Alright! Early breakfast, head out of town about 60 miles to Red Lodge for a few loops.
Well, there are the plans, and then there’s the reality. We left a little late, and we stopped at the Visitor’s Center to get some literature, and a very nice woman talked with us, regaling us with tales of life in Montana. Very enjoyable. Well, for the most part. There are bears. Ok, we have The Bear, and in the wrong mood, I probably would rather face a real grizzly, but still, this is no joking matter. I have Gretchen with me, and will be carrying her on the trails, but I really have no desire to shoot a bear, I’d much rather just scare it away. Of course, loud noises are supposed to shoo them away as well, and Gretchen can certainly make a bunch of noise, but again, I’d rather do it in a low-impact way, so off we go to find bear spray. Oh, yeah – Gretchen is my Glock model 20, in 10mm, loaded with DoubleTap 200 Grain bullets that move out at 1250 fps. Almost 700 ft-lbs of energy, and they’re used by the Sirius Sledge Patrol in Greenland to protect themselves from Polar bears, so I figured it should work for grizzly as well. I sincerely hope I never have to find out. So, off we go to get bear spray. $40 bucks for a small bottle, but what’s your life worth? Well, we figure ours are worth at least that, and we get a bottle. Barri has the spray, I have Gretchen, and Adrian … well, he’d better ride faster than either of us!
Bottom line? We get into Red Lodge proper and done with our shopping at 11:00. Ok, let’s have lunch, then we’ll ride! The guy at the store (Sylvan Peak Mountain Shop) was VERY friendly, and very helpful, and even pointed us to a great place to eat – Foster & Logan’s. Off we go! And it’s closed. Doesn’t open for half an hour! Ok, we’ll wander around town and see what’s there. End up at the local Coal Mine museum, go through it and learn all kinds of cool facts. And now, it’s lunch time! Woohoo! On the way to lunch, we see some cool recycling ideas:
A ski bench, and a ski chair:
Some folks had also used them as fence boards. Cool idea! Ok, lunch for real!
Burgers and french fries, but no Guinness, we’ll have to come back for that, and finally we’re off to ride the trail. Trail’s a little hard to find, but we finally get there, and star the ride – uphill. Why do they ALWAYS start uphill? Can’t you just ONCE park us a little high, let us breeze through the first part of the trail, and THEN kick our butts with the hills? No. I guess they can’t. But it wasn’t too bad, a service road at first, a little rocky, a little sandy, not too hard to ride, then we get to the actual trail. A little rocky, a little sandy. A little rockier, a little sandy. Ok, it’s getting quite a bit rockier, and the rocks are getting to be the size of cabbages, and it’s starting to be a challenge to ride through this stuff … this is not so much fun right now, but we’re troopers, and we keep going. We were in tall pines, so the scenery was pretty spectacular, but the ride … oh, how I hate the stutter bumps of riding on rocks. Well, thankfully, it eventually smoothed out, and the ride back was smooth and fast, until we got to the road we took up to the trail, but by this time, we were flying so fast down that hill that we were only hitting about half the rocks, Oh, lordy, please don’t do anything where I have to stop suddenly, because that is just not going to happen. Not gracefully, anyway!