Day 102 – Last full day on the CDT proper

Tires sliding on rock, heads continually scanning the horizon.  Hoping, hoping that the next false summit will be true.  Feet sliding, too.  Incredulous.  This is an unholy climb. It’s late in the day, and we wish it was later so it would be camp time.

Yet another ATVish rubble fall-line climb, right along the divide.  The target? Black Mountain, a 8400′ peak that towers above everything in the immediate 60 mile radius.  True to CDT form, the trail inches to within 50′ of the summit, then decides to ‘contour’ around and begin its descent.

CDT signs pointed onto an ATV track that is even more ill-used than the one we were on.  Oh boy. Why did we push bikes all the way up here?

Singletrack.  Bench cut.  Massive switchback platforms.  Righteous trail.  This is why we pushed bikes up here!

The gnarled forest of the divide’s ridge seemed to dance in the golden hour light.  Flat spots called out to us… it is time to rest.

Today was our last full day on the CDT.  We’ll ride more tomorrow, then drop into Lincoln for resupply and also detour around a series of Wilderness and Parks (Scapegoat, Bob and Glacier).  It’s definitely a bit of a bittersweet ending to the trail we have called home for so long.

The day started with an electric sunrise, as seen from our divide perch.  The wind had howled all night, and continued.  We moved ‘camp’ over to the food tree to find more shelter so we could cook and pack up.

Trail was good, disappearing in meadows and full of sweetness in the trees.  It looked like it was going to be smooth sailing to the next highway crossing.

Ouch.  100+ trees down, and of a nasty sort — lots of branches and extraneous stuff making travel very difficult.  An hour’s hard effort into the day, we had failed to cover even 2 miles.

We eventually said ‘enough’ and made a beeline for the edge of the trees, hoping a meadow awaited.  The cows I could see on the horizon were a good sign — open ground to skip around the rest of the blowdowns.

The next challenge of the day was of the technical sort — rocks!  Some rideable, some walkable, some just perfectly challenging.  In the middle we ran into a wildlife biologist that gave us a low down on some of the goings on in this forest.

Some trail later, we popped out a some communications towers, crossed the highway and began a 1200′ climb to still more towers. 

1000 feet of descending through the ‘death by 1000 rocks’ section (which wasn’t all that bad) brought us to Priest Pass and the divide route.  I love it how we kept doing major descents down to the high points of the divide route — which seem so high and mighty when you ride that route.

We looked for divide riders as we ate lunch, but none appeared.  Nice trail took us around the next hillside and into some crazy woods.  A steep trail connected to a very old railroad grade that featured a disintegrating trestle that was one of the coolest things I’ve seen on this trail.  You never know what you’ll see out on the trail.  The brief section on the grade we rode was superb singletrack!

Eventually we ended up on some descent quality roads, climbing along the divide to the tune of huge views.  We popped in the ear buds and I had some good time to reflect on the trip as a whole and all we’ve been through.  It’s hard to process or grasp it all.

We ran into Billy from Austin, touring the divide route but trying to detour into Helena.  When we told him we were doing the CDT, not the divide, he replied, “oh, that’s the orienteering version of the divide, right?”

That’s one way of putting it!

More steep but good quality roads followed.  We  couldn’t find a piped spring that was supposed to be our next water source.  Looking ahead, we were on the same road for the next 5 miles, so even if it were steep, that might only be an hour of riding. 

We rolled on to Dana Spring, which was a good source.  Second lunch gave us the energy to tackle the 1300′ climb to Black Mountain.

This will be our fourth night out since Butte.  Definitely looking forward to a little town time, some rest in a bed, and then some easy riding on the divide route!  It’ll be with some relief but also a little bit of sadness that we leave the CDT tomorrow.