James and Zoe Ride Bikes

July 21st/Day 49 – Ennis, MT to 20 miles short of West Yellowstone. 52 miles (Zoe)

Sleeping with the tent flies off last night was pretty awesome – big clear Montana sky, no light pollution, and the moon didn’t come up until about midnight. I saw my first shooting star in a long, long time. We had our second 6am alarm in a row – easier than you’d think, when the sky starts getting light about 5 or so. We bid a sad adieu to the Ennis RV park, which is fantastic – sitting on a bluff above the Madison River with views back west to the VC hill we’d come down, and east to the mountains surrounding Yellowstone. The goal was to beat the wind we’d be riding into. It seems to start coming up about 9 every day, and can get pretty crazy mid-afternoon. We managed to beat it for an hour or so, but…

Today’s ride was supposed to gain us 2000 feet of altitude over 70 miles and put us within striking distance of Yellowstone, to set up for park adventures tomorrow.  We’ve achieved that, more or less, though at a little cost. The wind crept up and started hitting us head on after about an hour of riding, reducing our speed to about 8mph.  We knew the valley, then canyon, would open up in two directions - one pass to Idaho, one to Yellowstone - but had no idea which direction the wind was coming out of. Headwinds are worse for my mental health than anything else we’ve encountered on the road, and headwinds with climbing…blech!! My left knee is being incredibly fussy – we’ve adjusted my saddle, seat post, foot position etc a half dozen times, but I think it’s just protesting at the passes. Riding uphill into the wind is perhaps the most strenuous thing I can ask this mistreated joint to do, so I tried to help it out by concentrating on my upstroke, pulling the pedals up rather than pushing them down (ish). This worked well…for about 4 hours. At which point I absolutely couldn’t get any more out of muscles that have never been used in this way. Fortunately, just as I was reaching my limit, the headwind became a crosswind – still strong, but rideable. We then met a rider, Matt, who let us know that as we turned into the Hebgen Lake road we would have a tailwind – the wind was in fact coming from Idaho, and blowing not only in our faces, but eastwards into the Hegben valley  – inspiration!

There used to be a river running east out of the lake. In 1959, though, an earthquake started a landslide which blocked the river, as well as killing a number of people in the campground. Overnight the river valley became a second lake, Quake Lake, and the rising waters drowned hundreds of pines. Although the lake’s been there more than 60 years, the bleached bones of the trees still stand in the water. It’s remarkably eerie.

We’re now at a campground with meadows full of wildflowers surrounded by aspens and pines. All pretty shattered after the slog into the wind. It’s Kraft Mac n Cheese for dinner (our emergency meal), since we didn’t pass a single shop or town today. The camp host assures us that we’ve picked a good spot, since they haven’t had a bear come by for a month…

July 20th/Day 48 –Twin Bridges, MT to Ennis, MT. 47 miles (James)

I’ll be honest with you: cycle touring had been wearing on me a little. We’d done big climbs, headwinds, early mornings etc, but I just hadn’t done anything other than cycling, preparing for cycling and recovering from cycling for a long while. I was a bit fed up last night. But today was one to raise the spirits. And all this despite a 6:00 alarm and being on the road by 6:50.

Strong gusts the night before had us paranoid that we’d be riding into the wind all day, but the winds grow throughout the day, so we got up early to beat the weather. 8 miles later (involving neither wind nor conversation) and we were in Sheridan, ready for breakfast and we smashed bacon, eggs, pancakes, French toast etc. The day was looking up.

And up we had to go. We had to gain the better part of 1000 feet before we could begin the climb proper, but it was gentle (sneak hills, as Zoe calls them, because they sometimes appear flat and make you wonder why the pedalling is so hard). The route followed a formerly bandit-infested route called Alder Gulch, an environmental catastrophe the likes of which I’ve never seen. Gold was found here, and garnets too. To access the former, locals invented a dredging machine about 30 metres long which dug down and overturned all the earth like a giant plow. What they left were seemingly endless rows of giant gravel piles. The old vegetation was buried underneath the river stones atop which they used to sit, and now with all the topsoil washed away nothing can grow on the bare rocks. They found gold, but they left a whole gully which is just gray heaps with the odd tree scattered between.

At the top, however, were two of the old mining towns: Nevada City and Virginia City. Both were abandoned in the early 20^th century, but a couple of pioneer enthusiasts bought the remaining buildings in the 50s to preserve them. They also bought other 19^th century timber structures and took them to these two towns for refuge, and you can now wander around an almost perfect time capsule, going up on balconies, looking at a couple of rare interiors, and pretending to be a cowboy or cowgirl (a lot of fun). It’s like a theme park, but it’s a real, functioning (albeit touristy) town still. One of the real highlights of the tour, and Zoe couldn’t stop taking photos. To make it better, we saw a grandma getting a lift on the back of a trail bike. We also came across a family from Alabama, and overheard their conversation:

Mother: “Why can’t I be Abraham Lincoln?”

Young Son: “Because you’re a girl.”

Mother: “So? I want to be Abraham Lincoln”

Young Son: “You can’t.”

Older son: “I want to be Robert E. Lee.”

Mother and young son (almost ashamed): “Oh…yeah. That’s right.”

In Virginia City, we looked up at the pass, a 1200 foot route winding between mountains. A cinnamon bun each for power and we began. We’d heard it was terrible but it really wasn’t that bad, and it was certainly one of the more scenic passes we’ve explored. Suitably impressed, we nonetheless had no idea how good it would get. We rounded a slight bend over the top, passed through a gap and suddenly burst out onto a view of the entire Madison river valley far below. The Romanist nerds among you may know the passages of Livy and Polybius which tell of an exhausted Hannibal staggering through the pass over the Alps and suddenly looking down on the Po plain and all of Italy. I never really believed that from one mountain route you could all of a sudden see such an expanse of land, but you really can! We saw for miles. Mountains, river, plain, town, everything. Zoe’s tried to take panoramic photos and we’ll see if we can stitch them together to make a widescreen print. If we can, it’ll be gold. And the best part in cycling terms was the greatest descent in the history of descents. It wasn’t busy, it had good roads, it was beautiful and we reached new maximum speeds: Zoe has the speedo and clocked 45.7 mph, and Caleb left her for dust. He has the advantage of larger wheels, but he’s also developed a trademark, low resistance crouch that he calls TIE fighter position. Basically, he lies his stomach flat on his saddle, puts his pelvis back on the sleeping roll which is strapped to his back rack, and then makes “p’dew, p’dew, p’dew” laser noises. It looks funny, but he gets real low and goes real fast. As an added bonus, every time we through the hill was over, we came over another crest and dropped another couple-hundred feet. Very much like being on a roller coaster that never goes up.

We pulled into Ennis in no time, planning on going another 25 miles, but after grocery shopping and two flat tires we decided to have an early end to the day and get ice cream. Fantastic ice cream. Coffee-cream, graham cracker and peanut butter, chocolate, and one called moose tracks, which was vanilla with swirls of fudge and bits of peanut butter cups. Now we sit in a beautiful RV park overlooking the river and mountains with geese, cattle, herons and we’ve been promised deer and elk. Sunset is beautiful, dinner’s on the go and I for one am pretty pleased that we called it quits and had an afternoon of leisure after such a satisfying ride.

 

July 19th/Day 47 – Jackson, MT to Twin Bridges, MT. 77 miles (Zoe)

Today was a day of winds. We were all a little wobbly this morning after a hard 60 miles of climbing and headwinds yesterday. Today we had two big passes, the first heading out of the Big Hole Valley up Big Hole Pass, straight into a headwind. Ick. Incredibly beautiful countryside though – impossible to describe or photograph. At the top of the pass was an info site, which mentioned (among other things) that the Big Hole Valley was such obviously awesome ranching country that by the time the first white person arrived to settle there, 27 000 cattle had already been moved in by drovers. 15 miles in the next valley and we hit a second climb over Badger Pass, this time with a slight tail wind. The descent down the hill was at least 2000 feet, as we lost the altitude we’d gained climbing Chief Joseph Pass a couple of days back, with mountains encircling us on every side and the valley stretching out before us. The slight tail-wind turned into a serious cross-wind, and then into a truly epic tail wind, carrying us into Dillon. A stop for lunch at Fiesta Mexicana! (a taco truck in an old bus) and another at the supermarket, and we were flying down the road again. When we were climbing into the wind this morning I was imagining the tantrum I was going to throw, insisting that we stop in Dillon. To turn down the tailwind, though, would have been an insult to the cycling gods. Good decision – we cranked out another 28 miles in an hour and a half, flying down the road at 20mph with hardly any effort.

Today was also a day of tourist-encounters. Coming the other direction in quick succession were: a group of 3 shirtless sprinters; Cory, a young guy riding a seriously loaded recumbent cycle; 25 twenty-somethings riding across the country to raise money for cancer research (4K for Cancer), with widely varying degrees of enthusiasm for the mountain they were slogging up; Norm, a retired guy finishing up the transam after spending four summers doing it in chunks; and a stinky ex-computer engineer who rode from Seattle to Orlando and is now on the way back, via Ecuador and Colombia. Larry left us when we arrived at Twin Bridges to take advantage of the headwinds and make it a little ways further up the road.

We’re staying in a fantastic place, a cyclists’ camp by the river. The town has set up a little hut with mosquito screens, toilets, a shower, a sink with hot running water, and cycling supplies like white fuel, spare maps, insect repellent, and stray books. It runs on donations. Every town should have one.

You might be able to tell from my terse prose that I’m pretty shattered. 77 miles with two big climbs is a long day, and this is our second big one in a row. To end: we saw a herd of pronghorn antelope hanging out in a local wheatfield. No photos. James, though, is on a serious hunt for a perfect Montana photo which has a) horses b) fields c) mountains d) the odd cloud. We’ll see.

July 18th – Sula to Jackson, 58 miles.

July 18th/Day 46 - Sula to Jackson, 58 miles.

We got out a little after 8:00 this morning, having added Larry to our bike gang. His wife, Marcee, was driving the support car today – the two of them swap riding and driving duties – and she offered to put all our bags in the car. Despite an enormous climb of over 3000
feet, however, we virtuously declined, with Zoe and Caleb insisting that it would be cheating (I was tempted, I won’t lie). So we got stuck in to Chief Joseph Pass, a long, steep and winding road through the mountains and across the continental divide. Correction: an earlier blog state that the Lolo pass was part of the continental divide, but that was erroneous. We have four more hops across the divide in the coming week or two, and I can assure you all that they’re pretty tough riding. 2.5 hours of climbing and we were pretty tried, but behold the power of peanut butter sandwiches! We rode on. It was tough, hot and almost entirely into a headwind, but it was a rewarding day. Exhausting, but rewarding.

The rest of the ride was notable for the spectacular big sky country. There were steep grassy hills to the left and the snowy continental divide on the right, with a high altitude plateau of marsh down the middle. This area was also the site of the Battle of The Big Hole, which basically involved American Troops attacking natives in flight. Uncool. I haven’t entirely ruled out the possibility that the Indians were actually being attacked by the mosquitoes here and mistakenly assumed they were armed soldiers, but it’s hard to prove either way. The marshes here breed mozzies that “will pick you up and carry you away”, as we were told today, and a wet spring has only made them worse.

Just how many there are became apparent when we met some riders coming from the opposite direction for a roadside conference. These three guys were riding from Mexico to Canada, and the oldest is 74, just twelve years younger than the combined age of Caleb, Zoe and myself. They said they’d stopped in for cokes a few miles back, and whether it was the caffeine or not, they were as fit and chirpy as any tourists we’ve seen. But after a couple of minutes chatting, we were overwhelmed by mosquitoes. We must have been quite a sight – seven folks in lycra chatting, laughing and slapping ourselves as each new insect landed on us – and indeed one random driver stopped and asked for a photo. But being eaten alive, we had to move on.

There wasn’t much else to see. The three Texans warned us about a hawk that would swoop us, but it only tracked us, flying right above us where we couldn’t see it. It cried out all the while, however, and made itself known. I guess we just looked too tough to mess with. Zoe uploaded a photo of the trading post in Wisdom, MT, but to appreciate it you have to know that country music was being pumped out of a megaphone on the facade. And now we’re in the hot spring lodge at Jackson, sitting in a hall surrounded by stuffed deer, bison, elk etc. It’s all very Montana, and I have to say, I like it.

July 17th/Day 45 – Hamilton to Sula, MT – 35 miles (Group blog)

Here we sit, the three of us, in a tent … under siege. Zoe’s very upset. She is too full to drink her beer. There are 14 mozzies sitting on the tent mesh above her face. James and Caleb can count at least another 20. We’re surrounded. Caleb is typing, and something is wrong with his pinky. It is no longer independent of his ring finger, and this is very distressing. Something to do with his position on his handle bars. But we’re loving our tour. Seriously. James stated earlier today that it’s not the hills, the camping or even the lack of showers that are wearing on him. It’s the little things. In his case, he mentioned sunscreen. Constantly applying sunscreen. Constantly swatting mosquitoes. Constantly sweating through the sunscreen and mosquito repellent we’ve already applied. Today was an especially tough day on both of these fronts. But it did start well.

Terry made good on her promise of pancakes – with applesauce and walnuts - and kept them coming until none of us could eat any more. It should be mentioned that this was on her way to work in the local ER. We met Carl, her husband, who was every bit as hospitable as Terry – and incredibly keen to meet any potential Virginia Tech fans, or college football fans, period. Sadly, we go to Columbia. After a stack of pancakes each and lots of good vibes, we were on our way, feeling incredibly thankful that there are such generous people in the world.

(Zoe) We began making good time – but a two inch nail skewered our plans, and at 11.30 we were still on the sidelines after riding only 10 miles. This pretty much put paid to our plans to climb the Chief Joseph Pass today, though it took us most of the afternoon to acknowledge this fact. We cruised down the Bitterroot Valley and into the foothills of MosquitoVille, Montana. We met Larry and Marcee, a couple who are riding across the country with two bikes and one car. Each day one of them rides, and one supports. We were lucky enough to benefit from Marcee’s support wagon in the form of cold water and sports gel (a big nutritional improvement on the 8 donuts we were carrying). A quick stop at a riverside park to stick our feet in the water led to some extended sitting, and three miles up the road in Sula a chat with the store owner led to some more sitting… I realized that it was 92 degrees in the shade, and soon enough we were camping right here rather than making our last 6 miles. I’m sure it would have been exactly the same up the road, but… we are now camped in a swamp, under siege. While setting up camp and cooking dinner we collectively killed I think a hundred mosquitos, and I am honestly not exaggerating. Now, trapped in Caleb’s tent, the boys have cabin fever and the giggles. Up early to make the pass before the heat kicks in again, we’ll head to bed early – especially since we can’t move without fear of being eaten alive…

July 16th/Day 44 – Missoula to Hamilton, MT – 53 miles (Zoe)

Today we are incredibly lucky. With 92 miles between us and the next big climb (up to the Big Hole plateau), we decided on two shorter days to get us there, so we can start up the hill with fresh legs on Monday morning. This meant a slow start in Missoula, lots of blogging (no internet or phone coverage since we entered Idaho), and breakfast at Del’s diner, where I tried to eat a full stack of pancakes for $3.25.

The trip down to Hamilton involved riding down the Bitterroot Valley, between the Bitterroot range (whence we came) to the west, and the Sapphire range to the east. Adding to the spectacular setting were two storm cells sitting over each of the ranges to the south of us. Riding hard, watching the lightning splinter the sky on both sides of us, but with clear sky dead ahead, we thought we might actually thread the needle and make it through without getting wet. Once the lightning count got under 5, though, and massive raindrops started to pelt down, we figured that mounted on steel frames wasn’t the safest place to be, and took refuge in a broken-down old barn. All very exciting!

The absolute best part of the day, though, was the end. Checking our Adventure Cycling Association map, which lists camp sites and accommodation, we saw an entry of a sort we haven’t seen before:  Terry Tignor provides Cyclists Only Accommodation. A phonecall later, we were on our way to her place in Hamilton. Terry is a wonderful woman whose son took up cycle touring a few years back. Appalled to think that he might not be able to get food and shelter easily, she realized that all cycle tourists are someone’s son or daughter, and decided to open up her home. Not as a hostel, not for any return, she has put us up in her backyard, provided us with hot showers, turkey, potato salad and brownies, and promises pancakes in the morning. She and her husband (who we’ve not met yet) take very seriously the idea that when they entertain strangers they may be entertaining angels. They have been Astoundingly Generous. There are really aren’t enough words to express our gratitude.