It’s official — Fall starts on September 1st in Montana. It was just over freezing when we woke up. The sun struggled to poke its head out all morning, and we spent more time riding in jackets than not, for the first time the entire trip.
There’s a crispness in the air, one that feels great — except when the sun falls and it’s time to camp. With our minimal bikepacking gear, we’re not really all that set up for cold nights. Eszter especially struggles with cold feet.
The last two nights camping made us wish we were indoors. We decided that the combination of rain or threat of rain, and bear country makes camping a little annoying. There are so many things to set up and fiddle with. It made me wish we didn’t have a stove and were keeping things simple in the food department. When it’s cold out it’s not that appealing to fiddle with boiling water and such, too. Or maybe we’re just spoiled by all the great nights we’ve had.
A resupply of food from Elliston, suspended out of bear reach.
We would have taken a room in town if one existed. But there was a ‘thing’ in town and all 4 rooms were occupied. It ended up being a good development, because Elliston has the distinction of being the first town we wouldn’t want to linger in. The people were odd and unfriendly, the food was bad and the bar was just plain bizarre. We pedaled out of there and rejoined the CDT for a few miles, finding the camping much more palatable than the last couple nights.
The day’s riding was good. Surprisingly good trail took us out of Leadville, as we shivered wearing all of our layers. It seemed new.Â
I loved the names of the mountains in this area — Blizzard Peak, Thunderbolt Mtn, Electric Peak. Luckily all we had was cold and thick clouds.
“Come on sun!”
This area is one where I’m not sure anyone really knows what the CDT is. It’s truly choose your own adventure. The maps have some ideas, the GPS has some ideas, and the signs are mostly non-existent. We opted to skip a big climb over Thunderbolt, with the possibility of finding new trail contouring around it. There wasn’t any new trail, but the Gibbons and Bison meadows trails were good riding. I’m not sure what kind of use keeps them open, but they were in great shape…. minus the second creek crossing that we almost skipped with an XC shortcut. We got our feet soaked on all the wet grass (come on sun!), finally wandering around enough to find the trail climbing steeply, but with singletrack switchback reroutes, back to the divide.
Our next choice came at Bison Mountain. I was still skeptical of the GPS data, and Ley mentioned people intentionally moving signs around in this area. It was hard to know what to trust. We took Bison and found new CDT signs. The GPS data’s route had no signs on it and no blazes. Both were forgotten 2-tracks. People had written CDT helper notes on many of the signs using sharpies, too.
It’s funny that there isn’t better communication about this stuff and that the trail can be so ill defined. But, knowing what I’ve seen even in the development of the AZT and some of the different routes that popped up or were in use temporarily, it isn’t too surprising. There may not be anyone that truly knows what the entire CDT is, and it’s always a moving target.
Whatever the CDT is through there, it was good goings. Dropping to Ontario creek there were new singletrack reroutes around the fall-line stuff. We regained the ridge on a barely rideable ATV trail/road, then signed in relief as we hit a major graded road. That road took us all the way to Elliston, for a 16 mile roundtrip resupply. The highway is shorter, but we don’t like to ride highways when we can avoid it. Telegraph Creek was a nice route.
It’s good to be back on the trail. Hopefully we can catch up on a little sleep with a better night, then knock out most of the trail to Lincoln tomorrow. Hard to know how it’s going to go, since, as always, there’s no beta on what the trail’s going to be like, especially for bikes!
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