Day 100 – Champion trail, Champion hike-a-bike

It was a slow morning.  We woke up to drizzles on the tarp.  I fetched the food and stove from our hanging tree in a lull, then we cooked from within the tarp.  More drizzles.  We went back to bed.  These fools don’t start rides in the rain… if at all possible.

After a nice morning’s nap, the sun started to poke its head into the forest.  Alright – time to get moving.  Still slowly.

More Nez Perce trail descending.  Chunky.  Fun.  Very good trail despite being open to motos.  Then roads!  To I-15.  I checked in on a tracker or two and emails while we still had reception.

Climbing away, we were soon on singletrack and soon smiling.  This started a very long section of good trail.  20+ miles, of perhaps higher quality than even closer to Butte.

It was much appreciated and very fun.  We did find our motivators sputtering from the morning’s nap for a while.  I was getting frustrated by 600′ climbs.  I knew it was silly given that they would be on good trail, but still, it is what it is.

Above Lowland Lake campground we met Scott and Sue who had quit their jobs in Alaska and are touring the whole spine of the Americas.  They didn’t seem to want to talk much, and rolled on after a little chatting.

We’d heard good things about the trail from there, and we can verify said good things.  Some of the easiest miles of the whole CDT, no doubt.  I’m not sure there was a single hike-a-bike in any of those miles — all the way to Champion Pass.  Just a few trees down, a couple of which I cleared.

After a second lunch at Champion the trail got more interesting.  Good trail is, well, good and all, but I think we’d get bored real quick if it was 3000 miles of at grade, machine cut trail.  That’s part of the beauty of the CDT — it is such a mixed bag and you never know what you are going to get.

The maps and GPS data seemed to be pretty clueless about the next few miles.  Both Ley and Bearcreek had proved themselves untrustworthy pretty early on (Cold Spring was a great source of water), so we put our trust on the CDT signs.  I think it was mostly well placed trust, though in one case the road might have been better/easier.

We’d spend plenty of time on the road just after that, as it barreled its way straight up the divide.  It was a 800 foot mostly unrideable push up to a pointless high point, only to steeply drop back down.  Ah, the CDT.  It’s the trail we know and love, and it was actually kind of fun to be back in the thick of things.  Like I said, never ending benchcut trail would get boring eventually.

We dropped down through the ghost town of Leadville, even though we never really saw it.  Unfortunately it’s very wet on this side of the mountain, and it never got that warm today.  This isn’t our best campsite of the trip, and it’ll probably be cold one, but… hey, it’s thru-riding.  If we wanted a perfect campsite, we’d go somewhere we knew.  But the unknown and the continued adventure of CDTbike calls us forward.

There’s much uncertainty in the trail ahead.  Talk of vandalized signs, flagged routes that go nowhere, GPS not agreeing with signs or the maps.  Should be interesting…. as long as we can make it to Elliston, MT for resupply by the end of the day.