Sunrise at camp
I’d love to see the profile for today’s ride. It would be enough to make even the most steady of stomachs queasy.
We took a big long ride on the divide roller coaster!!
This part of the trail is probably the most true to the divide — rarely does it stray further than a mile away, with many miles following the borderland’s fence between Idaho and Montana.
We decided that we like being on the Montana side better. Probably for no other reason than it feels like more progress towards canada! Crossing back to Idaho feels like backwards, and we probably did it 70 times today.
We hit the trail pretty early knowing we needed as much of a shot at ‘big’ miles as we could get. The jeep road roller coaster was our warmup. Good stretches of hike-a-bike, but we had broken up the whole piece so it did not seem too bad.
The singletrack climb the Elk Mountain was just as I described it on my blog in 2008. 90 percent rideable…. if you are willing to expend the energy on it.
At the top it is nothing short of dream riding. I think it may be our last time over 10k on the trip. Very high alpine feel. No trees. Huge views. Looking ahead at the trail only breeds good feelings — it looks to contour, and to hug the side of incredible mountains.
The downhill was easier than I described it, including some fun slaloming through the sage, and a wondeful section of contour that got us out of a ridiculous fall line jeep road.
More of that awaited us before Bannack Pass. We both were getting low on energy and motivation. Lunch in the trees and a bit of caffeine for Ez did the trick.
From the pass we moved into the unknown — the free beta courtesy of Diary of Scott Morris ended. I loved being able to read my own blog to learn about the trail ahead.
Climbing to Grizzly Mountain was shockingly well graded. It climbed to within a hundred feet of the summit, only to not quite tag it. The downhill was superb — more regular old mountain biking. I could see many riders loving this section. Some of the easiest miles yet.
We wasted some time on the first ‘spring’ sign — couldn’t find it after following the side trail for more than 500 ft. The next signed spring was super close to the trail and held good water.
As we climbed toward Goat Mountain I spied a rather large black bear cruising awkwardly across the sage and towards the tree. So much for this not being bear country.
In that same area we praised the CDT gods for granting us what we had wanted so many times in the day — a switchbacking singletrack to climb instead of the uber-steep and unrideable jeep road. Yay!
Energy and bonking were becoming issues as we got to slightly friendlier 4×4 roads. Right then we started running into thru-hikers. Birdie was full of enthusiasm and was pretty quick to grasp what we were up to. She was excited to hike a long with us (on uphills), sayins she would race us to Canada! Pretty cool to see an older woman out here hiking solo, and kicking butt!
A trio we had met in West Yellowstone was next, then a couple section hiking a month at a time. Turns out they had ridden bikes on the CDT across New Mexico! They are hiking the rest, but that was very cool to hear.
We managed somewhere over 40 trail miles today — perhaps better than expected, but we’ll see if it’s enough to get us to Jackson before we run too thin on food.
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