Missoula MT and the Idaho Beneath it...

Well rested after a night in a ritzy hotel, you might think, eh? Well, you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. I got caught up in television- not even cable/satellite television, just good, old fashioned PBS, which was running a documentary on a "Prison Town" in California. It was danged heartwrenching... shoplifting and broken families and law enforcement school and prison life and one milk man's struggle to keep his contract with the pen... so I stayed up til 2 a.m. watching PBfreekin'S. Does this make me a loser? Yes, yes it does.

Woke early to capitalize on the breakfast buffet, and capitalize I did. I musta crammed 2000 calories worth of biscuits, scrambied eggs, Total and Cocoa Puffs (the kid in me likes the chocolatey-ness, the adult in me likes the complete nutrition), and scone after nasty little scone, down the hatch and into the boiler room.

After about 16 or 18 additional cups of crappy in house coffee, I hit the streets. Stopped in at the Lolo Forest Ranger station to talk about bears, coyotes, and fires (oh my) and got some hot leads on free camping towards the top of Lost Trail Pass. Then, it was off to downtown, by way of about 4 nifty little independent bike shops. I had missed downtown on my little twilight ride the night before, but glad I didn't haul out of Missoula after judging it solely on the suburbs. The place is bike crazy! Imagine a little denser, slightly-larger than Moorhead-sized downtown, with shopfronts from the Fargo-downtown era and design school, add a tube-, kayak,- and raft-able version of the Red River (and rename it the Clark Fork), then place the MSUM campus next to this fine waterway (and replace Dragons with Grizzlies), srout mountains to about 2300 ft and dry the landscape a bit, add a brewery, several additional bike shops, and independent bakeries, subtract a few coffee shops and tuck away some of the banks, and there you have it: Missoula, the beautiful, the bike friendly, the cosmo city of hicksville proper. Crazy. I may well settle down there someday.

The bike shops are 'cross crazy, and I hear that 29ers and hardtails are pretty much all the rage there too (odd, coming from the NW where you're either a spandexed-to-the-maxxx roadie, a safety yellow commuter, or a 8 inches of travel, full-body-armor-bombadier), beings that the surrounding countryside is laced with forest service roads that are easy up (I mean, relatively easy up) and screaming down. Fun folks at the shops, too.

I hop into the bank to change my permanent mailing address (whoops... yeah, my ex-roommates are gonna get real used to my mail in their box for a month or so...) and got pointed to the Karbala of all cyclo tourists: Adventure Cycling's World Headquarters... that's right, the folks who make all the sweet, uber-detailed trans-america bike maps are hunkered down, busy cartographer-ing and magazine-ing there in the middle of Missoula, MT. I can't believe I hadn't remembered that.

So I bolt to HQ. There's a sign on the door (whose doorknobs are a pair of drop bars wrapped in orange tape) that says a staff meeting is just about to close down the operation for an hour or two. I rush inside, asking for quick directions on easier routes south of the city and or favorite camp spots, etc... Calm down, they tell me, share some info, and then INVITE ME TO THE FRIGGIN' STAFF MEETING.

I was like, "Wha?"

And they're all like "It's really more of a presentation than a meeting. Other tourists are coming. too." [translation: don't be so weirded out, dude. you didn't win the publisher's clearinghouse, dude. dude.]

And so I wheel my bike (which I'm sorta calling Kanker-Sore-Ass-Rex, have I mentioned that? I don't talk to it constantly, but dang if she ain't a good listener...) into the courtyard, where it is free to rest with all the other cool bikes (some japanese guy named Poi has been rolling around the world with a 20" foldalble loaded with what looks like 600 pounds of gear) and then into the conference room.

Apparently, some young fella from one of them Bay Area colleges took off after his grad-gee-ation to spread the [false] gospel of climate change to the ign'ant masses of 'Merica and South 'Merica, logging 16,000 miles (yeah, the comma is in the right place- 16mo-foinK) on bike. On BIKE. With a powerpoint presentation and a list of schools, public and private, to show it off to. I have to say, the journey was impressive, but the information he doled out was less than impressive (And I'm not just saying that because global warming is a commie-pinko-muslim-ec0-weirdo conspiracy to make me feel guilty about my pickup truck). Still, it was quite the show.

Afterwards, the Adventure Cycling folks put on a little barbeque in the courtyard, and I again shamelessly carbo-loaded to my gut's content. After posing with Kankasaurus for Greg Siple's (the founder of AC) permanent collection, I thanked 'em all and moseyed.

What a day, what a welcoming little town.

Then, Karma balanced itself by giving me 2 flat tires in 5 miles, riding on the glass riddled HWY-93.

Down to a campsite not too far away (I was moving slow- forgot to mention I stopped at the Kettle House brewery for a pint of IPA after the BBQ), and then to Sula, MT (a little crossroads further on with a nice lady clerk who called me "hon" and even "baby" in what a think was a southern drawl, though it was muddled by her bullfroggish emphysema croakyness) to camp again before the pass.

Lost Trail is apparently a pass surrounded by much controversy in the world of Lewis and Clark sholarship and lore: where and when did they actually swing through here? Which creek were they describing in this passage? Which rock did they think looked like a castle here? But it's a breeze of a climb (I was panting and beat toward the top, don't get me wrong. I'm still a pansy- a pansy with 50-odd lbs. of CRAP behind him). At the top I met a family of nomadic, methed-out skateboarders. Yeah. I was weirded out too when the young mother says, between sips of Coors in a 32 oz. can "Hold on, let me get my board from the camper." "Yer headed where? Shoot, we're just goin' up to Missoula to do some boardin'." But they were friendly enough and wished me luck. I did the same.

Then down to Idaho, where the climate turns arid again and smoke hangs thick in the air. It keeps on faking like it wants to rain, so I'll haul tail and set up my tent; throw everything in and then follow after it; there I'll sit, mostly naked and sweating like a banshee, waiting for the clouds to let loose, and they never do.

Two days I've been here now, lollygagging until tomorrow, when I head back to North Fork to hook up with the work crew for the Continental Divide Trail, and it finally rains- thankfully after I portion out 35 bucks worth of dehydrated mashed potatoes, oatmeal, cous cous and trail mix into heavy duty ziploc bags and bolt to the dry comfort of the local Library. Now it's time to read the paper- (ooh, the local weekly is an editors nightmare- Kim, you'd shudder at the shoddy attempt at AP style, and Katie, you'd cringe at the grammar. Dr. Sprunger, if you're reading this (you're probably wringing your hands with disgust at my own prose, and I do apologize, I do, but I warn you against the Salmon Register and Record) and then off to the laundromat.

Take care of yourselves... and peace... pics to come soon, but I'm pushing my 1 hr. limit here, so I best skeedaddle...