hit Highway 279, which would easily take me into Helena by dusk, but it would be off-course—I'd be cheating. For a moment the thought is tempting. I notice that the wind has sucked the photo of my family out of my map case, my peanut butter is almost gone, and I've lost my map for this section. But for the rest of my life I'd have to live with the fact that I didn't ride those 2,490 miles, that I took a mulligan above Helena. It'd be better to dope like a Tour racer and ride the whole thing than cheat on the course. Back uphill I go.

Rolling into Helena sometime after midnight, I want to drop out. There is an airport here. An IHOP. I sleep downtown for a couple of hours, waiting for the bagel shop to open at dawn. Pretty office girls in heels click around me as if I'm a hobo, which I kind of am. I grab two bagels, hit the gulch at the south end of town, and get lost again for a swift ten-mile penalty. But Matthew Lee had told me that four days is the threshold: "You make four days of the GDR and you can finish the thing."

I've made four days but am in no way confident. My ass is blistered and I can't feel my left hand below the wrist.