72 miles. Oh Aeolus, what did we do to make you angry?

As wonderful as Sunday’s ride was (104 miles with a substantial tail wind), today’s was  conversely  horrible – a constant hard wind directly in our faces the entire day! We wanted to get to Glasgow, in reality there were not any midway stops available – no hotels, B and Bs, Warm Showers, campgrounds – so we were committed. We sort of took turns with one riding ahead and the other tucked into that person’s wind shadow – drafting. Sort of, I say, since Maja did most of the leading. I took two turns but even out front, Maja is a faster cyclist so I did little to speed up the trip other than give her a few minutes breather. Drafting is efficient only if the behind person can get perilously close to the one in front with his front tire nearly touching the other’s rear tire. The system does work but the cost is 100% concentration which precludes looking around at the sights!

Almost looks like a painting we have of hayfields in France. Because of the wind we took quite a few breaks today.

We slogged on, mile after mile and reached the town of Hinsdale. Kelsey and Craig (he was last night’s host) recommended a bakery in Hinsdale that is known for its sweets and ice cream. Once we reached the town (we still had about 30 miles to go and no let up in the wind) we stopped at a quickie mart just to get some A/C, water, eat our sandwiches and get our heads out of the wind.  There we learned that because of a family emergency, the much touted bakery was closed! Of course, we said.

At that point, my eternally positive outlook on life had definitely turned to the dark side. Averaging only 7 miles an hour into that wind meant we still had 4+ hours of hard work to go. But, as is said, there’s nothing to it but to do it so off we rode. Honestly, if some Good Samaritan with a pick up had offered us a lift from there to Glasgow I would have jumped at the opportunity.

So … 4+ hours later, fighting the wind and the swirling gusts from passing trucks, we “rolled into ‘Glasgow’ feeling about half past dead” (apologies to Robbie Robertson). We had originally been in contact with a Warm Showers host who offered her living room floor but as we stopped at the edge of town to call her, Maja noticed that she had a message from Mary and John (highly recommended by Kelsey the night before) and they had a bed for us.  They breed Angus cattle and live about 6 miles outside of town on a sometimes rutted dirt road (not good for our already drained biking legs) but Mary offered to come into town and pick us up in her truck (fantastic!) and … wait for it … would fix us dinner and send us off with breakfast the next morning.  All we had to do was meet her at the local Albertson’s. Wow!  The skies were looking pretty bad so we retreated into the store for shelter, water and a few bananas.

After a bit, a woman came up behind me and without any introduction asked, “What kind of beer do you like?” Well, she had me at “beer!” It was Mary who had observed that we tired looking people in biking jersies must be her guests. Gratefully, we helped her shop a bit then loaded everything into the back of her pick up and away we went!

The storm passed us by and shortly we pulled up to their house. Mary and John had spent a hard day on the final leg of the artificial insemination process for their cows so we were, all four, a bit worse for wear. Showers, beer, snacks and good conversation helped Maja and me get back to being a little more human and Mary’s cooking did the rest.  John educated us in the process of breeding their cattle and the arcane metrics involved with picking the right bull’s genetics – a preferable low birth weight of the calves coupled with fast growth later, etc. We had a very pleasant dinner and stayed around the table swapping stories and getting to know each other.

In the morning, true to her word, Mary fixed pancakes and sausages and John drove us and our bikes back into town where we reluctantly said goodbye and got on our way.

We are newcomers to the Warm Showers movement and have not hosted yet. We plan to offer our house when we return to Paradise Valley and are learning from some very kind and generous people how to do it right!

This rock was in a roadside shelter outside of Malta. Legend has it that the Native Americans thought it looked like a sleeping buffalo. It was moved into Malta for a while then relocated to near its original location where many people give offerings to it for good luck etc. Back in the 1800s, the tribes thought that making offerings to the sleeping buffalo would bring the buffalo back to Montana (hunted into extinction) where they  had provided food, hides, and bones for tools for the tribes.

92.8 miles. The day got harder as the wind turned against us.

I’m writing this on June 22 as we sit in our hotel in Wolf Point. Our previous days’ riding were long and hard and we were too tired to add to the blog. We left Havre still buoyed by our wind aided ride the day before. We had contacted our Warm Showers host in Malta and told him we would be to town early in the afternoon. Oops!  The fickle wind turned and we had a small head wind for a while that grew stronger as the day grew longer and our energies grew weaker.

We stop at almost every historical marker. They usually give an unvarnished view of how the US treated Native Peoples.  This one describes the final defeat of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce.

The towns along Route 2 (called the “Hi Line”) were built originally by the railroad companies to serve the grain producers. According to legend, the railroad magnate(s) spun a globe and wherever their finger landed became the name of the next town – Harlem, Glasgow, Nashua, Malta, etc. At one point we were low on water but there was a town just ahead and we knew from other bloggers that there was a bar/cafe there where we could fill up. Surprise!  The bar was boarded up!

Lunch table provided by the shuttered cafe

We had lunch at one of their outside tables and moved on down the road to the next town of Dodson where there should have been a convenience store. That too was closed and may have opened in two hours or so! There was a three man crew digging a huge trench next door with a back hoe and they gladly pulled two bottles of water out of their ice chest for us. They told us that under a nearby house the town’s water main  was broken and that house was basically a swamp. They were searching for the main so they could cap it off but could not find it. This region of Montana is covered with about two feet of topsoil and below that is sand so once the crew hit sand (the foreman called it “quicksand”) the trench collapsed. Frustrated, they were calling it a day and offered us more ice cold water!

You’ll have to look closely to read the lettering on the grain elevator. It says “Howdy Pardner. Welcome to friendly Chinook.” The reality is that Chinook almost doesn’t exist anymore.

Our maps indicated an alternate route on a few BIA roads that got us off busy and narrow shouldered Rte. 2.  It added a mile or two but the road was completely empty. It ran more or less parallel to the sinuously flowing Milk River (eons ago the Missouri River followed this course but it was diverted by a huge ice dam to its present course. The Milk eventually took over the old Missouri channel and many centuries later Lewis and Clark named the Milk for its color.

The road outside of Malta. Note the narrow shoulder as well as the marker on the other side of the road with 7 crosses.

Finally after all the struggles with wind and lack of water we made it to Malta. We had agreed with our host, Craig, that we would supply the chicken for dinner and he would do the veggies so we stopped at the town Alberstson’s and then made it to Craig’s house.  He graduated from Nebraska a few years ago and had just moved to Malta within the last few months to work for the Bureau of Land Management. He welcomed us in and we sat and talked about Montana, biking and Warm Showers. He started the BBQ and his friend Kelsey joined us for dinner – she supplied a bottle of currant and honey wine from Canada. Craig also provided a delicious taco dip, eggplant and asparagus.

Over dinner, Kelsey asked where we were headed to next and said she knew a couple in Glasgow that did Warm Showers hosting and what great people they were.  We had contacted them but thought they (John and Mary) were unavailable. (More on this story in tomorrow’s blog).

We also heard from Craig and Kelsey that the storm we had avoided by sleeping in a motel in Shelby on Saturday had blown over a standing train in Malta.  We had seen the crushed cars being transported on truck beds on our ride.  Our warm weather hosts in Glasgow (details to follow in upcoming post) showed us the impact of the hail on their alfalfa.  We were lucky we were inside that night rather than in a tent.

Finally settling to bed – we were to sleep in Craig’s spare bedroom on the floor on our camping pads.  Maja discovered that she had apparently left her pad somewhere between Glacier and Malta! Craig, being the super nice person he is, offered her his pad not only for the night but to take with us to be mailed back to him once Maja got a new one.  She got on the phone to REI and they are shipping a new pad to our hosts in Bismark, ND!

Thanks to Fred Prozillo for recommending Gorilla Tape for our tool kit, the tape is holding my pannier together until we pick up the new one at General Delivery in Dickinson, ND.  Thanks also to Jean and Barry Bingham for their gift of miscellaneous items for out trip – some of the twist ties are employed to insure my pannier stays on the bike  and the anti saddle sore cream has been a life saver!

The weather is warming so Maja dons her sun sleeves.

6:1

Today was a biking day made in heaven!  It wasn’t too hot or cold, nor too sunny or cloudy and we had heavy winds (gusting up to 35 mph) at our backs!  Hills that normally would have beem the source of trepidation or despair were easy with a friendly windy push and we rode for miles at a time on flats or slight negative grades without pedaling.  We averaged 16.67 miles per hour on the bikes.  Normally we’re happy to average 10.  Hurray!  The wind also made what could have been a slightly monotonous landscape into an emerald sea.  At times it looked as though there were schools of silvery fish swimming just under the surface.  I kept expecting some to break the surface.  It was gorgeous!  And the tawny and rust colored grasses on the side of the road often looked like a lion shaking his mane.  Thanks Mother Nature.

The only downside of our windy day was that our bikes fell over at one point when I was taking photos and one of our pannier clips broke making it impossible to attach the pannier to the bike.

One of the photo culprits at the root of the pannier fiasco.

Luckily, our man Charles was ready with a zip tie and was able to save the day.  Semper paratus.

Charles fixing the pannier

At the next town we arrived in (Chester) I called REI and arranged for a new set of front panniers to be sent General Delivery to a post office in North Dakota where we plan to be on Friday.  So we’ll be good as new.

It was a fantastic day and I’m sure the fastest we will ever bike 104 miles in our lives.

Grain storage. We passed one farm with 40 of these.

We stopped last night because of the storm and saw that today was forecast to be very windy with blowing from the West. Perfect, we thought, and it was a prescient decision. For us, the road (Rte. 2) runs due east so we profited all day long from tailwinds.  I wish we had a spinnaker! There were times we coasted at 24 miles an hour propelled only by the wind at our backs. A greater biking century can not be imagined.

Many of the small towns on our route are on hard times with businesses closed and some buildings abandoned but we were prepared with PB&J sandwiches. At one point we were stopped by a Montana Highway Patrolman and advised to stay on the shoulder. The problem for most of the day was that the shoulder was narrow and, in some places, white line to grass rumble strips but we complied!

We passed through Dunkirk, Devon, Inverness and Kremlin then rolled into Havre, the home of Montana State University Northern and found a hotel room and Pizza Hut. Tomorrow we’re off to Malta with not as much wind in the forecast.

Lots of wheat fields. In the wind the waves were mesmerizing.

Catholic Church in Gildford

60 miles today.  The landscape is rolling and the road good (for a long way there was a very wide shoulder to ride on) so we made good time.

Storm clouds gathering along the “High Line” tracks we are following across Montana.

As we pulled into Shelby for lunch we checked the local weather (our intent was to move on to Chester – another 40 miles or so) and found there was a weather advisory for thunderstorms and hail. So, given that and the fatigue from yesterday, we decided to stop here and checked into the Comfort Inn – inexpensive, great and free wi fi (our crutch and hotel decider), guest laundry … The works. The maw of the stom appears to have missed Shelby but there is rain and thunder rolling around.

We followed a bit of the Lewis and Clark trail (Highway 2) and passed the town of Meriweather and the Lewis High School. The first part of the ride was through the Blackfeet Reservation then Rte. 2 just slides on due East. It is great to make mileage heading east after all the north and south squiggles we’ve been making since we left Washington.

A little roadside color along Rte. 2

About yesterday’s ride on the Road to the Sun:  As I may have mentioned in the short post about it, the ride from Lake McDonald to Logan pass is the equivalent of a category 1 climb in the Tour de France (the guide book said it’s the equivalent of the stage up Les Deux-Alpes. (I repeated a description I heard that the climb to Logan pass was equal to L’Alpe d’Huez but that climb is in fact Hors Categorie – even harder). Yesterday there were a lot of drivers taking advantage of the pass’s opening so the last few miles were a little busy – there’s no shoulder on the windy two lane road but the road surface appears to be new.

As we climbed higher we were in and out of clouds, some so dense you couldn’t see the road ahead.

Winding ever upward, the road truly is, as our Warm Showers host Chuck said, the most beautiful bike ride we’ve ever seen – dense forest gives way to rocky vistas of 8 and 9 thousand feet peaks some still with snow. As we reached the top the wind picked up and it got quite cold but we had been aiming for the Visitors’ Center to warm up and prepare for the long downhill.  Of course, the center was not yet open and I guess we looked pitiful enough because a very nice couple (Mike and Barb from Seattle – also cyclists) invited us into their camper for some much needed heat and some hot cider. Again, the kindness of strangers – a lesson to us all.

The hard climb done, we now head downhill toward the Mississippi

The downhill was indeed freezing – I stuffed a tee shirt under my jacket just to insulate my core – and we made quite a few stops just to keep from shivering. As I mentioned yesterday our route to Browning was taxing and on a day when we needed a lot of TLC at the end of the day, our hotel let us down by not offering the wi fi offered in their sign nor having hot enough water for showers, plus the room was freezing when we got there and took a while to warm up. Our dinner was a gourmand’s treat at Chez Subway and we quickly walked back and jumped right into bed.

We did get a free breakfast out of the deal and made PB and Nutella sandwiches for later.

Still plenty of snow up there. We saw some people with skis and a snowboard.

By the way, if you click on any of the small photos you can see it in large size.

82 miles up and over the Continental Divide. We got up very early and found that the power was out at the lodge so we got dressed and packed in the dark. We climbed the 21 miles to the top of Logan Pass and it was COLD, and even colder going downhill on the East side. Once at the East entrance to the park we decided on an alternate route that ended up being hard climbing through a pretty monotonous landscape but at least there was not much traffic to contend with.

We ended up in Browning on the Blackfeet Reservation and checked into the first motel we could find and that was a mistake. We will post more details when we have a wi-fi connection and will also post stunning photos from around Logan Pass and the snowy mountains.