Western MT is unreal

There has been such a drastic change in the landscape since entering into the Rockies at Glacier National Park. Before then a lot of the towns were pretty similar- small, off of Route 2 with really friendly people. One had a pretty cool dinosaur museum, one night I slept under the stars and could see the Milky Way but almost al of the riding was flat, through the plains with no trees, some plaques about the history of the Blackfoot Native Americans in the regions and not much else.

We left Cut Bank, MT a few days ago and were finally able to see the wall of mountains in front of us on our ride into Glacier, starting off with pretty brutal headwinds that made us happy to begin climbing. And once we did start going up it was crazy beautiful! \

We saw trees and mountains for the first time in weeks. That night we camped in Glacier during a pretty narly storm but it was awesome, I was able to fit in a fast hike to a waterfall during the day and the day after we climbed the Continental Divide, up road to the sun! I had some bike trouble, my derailer broke mid climb so I unfortunately wasn’t able to make it all the way up so I was a little bummed out but I got over it and still had a fun adventure on the bus ride town. 

We stayed in Whitefish, and awesome place with a really nice downtown for two days after because we had a build day there (our last one!) And we road to Eureka and now Whitefish since then. Our rides the past few days have been some of the most beautiful the entire trip, it’s been incredible, going through the Kootenai National Forest, stopping for lunch near incredible lakes, it’s been awesome. And tomorrow we leave Montana and are headed to Sandpoint!

Open Sky Country

Powers Lake was a really small town, around 200 people, but a lot of the community came out for dinner in the park and a bike clinic so that was really nice, and we just played games in the park until going to bed so it was a great night. But it was pretty crazy that it was the only town we came across all day, we had lunch in front of a gas station which was closed and that was the only store or even building that I saw until Powers Lake. The day after we rode into Montana, re-routed from Route 2 and ended up at Brush Lake camp ground which was a lot of fun even though there were no trees to be found. We haven’t had the chance to camp since New York so we hung out in the lake and played assassins. Yesterday we had a really pretty ride into Culbertson, with an awesome decent the last two miles and today we are in Wolf Point.  

Route 2

After about 250 miles of flat and windy riding along Route 2 in North Dakota, from Crookston to Devils Lake to Rugby (where we had prom!), to Minot, which we rode into during a storm and then stopped for a build day to help with flood damage from last year, we finally went on a different road (!) into hillier land to end up in Powers Lake, for our last day in North Dakota! It’s been quite an experience.