Brian Richardson
Town parks are great places to camp on a bike trip for several reasons: they’re typically in the center of town—close to food and other services—they often have tables for cooking and covered areas to hide from the rain, and they’re free. One of the downsides of camping in a park, however, is that is it can hard to escape noise and light pollution. This morning, we were woken up two hours early by headlights and a car alarm in the otherwise empty parking lot of the Twin Bridges town park. When our usual wake-up time of 6:30 rolled around, we were all rubbing our eyes packing up camp, and we were still yawning for the first few miles of biking.
We pedaled ourselves awake by the time we arrived in Nevada City, an historic Montana mining town. The town consists of fifteen buildings still standing from a gold rush in the 1860s, along with several other historic buildings that were transported here from around the state in the 1950s to create a kind of open air museum.
Breakfast and stretching in Nevada City, MT
Fueled by a mid-morning blueberry muffin, we started up our big climb for the day. Our journey through Montana so far has followed a pattern: parallel a river through a valley, pass over a mountain range to the west, repeat. Last week we left the Lochsa River to pass over the Bitterroot Mountains, then followed the Bitterroot River before traversing the Sapphire and Anaconda Mountains into the Big Hole Valley. Yesterday we climbed the Pioneer Mountains to the Big Hole River, which took us to Twin Bridges. Today, we continued the cycle over the Gravelly Range and up the Madison River. Much like the last few days, this climb was steep and sunny and gifted us with a gorgeous and terrifying view of the next range to come.
Friend and Michael cross over the Gravelly Range
The descent into the Madison River Valley and—our next obstacle—the Madison Range
In the afternoon, with a tailwind behind us, we chugged along up the Madison Valley to a campsite by the river. This puts us less than 40 miles from Yellowstone National Park and the Wyoming border, and solidly in grizzly bear country. We’re happy to have bear vaults in our campsite, where we can lock up our food, toiletries, and other scented items.
Friend cruises along with a tailwind
Bear vaults and sunsets at our West Fork campground
With another big day ahead of us, we’re headed to bed early—as soon as the sun goes down at 9pm. We’re hoping that our primitive campsite will give us some reprieve from car alarms if not from grizzly bears.
