Libby, Montana

-
Yesterday it was Labor Day. We celebrated in our usual manner: bike riding. We left a beautiful campsite near the Tobacco River and headed toward Lake Koocanusa. The lake was formed by damming the Kootenay River in 1972 and it wiggles and wanders for fifty miles of our Northern Tier route. We spent just about the entire today riding along its eastern shores and it was gorgeous.

Sheer rock faces rose above us on our left hand side and the lake came in and out of view to our right. When we looked at the elevation profile for this stretch, it seemed fairly flat. Detail and scale are important. Zoom in and the route looks more like saw teeth. The climbing made the distance a little more challenging but traffic was light and the views more than made up for it. The weather has been great recently - summer is holding on just a little longer.

In the early evening we arrived in Libby and sized up the town. We'd done five days of riding since our last break. It seemed like a nice place so we took the day off today.

Here are the events of today in no particular order of time or significance: We went to a coffee shop and got breakfast burritos and a smoothie, stopped by the post office and mailed the wallet we found to Alberta, bought me a pair of sunglasses after my old ones got too scratched up, ate lunch at the local brewery (it was good), bought some orange cord for tying our food bag up a tree and away from bears, I got a haircut, relaxed at the grocery store deli lounge, took showers at a laundromat because the campground doesn't have them, poked around on the internet, and Rach made us a campfire. Great rest day.

The bikes are holding up fine and we're hanging together too. It doesn't seem so far to the Pacific but our route does a lot of squiggling around mountains on our way west. If all goes well, tomorrow we'll be in Idaho.

Yesterday's ride: 67 miles

Our friendly camp neighbors who work for the National Park
Service told us this was a golden eagle

Koocanusa Bridge

Big Wall

Just hanging on

If you say so

Libby Dam, had a great observation platform

Closing in on the town

Fishing is popular in Montana

Comments

  1. the Old GuySeptember 4, 2018 at 8:09 PM

    Looks like its getting colder, no? Did you eat the fish?

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownSeptember 5, 2018 at 3:06 PM

    Stunning

    ReplyDelete
  3. CheriSeptember 5, 2018 at 4:03 PM

    When Mike, Jr. was little at Mammoth Lakes, you called a mountain the "humongous rock." There certainly are a lot of humongous rocks in your photos - such lovely sites!

    Ride safely.

    Cheri

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One More Day

-
Image
It was intensely windy as we woke up at the Leo Carrillo campground in Malibu. My Dad's tent nearly blew away as he was taking it down. As we pushed our first few pedal strokes back on Pacific Coast Highway the breeze blew up clouds of dust and grit that made it hard to see. Thankfully it was worst at the start and eased off as the miles rolled by. Then, on to familiar sights: Topanga Canyon, the Getty Villa, the Santa Monica Pier and the beach bike path. After a lunch time break of a few pizza slices we rode over to the marina to check on the boat. All is well. A little dirty but it looks largely the same as we left it and ready to be restored to its former glory, or even better. We had a few more miles to go so we waved goodbye to the boat and hopped back on the bike path toward Hermosa Beach. My Aunt Kellie, Uncle Randy, and cousin Will live there and were very gracious to host us for Halloween. We ate an incredible home-cooked dinner of chili and corn bread and Caesar salad. ...
Read more

San Francisco

-
Image
Thankfully the rascally raccoons of Olema didn't get quite every bit of food and we still managed to put together a decent breakfast on Friday before our ride into San Francisco. As we approached the city the roads became busier, the neighborhoods more dense, and the turns more frequent. The turns initially made a welcome change from spending 50 miles a day on highway 1 but then grew tiresome. There was much checking of directions as we wound through Marin County and it slowed us down considerably. Thankfully one of our hosts for the weekend, Joven, rode out to meet us as a grocery store and he took the lead towards the Golden Gate bridge. We stopped for some obligatory photos along with 1000 other people. The ride over the bridge was windy but fun. Joven, his wife Katelyn, son Tino, and dog Artie generously put us up for a couple of nights as we had a rest day to give us time to catch up with each other. As a bonus, Blake (whom we stayed with in New York) was also in town. The r...
Read more

It's The People

-
Image
The last few days have been all about friendly faces. We began riding down a sunny stretch of coastal highway when a dark grey fog bank loomed ahead. It felt like we would enter the mist and ride 100 years back in time. More realistically, we rode to a town called Davenport and got pastries and a coffee for my Dad. Next major milestone was riding through Santa Cruz, Aptos, and finally through rolling apple orchards to Watsonville. My childhood friend Mike Haney and his girlfriend Amanda were kind enough to drive down from Mountain View to join us for a Mexican food dinner. They had just taken a weekend away on the northern California coast. They stayed near Gualala in a lodge with Russian architecture - we took photos of it for the blog only a few days prior. We told tales about the trip, and then moved on to Yogurtland to swap more stories over dessert. It was great to see them and especially nice of them to drive to meet our route. With all the socializing we didn't even turn...
Read more