Day 10 - Butte, MT to Wise River, MT

What a day... One of those days with super highpoints and deeply depressing low points.  Things began with a literal cloud over us- a really wet cloud! We rolled out at 7:00am with rain coming down in buckets. Which wasn't helped by the fact that I spent 20 minutes tearing my stuff apart looking for my rain gloves, which apparently got left someplace over the last week.. but... Wet as we were, we met up for a great father's day breakfast with my son Niall who drove all the way to Butte from Seattle with his girlfriend Christina. That was a clear high point!  The low point was quick to follow, however...  After breakfast, Mike and I debated taking a rest day, but the weather forecast for Butte was not improving tomorrow, and it looked like things might get better if we could get farther south and into a another valley this afternoon. So... We headed to the Butte True Value Hardware just down the street, and picked up new rubber gloves, and some cheep vinyl ponchos to see if we could just ignore the rain if we could stay warm & dry.  By 9:00am, we were back on the road and eagerly following a new Google maps route out of town, as we again decided riding in mud on the GDMBR route was a non- starter, particularly with the notorious Fleecer Ridge on the schedule for today's route...

So...we gamely headed out in the rain up a long, steep 1000' climb to the southwest,

which then turned to wet gravel, and after 13 miles, a 20% plus grade private road of pure mud. After frantically rechecking Google maps, we determined that we'd been sent on a collosal bum route, and backtracked all the way back to downtown Butte to try again.

Iti's a good thing it was raining as hard as it was, as it pretty well drowned out  the considerable level of cursing that might have otherwise been heard all over Butte.  This time we just went straight to the interstate on-ramp and rolled west as fast as we could manage with our $8 ponchos flapping in the wind. We followed I-90 and I-15 for about 20 miles west and then south and as we climbed up yet another long pass over the continental divide, the sun broke through the clouds, and the day took a complete 180 for the better.

The temperature bumped up to about 55F from the chilly 46F start, and the mountains emerged from the clouds with rain squalls blowing by to both our north and south Miraculously, we stayed dry.  By a little after 2pm, we reached Feely, MT, and with Mt. Fleecer looming in the clouds to our west... And I saw my first Pronghorn Antelope of the trip! Plenty of sheep too... after another 10 or so miles we reached the Big Hole River Canyon to turn west toward our destination at Wise River.

  The Big Hole is one of Montana's destination trout fisheries, and the river was filled with fisherman in drift boats casting as they headed downstream.  Next time I'm here, I'll leave the bike at home and bring my fly rod!  The scenery all through this section was stunning, but we still had 22 miles uphill into a 20mph block headwind. No fun to ride through, but we eventually rolled into our cabin at Wise River Club at about 3:45pm.

It was quite the "easy" day we were hoping for, but it ended well, with a good warm, dry room, and a great meal at the H-bar-J Saloon just up the street! As I write this, we're trying to figure out the next several days, as weather still looks challenging, but hopefully better than this morning! Fingers crossed that things go well!

Cheers from the GDMBR :-)