55.6 mi / 9.6 mph / 3746 ft. climbing
Home: Sandra’s AirBNB

Coyhaique is by far the largest city on the Carretera Austral, as well as the midpoint of its 770 mile length. And the route to get there from the north is one of the only places where you have the choice to leave the Carretera Austral, by making a westward jog toward Puerto Aysen, and then back to east to Coyhaique. Surprisingly, the more-direct route along the official “Carretera Austral” is gravel (while the “alternate” is paved), and has more climbing, but is 10 miles shorter. There had recently been a timely discussion on the “Cycling South America” WhatsApp group about which route is better, but unfortunately there was no obvious winner. Almost every response was some version of “I took <X>, and while the <P> was bad, the <Q> was great, and overall I’m glad I took it instead of <Y>!”

For the Carretera Austral route, “<P>” was “gravel and hills”, and for the alternate, it was “traffic”. But did the latter mean “bad traffic in a global sense”, or just “bad traffic for the Carretera Austral“. Because surely a lot of the reason so many people come to this remote place on their bicycles is the generally-low traffic volume, so are these opinions coming from people who almost-exclusively do gravel or trail riding because they hate traffic so much, or do they come from more omnivorous cyclists like us? If it’s the former, we might not even notice how “bad” the traffic is.

I guess we’ll find out because after some hemming and hawing and Rett’s inability to decide for herself, I chose the longer, but paved “alternate” route, on the basis that traffic is at least a more-familiar enemy than gravel. That would make it one of our longest rides (both in distance and time) in South America, but we would be taking at least a few days off in Coyhaique anyway, so it was a good day to go long.

Any day is a bad day to have a mechanical issue, but this long day was especially bad. That’s why, when I suddenly heard an unusually-loud clacking when coasting, I just hoped it would go away. But no, it loudly insisted that we at least stop to investigate. I quickly deduced that it was coming from the hub, which then meant removing all the bags and flipping the bike over to remove the wheel. Ah ha, the lock-ring on the cassette had loosened! That’s an easy fix, I carry a special portable tool for this, the Stein Mini Cassette Locking Driver. In fact I had just used it on Rett’s bike at Christmas when I discovered the same loosening.

Except…tightening it didn’t fix the noise at all. Shit. And now I just doubled my work, because I would need to assemble the small-but-complex tool again to loosen the lock-ring and investigate further. Ironically, when Rett’s high gears had started making noise a couple weeks before Christmas, my first suspicion was a loose lock-ring, especially since I could make her cassette wiggle with my fingers. But then I checked my bike and I could wiggle the cassette the same way, so said “no, I guess that’s not a symptom of a loose lock-ring, it must be something else” (only to discover a week later when I had time to investigate that it was the lock-ring after all). Don’t assume that the control in your experiment doesn’t also have an infection!

Taking the cassette off revealed that it was a problem with the freehub (the ratcheting thing that the gears mount onto that allows coasting, i.e., allows the wheel to spin without turning the attached gears/chain/pedals). My memory, plus a lack of even more-specialized tools, and a weak Internet connection confirmed that there was little else to be done except follow the same advice I had given Rett when her high gears had started making noise: “Doc, it makes noise when I coast.” “Well then, don’t coast!” And…maybe keep an eye out for passing pickup trucks that could give us a lift?

So now we were 40 minutes behind schedule, and on top of that, I would need to spend the rest of the day riding without the countless mini-breaks that you normally get where you can stand up, shift position, or just relax when you hit a slight downhill or even a flat stretch. Instead, I needed to keep pedaling even on the downhills, and I found that even when turning the cranks as lightly as possible (after shifting into a very high gear), I needed to squeeze my brakes to counteract the propulsive force that I couldn’t avoid generating, otherwise I would have flown by Rett. Coming to a stop while continuously pedaling was perhaps the biggest challenge, and I wasn’t always successful at it, but I figured any time I could prevent the ratcheting mechanism from engaging, I was reducing the risk that it would fail and lock up the wheel completely.

Despite the mechanical issue, the day was shaping up just as I’d planned: we had finished our southwest stretch before the day’s west wind had even gotten out of bed, and just before lunch it had arrived in the office and gotten to work, but now as a solid tailwind as we headed southeast. More mishaps at lunch though: when I gave Rett too many supplies to carry down to our creekside lunch spot, she got tripped up and fell on her backside into the bamboo, thankfully not getting to scraped up. When I did another run back up and down the trail, I actually got a much worse slice up my shin from a sharp branch, even though I didn’t fall.

After lunch we hit a long stretch of single-lane road, with the orange cones laid down the centerline for no reason I could discern. Maybe it was purely to help us out, by bunching the cars into groups that would pass us en masse but then leave 10 minutes with no cars at all? In practice, the subsequent caravans coming from behind weren’t quite as regular as I would have expected, but overall I think it was still a help to us, since even just having our own lane through the “construction” zone was plenty nice (we were directed to ride along the “wrong” side of the cones).

At the top of the big late-day climb, there was thankfully a small stand where a cyclist we had been leapfrogging all day verified they sold cold drinks. A Fanta for Rett and a Coke for me, and more-importantly, some shade and benches to relax in on this newly-dry side of the mountains where we continue to shoot for our record of highest average riding temperatures for anyone who has ever traversed the Carretera Austral.

The subsequent downhill also helped to cool us down, but then there was still a tough climb up into Coyhaique, even after we reached the street grid. Unusually, the grid isn’t aligned with the sloped plane that the town sits on, so every single block has a slope to it, and it’s a bit of an unfun game to pick turns that keep the slope relatively-constant. But at least our AirBNB was entirely uphill; later, when walking to the grocery store that was essentially at our elevation, but in a direction diagonal to the grid, the game was to pick a zig-zigging route where the “east/west” streets wouldn’t drop you down too far before you need to climb back up on a “north/south” street.

Days 2-9

We had originally booked three nights in town, just on the basis that it would be valuable to spend a bit of time in the most-resourced city on the Carretera Austral. But those three days aligned with “good” weather, and less-good weather was coming after. We briefly considered getting out of town early to take advantage of the weather pattern, but instead decided on the opposite: adding another five days (one more in our current AirBNB, and then moving to a different one for four nights) to make it to the next clear-sky window.

Those five days went by in a flash, proving that it was the right choice. Much of my time was spent figuring out a solution to my freehub problem, which at least hadn’t turned catastrophic before reaching Coyhaique. I was able to remove the freehub body from the hub, but it’s not really serviceable, so the best I could do is try to flush out whatever gunk may have gotten into the innards, first with soap and water, and then with the only solvent I had on hand, gasoline. I then dripped a bunch of chain lube in there, and the sound/motion of the spring-loaded pawls clicking against the ratchet had returned to normal. The cleaning process would have removed whatever grease was on the ball-bearings, so I put a little new grease on the accessible bearing, but I guess the hidden one on the other side will just have to rely on the chain lube and minimal forces to continue spinning smoothly?

The strange thing is, I’ve been using this same model of hub (Shimano Deore XT FH-M756-A) for some 20 years and never had any sort of issue (their reputation is why I started using them!) But this one is less than a year old, from when I built us new wheels before coming to South America! So is it just a dud from manufacturing? Did a factory worker forget to squirt a glob of grease in the right place before assembling it?

There is very little to learn on the Internet because it seems like they almost never fail, so no one even ever talks about problems and fixes. But I managed to stumble across a very interesting clue in this StackExchange thread: a guy using the same hubs had two of them fail in short order, and found mud caking the innards. A super-knowledgeable responder said “It sounds a little like you’re riding in an area with the kind of fine, silty mud that is simply very hard on FHBs”, and the OP replied “there’s plenty of farm runoff on our roads in the winter, so yes, fine silty stuff in water more than actual mud.”

Three rides ago, on our rainy day, the ride had ended on a stretch of gravel road that was being actively regraded, and the hundreds of mini-potholes were filled with puddles the color of a latte. You could certainly call it “fine silty stuff in water more than actual mud”. The insides of my fenders (and much of my bike) was still covered in the dried remains of those splashes, and when rubbed off, it turned into an almost dust-like extremely-fine powder. So my guess is that both me and this guy ran into the same rare form of silt-water mixture, the lone form of road-gunk that can successfully attack these freehubs. And the puddles had been at the point where I raced ahead of Rett to secure our campsite, so I was bashing through the puddles with pedals and chain spinning at high speed, while she was calmly walking much of the climb. So that’s likely why my hub (thankfully) seems to have been the only one affected, and checking her bike indeed revealed much less of the dried powder stuck to it.

So hopefully that’s the explanation, and hopefully my cleaned (but not fully-overhauled) freehub continues to behave normally. But I still visited all the bike shops in town; unsurprisingly none of them had just the freehub part (since they never go bad, why would anyone carry replacements?!), and none had the same Deore XT hub. But the third shop (Bicicletas Figon) had tons of parts, and I bought an entire new hub (FH-M475) that contains a possibly-compatible freehub. I removed it, left the rest of the hub parts behind, and will carry it as a bit of insurance since there will be no other chances for a bike shop if mine goes bad again in the coming weeks.

I also got a new pair of socks to replace a pair I had somehow left behind at an AirBNB a couple weeks ago (and Rett got a new Buff headband for the same reason). Surprisingly it was easier to find merino wool socks in this city of 57,000 people than it had been for Rett in Puerto Montt, which is more than four times larger and much-less remote. Patagonia (the brand, not the region!), The North Face, Columbia, and Merrell all have shops here, in addition to a few independent outdoor business. When we finally visited downtown to do this shopping (our AirBNBs were a bit more in “the neighboorhoods”), it was crazy (but also unsurprising) to see loaded touring bikes parked almost everywhere we turned. Understandably everyone spends at least a little time here before continuing to the second half of the Carretera Austral.