After 22 days and 2,711 miles across North America, it looks like Matthew Lee has finished the Tour Divide. It’s not confirmed, but in his last call-in he said that he was hoping to finish the following day, and his SPOT tracker places him in El Paso on the Mexican border which would suggest that he’s finished. Of the 16 Tour Divide starters, another five are still on the course, ten having dropped out. Current tail-ender is Stephen Gleasner, who still has half of Colorado and all of New Mexico to cross.

Meanwhile, the Great Divide Race, the original self-supported epic along just the US section of the Great Divide MTB Route, is still in full swing. Leader John Nobile has overhauled some of the Tour Divide racers and at the time of writing had about 600 miles to go the border. He’s a good 200 miles ahead of his closest competitors in the GDR, but also 12 hours down on Jay Petervary’s record pace from 2007. Weather conditions haven’t been great, though, with lots of snow still on the high passes in the early stages of the race.

Only eight of the 18 starters are still in the GDR, with British riders Carl Hutchings and Jenn Hopkins among them. Carl is running third, and very close to second-placed Rainer Lenninge. Jenn, the only singlespeed rider left in the race, is fourth, about 20 hours behind Carl, but she’s running ahead of the pace for the singlespeed and women’s records. If you’ve got the time, it’s well worth a listen to the recorded rider call-ins for both races at www.mtbcast.com – there’s a lot of quite dour-sounding Americans and then a couple of chirpy Brits. A typical call-in from Jenn runs thusly: “Yesterday was gorgeous, I got back to trees again. Trees are great. You don’t realize quite how good trees are until you don’t see any for two days.”

Best wishes to everyone still on the course. Great Divide Race updates are at greatdividerace.blogspot.com, Tour Divide updates are at www.tourdivide.org.