Day 17, St. Mary’s Campground to Many Glacier Campground: 23.2 miles, 1,407 ft. elevation gain, 11.4 mph average speed.
Trip totals: 890.7 miles (55.7 mile daily average), 55,000 ft. elevation gain, 11 mph average speed

It stormed last night, the first big rainstorm of the trip and we were lucky enough to be in our tent. The storm was short, but the rain was torrential. We have a few holes in our rainfly and we didn’t bother with the ground tarp since it really didn’t look like it was going to rain as we were going to bed, so our tent last night was probably best described as very water resistant rather than waterproof. But it was really just a little damp at the corners, not a big deal at all. At least ourselves and all of our things inside the tent fared a lot better than our freshly-washed clothes that we left on our clothesline overnight.

In any case, I woke up with more pressing priorities than damp clothes. Using Gina’s phone (thanks again, Gina!!), I called Velocity to see if they could help me. The rep answered the phone, perhaps a little hung-over, perhaps just not fully awake. (I was calling at 9:01a EST, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he had just sat down at his desk.) I told him my sob story, and he asked me a series of questions about the wheel, how it was failing, when it was made, what tire I was using, and under what pressure.

After the questions, he said, “Do you have an address to which we could ship you a new wheel?”

And that was that! Velocity is going to ship me a brand new wheel for free! He even agreed to ship it express. We’re having it shipped to the Many Glacier Hotel, and it should be there by Thursday. This is perhaps the best way this could have worked out. I get a replacement wheel for free and we get an excuse to do some hikes in the most beautiful part of Glacier National Park. Yay!

Since we were riding less than 25 miles, we decided to take it slow in the morning. We put things that got caught in the rain (helmets, shoes, the tent) into the sun and took Dan and Gina up on their offer to share their oatmeal breakfast. We finally packed up and got on the road, only to stop after about five miles when we saw a cool, funky looking restaurant called Two Sisters Cafe in the middle of nowhere between St. Mary, MT and Babb, MT. The server was a bike tourist, and regaled us with stories of his trips while we enjoyed a bison burger, an open-faced chili cheeseburger, mango-berry lemonade, and a piece of PB&J huckleberry pie (huckleberry pie meets peanut butter mousse!).

After that incredibly satisfying meal, we continued on to Babb, MT where we stocked up on groceries for the next couple of days before riding the final 12 miles into the park.

Holy headwind, Batman. It was rough! I’m not going to complain though. I want that exact wind blowing at our back for the next two weeks.

Many Glacier is beautiful. So so so beautiful. It has a rugged majesty, a feeling that this is what the world was like before humans got involved. Walking and riding around here, you just can’t help but feel awed and amazed.

We fought our way through the wind and made our way to Many Glacier campground, which was full… but not for us! The National Park Service always sets a site aside for hikers and cyclists that enter the park without a vehicle, and we headed straight to that site and set up our tent. It was still pretty early in the day, so we went out to explore our surroundings. It turns out that the campground is a five-minute walk away from the Swiftcurrent Inn, which has a camp store fully stocked with cold drinks including chocolate milk, lemonade, and single beers. What more could we want? Public hot showers? Ok! A porch that looks out onto amazing scenery where we could sit and drink a beer? Sure!

This is a great place.

We decided to make the most of our time here, and so we found a short (3.6 miles round trip) hike to Red Rock Falls. I have a feeling that we’re going to spend the next few blog posts struggling to express the beauty around us, so maybe it will just be easier to say that if anybody is wondering where they should go on their next vacation, we suggest putting Many Glacier near the top of your list.

After our hike, we came back to the inn, had a few beers on the porch, and reflected that if my wheel was going to break, this is the best possible place on our trip to be stuck for a few days. We’ll get to do a few more hikes than we thought, and we should be able to make up the day or two that we’ll lose.

Dinner was pasta with a spicy red sauce with tuna, green pepper, and carrots, and we went to bed immediately after cleaning up. Tomorrow we’re going to hike to Grinell Glacier, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful hikes in the park!

Note: Our current access to internet is very slow, and we’re having trouble with uploading pictures. I think I managed to get some pictures into this post, but I’m not positive. If not, I’ll come back and update again later.

Day 15: Montana Bike Hostel (Whitefish, MT) to Sprague Creek Campground, Glacier National Park: 35 miles, 1,392 ft. elevation gain, 12.4 mph average speed
Trip Totals: 781.4 total miles(55.8 daily average), 49,635 ft. elevation gain, 11.1 overall average speed.

Today was a great day. It was a great day for relaxing and enjoying our surroundings, for slowing down the general “we have to rush to the place we’ll be sleeping” mentality that sneaks into your mind when you’re on a bike tour.

There’s a little irony there, because today we actually did have to rush to the place we were going to sleep. Glacier National Park prohibits cyclists on certain stretches of Going to the Sun Road, the main road through Glacier. We had to ride 35 miles before 11:00a to make it to Sprague Creek Campground in the park, which several people had told us was the best place to camp on the west side of Logan Pass. There were a few hills on the way, and we decided we’d rather have too much time than too little, so we were awake at 5:15a, and on the road at 6:00a.

We were a little better informed heading out of the overpriced backyard hostel than we were coming in, so we were able to stay on paved roads heading into and through Columbia Falls. The Northern Tier route took us on back roads, since apparently sections of Route 2 between Columbia Falls and the park are terrifically dangerous for cyclists. The back roads were nice, but we had to fight against a powerful headwind for four or five miles. At that point, we turned off North Fork Road and escaped the headwind, but then we had to ride on a gravel/dirt road again, this time for 2.6 miles. As much as we don’t really enjoy riding on gravel, the experience is reminiscent of our time in Zambia. There we pretty much exclusively rode on gravel, and the best road there was less well-maintained than the worst gravel road we’ve ridden on here.

We made it through the gravel and back onto Route 2 for only of a couple of miles before we turned toward the park. We passed through West Glacier, which was a cute-looking town, but we didn’t want to stop because we wanted to get to the campground as soon as we could. The road inside the park was flat and newly paved. It’s amazing how big of a difference a beautifully smooth surface can make. We felt like we were flying! We covered the nine miles between the entrance gate and our campground in a half hour or less, which got us to the campground by 9:15a. That’s right, we were finished riding for the day by 9:15a. How exciting!

Dan and Gina arrived shortly after us, and Clive was staying a mile up the road at the historic Lake McDonald Lodge. We set up camp and headed up to the lodge, where we all passed a lovely day doing not much at all. We bought snacks, lemonade, and chocolate milk at the convenience store; sat on a bench behind the lodge and chatted and watched the lake; and ate a buffet lunch, stuffing ourselves with as many calories as possible and making sure we got our money’s worth. After lunch, Clive ran into another British biker tourist named Jules, who, funnily enough, was ALSO touring on a carbon road bike with minimal gear packed into a Carradice saddlebag. Something about these English men, apparently.

After chatting with Jules for a while, we headed back to our campsite, which, as it turns out, was situated right by a beach on Lake McDonald. We jumped into our suits and jumped into the lake, alternating between floating on top where the water was warm and diving down into the chilly snowmelt below.

When we finished swimming we headed back up to the Lodge, where Clive was kind enough to let us use the shower in his room. As Dani showered, I investigated (for what was at least the third time) a squeaking noise that my rear wheel had been making for a week. It had suddenly gotten worse, evolving from a simple squeak to a shuddering, antilock-brake shaking every time I used my rear brake. I was dismayed to discover that my rear rim was unaccountably bulging right by the valve. I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew it wasn’t good.

Dani finished her shower and headed back to the campground and I quickly cleaned myself before throwing myself into Google to try to figure out exactly what was going on. I read that bulges like mine might indicate a cracked rim, and I hurried back to camp to remove my tire to see if this was, in fact, what had happened.

Back at the campsite, I found Dani talking to a Dutch couple, Gerry and Klaas, who were biking around Southern Canada and the Northern US and had bike toured extensively in their life. They were a charming older couple, and they were full of good advice from their experience. They also developed an inspirational (at least to us) style of touring that emphasized comfort on the bike and in the campsite. Their tent was like a palace, including a vestibule to store all of their gear, and still folded down to be quite small. We’ll definitely be taking some of their tips on our next trip.

Anyways, Dani had our chicken burritos ready when I made it back to camp (what a girl!), so I didn’t look at my bike until after we ate. I took the wheel off the bike and the tire and tube off the wheel, and my fears were confirmed. My rim had developed a jagged crack at the inside joint of the rim wall and base.

This is the first big bike problem of the trip, and the fact that it’s my wheel failing is rather ironic. I have Velocity wheels, which are renowned for their toughness and durability. The rims are wide and the spoke count is high. These wheels should be able to withstand anything. When I went to my local bike shop to measure our spokes so I could get some spares, the mechanic said, “I could sell you some spare spokes if you want, but I would be shocked if you were able to break a spoke on this wheel. This might be the most solid wheel I’ve ever seen.” Several other cyclists we’ve met on our trip have echoed his sentiment. “Boy,” they all said, “You’re really ready for anything with those wheels, huh?” The word “bombproof” has been thrown around a half dozen or more times.

I guess I was ready for anything except an inexplicable wheel failure after only 5 years and 6,000 or so miles. Oops.

Klaas, who has a significant amount of on-the-road maintenance experience, took a look at my wheel and told me that I should definitely get it replaced, but that I could ride on it until it was convenient to replace it. He opined that it might even last for several hundred additional miles or more. But most importantly, he said that when it failed, it wouldn’t be some sort of catastrophic failure that would send me flying off the bike at high speed, but rather a loss of tension and balance that would break spokes and make it impossible to ride, but not before I had time to realize what was happening and slow down and get off the bike.

So that’s that. We’re climbing our last big pass of the trip tomorrow and I’m doing it on a gimpy wheel. I’m not exactly sure what we’re going to do next. We’re a few hundred miles away from the closest bike store, and I don’t know if I willing to gamble that much. I think I’m going to try to call Velocity from the other side of the pass and see what they can do for me. We’ll see!

Day 14, Eureka, MT to Whitefish, MT (and then to the Montana Bike Hostel): 63.4 miles, 3,411 ft. elevation gain, 11.5 mph average speed
Trip totals: 792.3 miles (60.9 daily average), 48,243 ft. elevation gain, 11.0 mph overall average speed

Map and stats here. 

The title of this post may be a bit misleading, since we’re only a couple of days away from taking “Going to the Sun road” over Logan Pass in Glacier National Park. But today, we raced the sun.

Yesterday, you’ll remember (or you just read), was terrible. And the fact that we were riding in 100+degree temperatures made it so much worse. Then, the other bike tourists at our warm showers place last night told us that it was going to be even hotter (!) in Whitefish, our destination for today.

We couldn’t fathom riding through that heat again, so we decided to get to Whitefish as early as possible. We woke up shortly after 5:00a, ate an AMAZING breakfast prepared by our Warmshowers host (you’re wonderful, Nikki!), and got on the road by 6:30a, an hour before our standard time.

You’d think they’d realize their mistake pretty immediately, but we saw several of these on the road today.

And that was just the first half of our race strategy. The second was to cut down on our usually numerous breaks. We took a short break 5 miles in to stretch, a brief break shortly after that to take a picture, another break 30 miles in to grab second breakfast, and then we pretty much cruised the rest of the way. Although, part of the reason for the lack of breaks was the fact that we were riding on a major-ish highway with minimal shoulder.

The shoulder in this picture is a bit of an aberration. More often they looked like the one in the picture below.

The last four miles into Whitefish were on absolutely terrible road conditions. No shoulder, horrible pavement conditions, steep rolling hills, and tons of traffic hurtling around sharp corners. Miserable. But we hear those are the worst four miles on the entire Northern Tier route, so we’re grateful to have seen the worst!

We made it into Whitefish a little after noon, and made a quick trip to the post office to mail some more stuff home (a lot of it was our cold weather gear that we brought along for Glacier; remember that record heat wave we were talking about?), and then went searching for a place that had both WiFi and smoothies. We found a little café that had both, but the smoothies were much better than the WiFi. Then we headed to the bike shop to pick up some odds and ends. While there, we ran into Dan, Gina, and Clive and we all went out for lunch at an Italian eatery next door, where I gorged myself on a giant calzone. The best part about riding 60+ miles day after day is the  enormous amount of food we get to eat. No calorie restrictions on tour!

Afterwards, we went up to Lake Whitefish and took a quick dip to cool ourselves off (heat wave). Then we pedaled to our camping place for the night, The Montana Bike Hostel and Campground. This is a side business run by a couple of folks that live almost on the way (but not quite) between Whitefish and Columbia Falls (the next town over), but a couple miles down a gravel road. We chose to camp here because we’ve had great luck with cyclist-focused lodging so far, but this was a letdown. It is run as a business that seeks to take advantage of the cycling culture around Whitefish and Glacier National Park. It exists to make money. The other places we’ve been staying have been run more for the love of cycling and helping bike tourists along their journey, without really seeking to make a huge profit.

Beautiful! But out of the way and pricey!! And notice the locked door on the hostel. They came out to lock it up after we had the audacity to go in and look around.

I guess we had no reason to expect that everyone is just going to be kind, but if we had to do it again, we’d stay at one of the other campgrounds closer to town and not come out of the way to pay the most we’ve had to pay for camping so far to pitch a tent in a guy’s yard and get lectured (citing half-truths and some outright lies) about how fair the price was and how untrustworthy and cheap cycle tourists can be.

There was also a little misunderstanding about the shower situation. When I talked to the owners on the phone, the man mentioned that there was an outdoor shower that we were free to use. When we showed up, the hosts were nowhere to be found (and didn’t answer our knocks on the door or rings of the doorbell), so we started to get set up. We pitched our tent and saw a small structure across from the bike bunk house (which we couldn’t afford) with the word “shower” across the top. “Oh,” we thought, “that’s the outdoor shower.” So we turned on the water and I jumped in the shower.

The hosts came out and started to talk to Dani as I was getting out of the shower. The first thing they told her was that we were not permitted to enter the bunkhouse (which had electricity, a cooktop, and a weak wifi signal), because those luxuries were only for people paying to stay there. Then, when we tried to pay the exorbitant camping fee, the host said, “And also $5 for the shower.”

What?!

First off, $5 for a cold shower is really steep. Secondly, he had told us that the outdoor shower was free. But, as was quickly explained to us, the shower I took was in a shack. So it wasn’t outdoors.  The “outdoor shower” he was referring to was hanging the hose from a tree in their yard and letting us stand under it.

But, as Dani said, just because an outhouse has walls and a roof doesn’t mean it’s an indoor bathroom.

Anyways, this only seems like a bad experience because we’ve encountered so many selfless, generous people who have gone out of their way to be kind to us. This serves as a reminder to us to be grateful for every kindness and not take anything for granted.

Tomorrow’s another early day! We have to make it 36 miles to our campground in Glacier before 11:00a. They close parts of Going to the Sun road to cyclists from 11:00a-4:00p, so if we don’t make it in time we’ll have a long journey ahead of us on Monday!

Day 13, Libby, MT to Eureka, MT: 74.6 miles, 5,954 ft. elevation gain, 10.6 mph average speed
Trip totals: 728.9 miles (60.7 daily average), 44,832 ft. elevation gain, 11.0 mph overall average speed

Map and stats here.

Oh boy. Heat warnings all over Montana. You know what 100+ degrees feels like, right? Pretty terrible. Now add riding a bike with no shade at all for 6 hours. No shade, but with cliffs on one side of the path that absorbed the heat and baked us from the side. Let’s just say I was not the happiest camper at the end of the day. Some kids on ATVs were complaining about how hot it was on their ATVs. I wanted to ask them to trade vehicles or stop complaining so close to me.

We started out of Libby a bit earlier than usual (7:35a), and it was actually quite cool in the morning. We had a lovely ride on a country road with rolling hills for 15 miles. Ted said he wanted to capture some of the chilliness he was feeling and put it in his pocket for later. I couldn’t agree more. We decided to enjoy the cool, calm road while we had it.

We turned onto the main route to Eureka and started climbing toward Libby Dam. We ran into our trail friends, Gina and Dan, who were exiting the dam. I don’t think we mentioned them before. We met them at the Bicycle Barn after climbing Washington Pass. Gina and Dan are moving from Sacramento to Minneapolis and decided to ride the Northern Tier during their transition. Fun fact: Gina is from Apple Valley, MN, where I lived from 1996-99, and was a year behind me at Falcon Ridge Middle School! This is the second random person I’ve met from middle school later in life (Katie, our friend from Peace Corps, also grew up in Apple Valley and went to Falcon Ridge). Anyway, we ran into them at the entrance of Libby Dam and they warned us that the climb up from the dam was steep, so we stashed our bags behind a road barrier and rode down–free!–on unloaded bikes. What a feeling! After the steep descent, we saw seven bald eagles perched on the dam and two ospreys flying from tree to tree. Ted’s family would have been in heaven!

We climbed the steep mile-long hill back to the road, sat down to eat a snack, and up rolled another trail friend, Clive (the one who is carrying very little luggage on a road bike). Clive decided to slow his pace for the day and ride along with us. We stopped at the upper dam lookout about a mile further up the road (and sort of wished we hadn’t added a couple miles onto our ride to look at the dam from the lower perspective), then proceeded on our ride. The ride was extremely hilly and we actually exceeded our largest total elevation gain of the trip, but never exceeded 2900 feet of elevation. It was just up and down all day and so incredibly hot.

We rode along Lake Koocanusa for around 50 miles. The lake is 90 miles long, is beautiful, and was formed by Libby Dam. A professional cyclist later told us that professional cyclists ride along Lake Koocanusa early in the cycling season because it’s a banana belt and good for hill training. So add five to ten degrees onto the 100 degree high for the day and that’s what we were riding in. On hills that were good for training.

There’s very little real estate along the lake, so it was pristine and very few boats were out. Clive kept our breaks infrequent and short, so we made better time than usual. I tried to tone down my complaining since we had company, but it was hard to cut it out completely. Can we talk about saddle sores here? I won’t go into detail, but let’s just say I have them and they are painful.

Just when we thought we were in the day’s downhill/flat approach to Eureka, we climbed three unexpectedly steep hills around mile 72 and ended up at a gas station at the edge of town (which, in my opinion, came straight from heaven). Upon arrival, I haphazardly threw my bike against the wall, ran inside, and bought a liter of seltzer water and a liter of chocolate whole milk. I then went to the attached Subway to chug seltzer water while Ted moved my bike to a more reasonable position, and when he returned, we quickly downed both liters of liquid. Turns out when it’s 100 degrees outside and you have stainless steel water bottles, you will be drinking 100-degree water all day. Dreaming of seltzer is what got me through the day.

After I regained a bit of composure (emphasis on a bit), we pedaled the remaining 1.7 miles into town and arrived at our warm showers host’s house, where we found Lou, the guy on the recumbent bike, and met Steph and Tom, a retired couple from the bay area riding from Oregon to Maine on a recumbent bike. They retired in their 50s and are living it up! I’ve got to start maxing out my 401k!

Our host, Nikki, was fabulous and incredibly generous. We’re having the best luck with warm showers so far and are so grateful to all of the kind souls who are so hospitable to total strangers. It really helps restore my faith in humanity. Nikki has two dogs, one of which has a happier and more proportional version of Ellie’s face, so Ted and I gushed over him all night and morning and got very homesick for Ellie.

Getting up early tomorrow to beat the heat (learned our lesson today!).