Day 44 - June 29 - Cathey's Valley, CA

I headed out of Yosemite pretty early after getting some food at the Yosemite Village. After getting out of the Yosemite Valley it was pretty much downhill for the next thirty or so miles. It would definitely not have been fun going up that way, a lot of 8% grades and gradual climbs. Eventually I hit the bottom of the hill at 1,300 ft. elevation, the lowest I've been in a long time. At the bottom I heard some very familiar words. "There's a summit up there, but after that it's all down hill, you can probably just coast the next 30 miles." I've heard the phrase "it's all downhill from there" several times since Colorado, and not once has it been true. I made it up to the 3,000 ft. summit pretty easily because I'm pretty used to climbing by now, but it wasn't the end of the climbing for the day. At the bottom of the summit I went to put on my brakes and my front brake went out. My rear break has been pretty weak for a while but it hasn't been much of an issue because the front one was working well. I spent some time trying to fix it but the housing for the brake was messed up and I didn't have the parts to fix it. There were a few more hills going into Mariposa and during that time my rear brake completely stopped working. So, I had no brakes and Mariposa is on a hill at a downward slant so I rolled into town with no brakes and hoped to find a bike shop but there wasn't one. The next bike shop was in Merced, about 40 miles away.

So, I figured I'd make my way to Merced and see where I'd end up. Leaving Mariposa was a fairly steep grade downhill. I didn't really need my brakes really because I wasn't stopping. However, when I was getting into the town of Cathey's Valley, I stopped to ask some people if there was a campground near by and I almost crashed a few times trying to stop my bike by hand by grabbing the front brakes and pulling up. I didn't feel like going much further with no brakes so I set up camp in the town's park and tried to figure out what to do for the next day.