We started our day with some puddle water coffee- you could hardly even taste the puddle. The first few miles of riding featured a bit of chunk, but pretty soon we ended up on a more primary forest road with high quality gravel. The ridge never really offered any spectacular views but the forest was lovely and the riding was fun. We saw very distinctive feline tracks that we guessed were from a cougar which was a little unnerving, but we supposed all the cows around made better targets than us. Eventually the gravel dumped us out onto a spectacular paved road that wound through a canyon with steep red walls. We rolled into Cuba (which is not terribly charming) and met back up with Alyssa for lunch and a brief resupply. We’d made the decision to split from the caliche-ridden main route at this point and take the official ACA paved alternate to Grants, to preserve our timeline and overall sanity. The alternate entered the Navajo reservation which meant that camping was limited, so our destination was Chaco Trading Post which welcomed cyclist campers inside their fenced lot. It was a bit of a push to get there before they closed at 8, but we managed the miles and got there in time for cook-it-yourself frozen pizzas. We watched a spectacular sunset just as a huge storm rolled in- fortunately the worst of it missed us but we got a great show of lightning from the front porch of the store.