RIDE THE ROCKIES: Tour concludes in Salida
salida» The hospital priest from South Dakota pedaled his final strokes down Crestone Mesa Drive here, led by trio of three State Patrol motorcycles flashing their lights and blaring their sirens as the bright, late-afternoon sun beat down.
As he neared the finish line, riders from his group — Team Project Haiti — who had long ago finished, but still adorned in their bike shorts and jerseys, bolted from the sidelines and ran to him, determined they would cross the finish line together. Trailing them was a phalanx of ambulances and a motorcade of minivans.
The Rev. James Zimmer, 67, was the final cyclist on Saturday at this year’s Ride the Rockies bicycle tour, which took riders 447 miles through southwest Colorado, punishing their legs and lungs with more than 30,000 feet of elevation gain.
“I just wanted to sneak in,” Zimmer said, surprised by the ceremonious end to his ride. “I was just hoping my team hadn’t left. I was feeling bad. I was keeping everyone waiting.”
Zimmer was one of a handful of riders for Team Project Haiti, a group led by Dr. Paul Severson, a Minnesota surgeon who founded the nonprofit Project Haiti Inc. in 1989 with the goal of sending volunteers with expertise in medicine, dentistry, economic development and construction to help the impoverished country.
“It was the greatest disaster in the history of our hemisphere,” Severson said. “I’ll work the rest of my life trying to help that country.”
This group of cyclists was raising money to rebuild a hospital in the capital Portau-Prince destroyed by the 2010 earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people. The cause is close to Zimmer, a hospital priest in Sioux Falls, S.D.
“I see the beauty of all the things that happen at a hospital,” Zimmer said. “There’s so much life there. It’s what attracts me to it. The people in Haiti need hospitals — more than we do, because they don’t have them.”
If Zimmer’s effort to get to the finish was Herculean, then David Levine’s effort to get to the starting line was the same. The 36-yearold rode his bike — complete with camping gear — from Joshua Tree National Park, in Southern California, through Arizona, Utah and Colorado before arriving at the starting line in Alamosa.
“There’s this saying that you ‘ride to the ride.’ You don’t take your car to the ride,” said Levine, who is about to start working on the Mars 2020 rover project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory . “It just worked out that I knew I was going to be doing Ride the Rockies. I knew I was going to be starting my job after I finished Ride the Rockies. I could see the Southwest and could see all the National Parks between here and California.”
He left two months and a day ago before arriving at the finish line. Turns out that going over Wolf Creek Pass with 80 pounds of gear is harder than without it. The entire 1,000 miles or so, he dealt with only one flat tire.
Greg Miller and A.J. Mohammed were each participating in their first Ride the Rockies.
Miller, a former professional cyclist, works closely with wounded military veterans and races with them on tandem bikes.
Mohammed is almost entirely blind and suffers from loss of hearing, taste and smell after an injury he sustained while in the Middle East in 2004 with the U.S. Navy. This was the longest ride of his life.
“I was homebound. I didn’t like going out. I really didn’t eat because I didn’t like going to the store, so I ordered in a lot of food,” Mohammed said. “And I didn’t really have any goals in life or ambition.”
But in December 2014, he received an email from the Navy’s Safe Harbor program. Mohammed was offered a chance to participate in an adaptive sports camp. Despite anxiety, he attended, participating in archery, cycling, swimming and track and field. Today, the 36-year-old from Wisconsin competes regularly in cycling and archery.
“Sports saved my life,” said Mohammed, who was among 15 riders with the Adaptive Sports Center in Crested Butte. “This week’s been amazing. It’s a oncein-a-lifetime experience for me.”