Mountains Of Fun

I had been promised a change of scenery days before, back when we left Havre. Bob had told us we were on the cusp of it — trees, mountains, greenery, the Rockies rising up out of nowhere. Days passed and nothing changed, until I began to wonder whether someone had quietly moved a mountain range while I wasn’t looking. Breakfast, at least, never let us down. The three of us treated it as a serious occupation, generally finding time for a first sitting and then a second, and lately I had settled on pancakes, with blueberries added whenever the option presented itself.

We kept the ride to Cut Bank short and deliberate, positioning ourselves for the next day’s destination and steering well clear of an overnight in Browning, which everyone we’d spoken to had strongly advised against. The campground turned out to be a good one — decent showers, wifi, the small luxuries that mean more on the road than they ever would at home. Flavia rolled in visibly upset: she had lost the orange sweater she’d bought back in Fargo, the one that had been keeping her thermal troubles at bay. I told her that somewhere out there a small mammal was very grateful for its unexpected new coat, which seemed, against the odds, to help. We cooked, opened a few Ninkasi beers, and settled into what had become our nightly ritual of hangman and the sketch game on Flavia’s iPad.

One sweater down…

Rain hung around the following morning, so we made straight for a gas station breakfast, keen to put in some early miles on the way toward Glacier. I had a small drama of my own with the coffee creamer machine — no obvious button for milk, just a filled teat hanging down like something off a cow’s udder. I squeezed it. Milk came out, along with the gas station attendant, who came to tell me off in no uncertain terms.

The stretch between Cut Bank and East Glacier ran through the Blackfeet Indian reservation, a place that had had a bad reputation two hundred years ago and, by most accounts, still carried one. The warnings about Browning itself, though, seemed a little unfair once we got there; we stopped at the grocery store and fell into easy conversation with a few friendly locals. Forest fires had hazed the distance for days, but as we left Browning behind, the Rockies finally revealed themselves, unmistakable and astonishing.

The landscape held its nerve right up until a mile outside East Glacier, and then, all at once, gave in: trees, trees, and more trees. I hadn’t seen proper forest in weeks and pulled over at the first gas station simply to take it in. From there we climbed over Marias Pass, the continental divide, and coasted down the other side for several glorious miles into the Glacier Meadows campground.

I crawled out of my tent the next morning looking, Flavia informed me, like a prairie dog as usual. There was a quiet sadness to the day: it would be her last riding with us for a while. She was continuing west to Seattle while we turned southwest for Missoula and then Portland — a detour we’d already committed to, otherwise we might simply have ridden on to Seattle together and turned south from there afterwards. We had time built into the trip’s end to make the journey up to see her again in a few weeks, and the thought of that reunion was some comfort.

The ride into Whitefish was, I think, the best day’s riding I had in the whole of the US. The scenery alone would have done it, but there was also second breakfast at a wonderful lodge, a dip in rivers cold enough to take your breath away, and an arrival timed perfectly with the farmers market opening its stalls, followed by an evening at the local brewery. The trouble with keeping a blog is that it reduces a day like that to a summary strung between photographs — almost the whole ride gets lost in the telling. You’ll have to take my word that it was extraordinary. I should at least record, in the interests of accuracy, that Flavia managed to fall over sideways while stationary, still clipped into her pedals.

Yummy yummy for my tummy!

I had talked before about lifer friends, the sort you make once and keep, back when we left Joe’s place in Pittsburgh. I was fortunate, it turned out, to be adding Flavia to that list.