Until Day 4: A Recap and an Intro

Here we are about to leave Montana after 4 days of riding and it has gone very quickly. Long days make for short evenings, and bad weather has the same effect, so let me see if I can get everyone up to speed in one fell swooop.

Dramatis Personae:

• Tom, Mike: if you're reading this you know one of us, and probably know we've done 6 previous trips together including the Northern Continental (NorCon) across the US last summer



• Don, Reg: Friends of ours from Seattle, both are PacTour Arizona training camp riders, but no previous trips, so their first time on a long trip. Don's a doc; Reg is a retired IRS auditor, both strong and steady on a bike.



• Greg: my roommate, was on NorCon with Tom and me last summer, he was the Greg of "Greg and Greg's roommate Greg," a chiropractor from Sonoma, California.

Now many of you are probably stuck on the fact I have a roommate who isn't Tom, and before you go bad-mouthing him, thinking ill of him, considering him an Estonian hussy who, after we'd completed 6 trips together (spare me the Brokeback Bicycling jokes), just decided to take up elsewhere, let me say in his defense he was the first guy who signed up for this trip and I was the last, so it just didn't work. That said I am glad to have a roommate I know from last year who also had one of the key comments of the trip so far as we unpacked in a Super 8 motel room and washed out water bottles:

"It's like we never left...."

The Seattle gang of us has been referred to already as "The Light Brigade" since each of us has a bright flashing tail light which is visible from a mile away and is a welcome addition when riding in the rain and fog, and also "Seattle Slew" for our speediness. We'll see about the later as the trip gets longer. We tend to ride together and stay pretty organized in sharing the load, although Reg likes to leave quickly leaving the rest of us to chase him down.

So there's us, we 5, and then there are 35 (!) more riders actually on the trip; 2 more failed to show (injuries prior), 1 still to come (David, from Oz, with us last summer, will join in Jackson) and 1 to leave in Jackson (whose name we may discern only by process of elimination). That's still 34 people that are RIDERS, and 10 more as crew. Of the 34 we know several from last year's USA crossing (if you know us from NorCon: Tandem Driver Pat, Brian w/ the white Colnago, Walt, and Boston Gerry who lives in Arizona). That leaves 30... which includes folks from Australia (3), UK (2), Germany (2), and Switzerland. Of the 40, 8 are first timers to PacTour. Still, 30 names and histories in just 18 days compared to 30 riders in 30 days last year, well, we have a lot of people to figure out. And 7 new crew people (John Lake, Lon, Susan, Christopher, and Rebecca are back). The bottom line is we're grasping for unique identifiers for everyone we interact with to get a handle on who is who. What NOT to say is "the fit guy with grey hair and glasses" which could be about 10 different guys. There are some folks we do have agreement on:

• The Australian couple - husband and wife



• The Billboard - Australian woman who was sponsored by Hammer products and is all product advertising on her kit, all the time



• Nascar or Pitstop: Karl, who zooms through stops in a matter of minutes



• The Assos guy - all Assos, all the time, all black and white



• The white guy - white jersey, white vest, white bike with white rims! He dons surgical gloves at the end of each day to undo the day's dirt to his very white bike. It takes him a long time. Note to self: don't buy a white bike



• Fred - we just know who he is I guess, he writes for VeloNews



• Patrick 1 or 2 - the two UK guys (one from Wales, one from England) are named Patrick, they ride with another guy who is American named Ron



• Mattias - from Munich, strong climber



• Karen - there are only two (single) women riders, she is one



• The other woman - the woman who isn't Karen

Which then leaves at least 20 people we're still grasping to meet, 25+ including new crew members. And here's the trip data: it's just over half as long as last year’s in distance (1900 vs 3400m), and has 50% more climbing per day (88k vertical feet total) in 18 instead of 30 days.

Random thoughts on the journey so far that I need to get out of my head. What to call the Montana part of the trip: "The Tour of Gravelly Shoulders" or "The Concourse of SUV-towing 40foot RVs"? MOSQUITOS! A dead owl on the side of the road next to a dead ferret. The owl got the ferret, the truck got the owl. Bluebirds on barbed wire, meadowlarks singing. An antelope and a deer, not together. A rider saw a bear in Glacier National Park and warned some people about it around the next corner who promptly took off running to see it for themselves... and last week the first person in a bunch of years was killed in Yellowstone by a Grizzly sow with two cubs. The procession of white crosses on the highways marking fatalities: two lane highways and 70MPH speed limits.

And finally:

The perseverance to have lasted nearly seventy years amid such cold prospects was what heritage Dad had for me; I had begun to see that it counted for much.

Ivan Doig\This House of Sky.

So much sky here, so much space, all the open valleys and forests, so few people; it's a hard place to live or as a woman in Kalispell said "it's beautiful, but you can't eat beautiful."

Day 4: Ennis to West Yellowstone
71 miles, 3000ft of climb. Yesterday's weather had everyone nervous this morning as there were a few sprinkles, somehow, from the cluster of clouds that were directly, and only, overhead. Many were the leg warmers and booties and jackets donned in anticipation of another day of shivering, but just out of town and onto a long 1 or 2% grade, out came the sun and we stayed in it throughout the day. The ride followed the Madison River and we saw 100 boats either on or going to the river, I even got a Salmon Fly in the face at one point, so hopefully the season will move on. Just long and slow climbing, a brisk headwind that arrived with the sunshine; a rest stop out at 32 miles, another at 55, a set of up and downs through the Gallatin National Forrestand along Hebgen Lake, a right hand at the T intersetion, and then a last straight shot (naturally) into a headwind into "town." West Yellowstone. We arrived early, 1:00pm or so, with lots of time before the motel rooms were ready. Laundry drying on railings and clotheslines outside rooms in the sun was a sign of the times.

Dinner across the street, very forgettable dining, in a town built around the extraction of tourist dollars and the mollification of small children. Bleah, at least tomorrow we're into the park.

Day 3: Butte to Ennis
"only" 86 miles and 4,000 feet of climbing so no great hurry. Good thing, departure was delayed until 9am due to lightning and a hailstorm that pounded the hotel. Whee! We left with threatening skies and sure enough it started raining so we got drenched for our climb over the Continental Divide, somehow still a nice climb in the cold (55 degrees) and wet. On the other side we found dry roads and a cold descent of about 10 miles and 2,000 feet into a wide, dry valley. Here we parted ways with our route of last year. Last year we went straight to Bozeman, this year at the end of the descent we took a right hand turn over a bump and into a wide, wide, valley. It got better as we went along, more prarie and grazing land than sage brush, and more fly fishing: Twin Bridges, home of Winston Fly rods, the Four Rivers Guiding Company and the Three Rivers Saloon. Then on out the valley and another turn up through the ghost towns of Nevada City and Virginia City... the remnents of their gold mining still visible in mile after mile of rubble pile from washing all the dirt away 100 years ago. Around here everything is called Ruby: the Ruby River, Ruby Mountains, Ruby Valley, because the miners thought the red stones they found were Rubies. Actually they were garnets, and Montana garnet shops and digging sites were in every town or village. Lunch was right in Virginia City at 73 miles which meant we had 13 or so miles to our motel, but first we had a gradual 1,000 ft climb into heavy rains that began at the summit and led to a fast, shivering, soaked, long descent in Ennis. 40 MPH and faster, it'd be worth going back to redo that descent on dry pavement and worry less about losing control.

Dinner was somewhere along the one block of shops on two sides of the road that is Ennis, most of the shops focused on fishing the Madison River which flows next to it, home of the world famous Salmon Fly hatch which is running a month late due to high water. The Madison is actually the first close-to-fishable river I've seen in the state: the Blackfoot and West Fork of the Clark and anything else we've been near is high, opaque and glacial silt green. The motel owner in Ennis has had the worst spring he can remember for cancellations due to high water levels, as if Obama, the state's wolf population, and high gas prices weren't enough.

Day 2: Missoula to Butte
134 miles... if you really want to know it, read last year's blog entry, was the exact same route, on and off Rt 90, gravel in the freeway shoulder sounding like Rice Krispies under our tires, Snap! Crackle! Pop! A tree of cow skulls, the climb up to Georgetown Lake, along the lake, and then down into Anaconda. Anaconda is the Youngstown, Ohio, of Montana, or as Bruce (Springsteen) says:

Then smokestacks reachin' like the arms of god
Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay

Now a major Superfund clean up sight, the smokestack from the smelter still stands, once the city air was so dirty people couldn't see in front of them.

But what we'll remember of the ride is the hailstorm outside Anaconda that kept a group of us under a rest-stop tarp for 20 minutes and feeling sorry for the people who had to ride soaking wet through the hail to get to the rest stop. And feeling amazed that people who left 2 minutes earlier from the rest stop never got a touch of rain: the weather is so localized, unbelievable. And then the miserable, awful, hot, dry, hilly, strong headwinds and endless bumps from Anaconda to Butte. And finally the thunderstorm that hit the hotel just after everyone got in. Then it cleared and off we went to Fred's Mesquite Grill for dinner, driven by Bongo the only cab driver in Missoula, who let us off to look in the world's largest open pit mine where 1.4B tons of ore had been extracted leading to massive wealth for the "Copper Barrons" of Butte. Guess what, it's back in production, copper prices being what they are, did you know a copper penny (not the fake ones produced since 1985) is worth 2.5x it's monetary value in copper? Bongo was a riot, articulation wasn't his strong suit, but his tour along Mansion Row and commentary was worth the trip.

Day 1: Kalispell to Missoula
Riding from Kalispel to Missoula was 148 miles. On the road by 7am. Conditions to Missoula were warm/hot with some favorable winds and mixed roads. We started east to the foot of the Swan Mountains, then due south on Rt 83 between a long line of snow-streaked peaks, sentinels watching us pass by, to our left and either more mountains or a series of lakes and streams (Swan Lake, Lake Alva, Summit Lake, Salmon Lake, Seeley Lake...) to our right. Things were fine, road a little spookey with a white line and no shoulder, and then we took a right, due west on Rt 200 and climbed up and then down, following the Blackfoot River, into Missoula. Yes, climbed down, freaking uphill headwind made the last 20 miles into town a very LONG 20 miles into town. Dinner with Ned and family, two years in a row PacTour has put us together in Missoula (!).