More Montana Madness

After a short ride into Helen, we looked to make it about 85 miles to Butte today, with clean bikes and clean clothes!(A luxury on theTD!)

As usual, there was plenty of climbing, starting with a 1700’ climb immediately to start the day. Now, we did a abundance of planning and knew there were three major climbs (1700’, 700’, 2300’) for us today, but as I said in previous posts, things are never what they seem! See, what makes things tough is the little ups and downs that add up This day actually had over 8000’ of climbing. That’s kind of important when riding a 60 pound bike!

At any rate, we made our way through Basin, MT and over another climb into Butte.

It was a fairly uneventful day, as Tour Divide days go….except:

When we finally got into Butte, and located our lodging, which we hastily booked at the last second, it was overbooked. Others in check-in were berating the very young looking receptionist who, at that point was in tears. Rather than adding to her problems, Ray and I simply cancelled our reservation (she was very thankful), found a room across the street and after a quick clean up, went in the hunt for food at 9 PM One quickly discovers that only pizza joints are open that late and since we were on foot, PapaJohns it was.

We hit the hay at 1100, looking forward to our ride to Wise River and the climb over the infamous Fleecer Ridge.

Thanks for riding along!!

We’re Southbound and Down!

Shane and Ray