After a good night’s rest we loaded all our panniers (a place for everything …) and biked to the local bakery/cafe for breakfast burritos, sandwiches for lunch and some trail mix. Then we hit the road in a light rain. The forecast was rain all day but that never materialized, it was just clouds and cool temps. We took an alternate route that paralleled the horrible Hwy. 200 and were soon zipping through fields and farms and entered Montana.
Typical scenery for the day
The last mile or so of this road before it re-joined the 200 was gravel and the joy of zooming downhill was tempered by the washboard road and occasional potholes. Rounding a bend we flew into and out of the town of Heron where we had our first dog chasing incident of the trip… It all ended well when he/she saw we were pretty fast prey! The road continued in gravel and we went up and down for a while until we realized we should have turned left before even getting into Heron. We stood at a Y in the road trying to figure out where we were and how to get back on track – retracing our route back down and up was not appealing. Along the road came a beat up pick up and we flagged the driver down to ask for help since we were “lost.”
“You’re never lost,” he said. “Only slightly confused!” His name is Fred and he lives off the grid at the end of that gravel road. Without any hesitation he cleared space for our bikes in the tool-and-equipment-filled bed of his truck and lashed everything in securely.
Fred tying in our bikes
We crowded into the cab (it was a mini pick up) and Fred drove us back into Heron where we unloaded at the turn we should have made in the first place. As we thanked him for his kindness he said he wondered why God had made him leave his house at that time today. I guess it was to help us!
The rest of the ride was quiet on a nice road leading to Libby. We stopped outside of town and Maja walked down to the Kootenai Falls (think DiCaprio’s escape over the falls in the Revenant…
Kootenai Falls as we saw them
Leo DiCaprio’s character shooting the rapids at Kootenai Falls in The Revenant.
The scene was filmed at Kootenai). We are camping at the Two Bit Campground in Libby and head for Eureka tomorrow and are now in the Mountain time zone.
bikewright 2.0 