Big Sky. Big Miles.

First off check out our flickr for some sweeeet new pics, the link is a few posts ago.

We left off after just having crossed the border into Eureka, Montana for our rest day. It was an awesome day in small town America. We started the day with a giant breakfast of biscuits, gravy, eggs, and hashbrowns which filled us up until dinner. We spent the rest of the day running errands. Dinner was a fascinating insight into some of the odder folk of the Midwest. The two employees of the powderhorn cafe fed us and kept us entertained with interesting stories and advice such as wearing a mask on the back of your head so cougars can't sneak up and attack. Shortly after getting back to the park Zeke arrived. Zeke is another unique individual. He is riding from Brooklyn to the West Coast because "He doesn't like bikes but someone said it's not possible."

In the morning Zeke was gone. It was a sunny beautiful day. Much of the day was spent paralleling the mountains at the edge of Glacier. We had an awesome rest at one of the forest service cabins before starting our second pass of the day. The pass was brutal. The last 3 miles of the climb were covered in snow and required a long, miserable drag-a-bike. We stopped at Upper Whitefish Lake for some freezing swimming and a place to camp.

We started off the day with a 30 mile descent. Whitefish was a sweet town with an awesome bike shop, Glacier Cyclery, and delicious beer at the Great Northern Brewery! The next 40 miles were pavement until we got to Bigfork where we stopped for some delicious cookies and a resupply. Everyone in Bigfork was very friendly and wanted to know about our trip. As we got back on the trail we met Blake, our first divide racer. He had started 3 days before and had already made it almost 400 miles. Blake, like both of us was having Achilles problems and was stopping early that day. We thought about stopping in Bigfork but decided to push on over one more pass. Camp was the side of the forest road and in less than an hour we made, ate, and cleaned up burritos and got in bed.

After a thunderstormy night and eggs on toast for breakfast we got on the road. At lunch we met some awesome folks from Missoula, more on them in the next post. We met Shell later that day, a racer heading South to North. He was a super gnarly looking dude on a sweet custom Blacksheep bike with a planetary bottom bracket who was looking at riding the entire divide in around 18 days! After some cooling afternoon thunderstorms we stopped after only 50 miles at Holland Lake for an awesome night!

Joshua awoke with a mosquito on his eye which had him looking quite ridiculous. Breakfast was an amazing loaf of banana bread. We decided to get back on track with 90 miles of hot riding and two passes. Our first pass of the day was the last snowy pass of the divide! We met Magnus, an Aussie riding S to N. We resupplied, waited out the hottest part of the day and had fried chicken for lunch in Seeley Lake. We didn't hit the second pass until sunset getting some amazing views and rolling into Reservoir Lake to camp around 10pm.

By the next mronging we had renamed the lame Mosquito lake. Morning poop time was significantly more unpleasant than usual... We rolled out to a second brutal day of riding, 3 Continental divide crossings. The first pass was brutally steep and long. At the top we met northbound racer, Chip. It was brutally hot out the entire day. We got a little lost after our second but were able to quickly get back on track. We spotted some smoke and by the time we finished our third crossing and happily rolled into Helena for our rest day the smoke was clearly a full blown forest fire! Luckily we're safe from the fire and it's not near our upcoming route. We got a room at a hotel and passed out.