First and foremost I want to thank all of the folks that have been so generous and pledged a contribution to Healing American Heroes. It really is inspiring to get off the trail after 3 days of riding and see more are sponsoring, thanks. Rosie Babin and the volunteers are getting to help more and more of the wounded by your thoughtfulness and caring.
A special thanks to our friend Tom Lafleur who came up from San Diego to drop us off and take John Witzel's car back to San Diego. Hope we don't run into any of the mountain lions like the one Tom saw while fishing a river after dropping us off eating a deer a hundred feet away!
Prior to crossing the border we said a prayer for God to watch over us and to keep our families safe and to thank those that have sacrificed for us. We start all our rides with a prayer, sure seems to be working to know that He is there with us.
Our Saturday launch began pouring rain and lightening within 10 minutes of crossing the Canadian border back into the U.S. We rode for 62 miles going through some really beautiful Montana farmland, lots of horses and cattle in very green meadows. We started our first climb over Whitefish Pass at noon and crested it about 3pm right when it reached 96 degrees! The downhill ride was beautiful through pine forests and a vista of huge mountains surrounding our descent. You really have to watch your speed going down gravel roads with a 40+lbs one-wheeled trailer behind you, hitting 20 mph and the thing starts to sway back and forth. We ended the day around 6pm after finding a beautiful campsite along the North Fork Flathead River with an absolutely breathtaking view of the mountains in Glacier National Park. By the way if you stand on a dirt road looking at a map in Montana you get someone to stop and offer you assistance, the people here really are very friendly and want to help, which is how we found our campsite.
Sunday we were out of camp by 8am, seems it takes us about 2 hours to eat, refresh our water, breakdown our tents and repack our trailers. We were off and ran into three folks on bikes, a husband wife from Australia and a godson from the U.K. They had started in Arizona and were biking well past Banff. We are just going to the NM-Mexico border, these second timers on the Great Divide Ride sure have us beat! Great conversation with them comparing stories, but it also caused us to lose focus and we missed our turn up to the second big climb to cross the Divide at Red Meadows Lake. That cost us 30+ extra miles and an extra climb too boot. We have learned a hard lesson, pay attention at every intersection to where you are going! We ended up going 50 miles but only doing 17 trail miles and spending the night camping at Upper Whitefish campgrounds instead of a hotel in the town of Whitefish. But even with all that frustration we still enjoyed the spectacular views of Red Meadow Lake and the surrounding mountains.
Monday, August 1st we a got out of camp at 8am and headed downhill to Whitefish, a great, but initially cold ride to a beautiful town on Whitefish Lake. We got some repairs done at Glacier Cyclery (nice folks and very helpful) and then headed off to BigFork on a mostly flat ride, well at least no big climbs. Here again, we went through beautiful farmland, very green pastures. We called ahead from the road to be sure had a place to stay and were in luck, a bed, a beer and a burger. Had a great nights sleep and now we are ready to make steep climb on Day 4 of the ride. It will probably be a couple of days before we can catch up again. Still working on getting pictures into the posts from my iPad.
