Welcome to our Great Divide documentation!
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elisawoodham@gmail.com
Beautiful|Mountains|Rainy
by Elisa
The day started with clearing out our temporary home and making the RV look presentable before bidding goodbye to our lovely hosts.... The first stop of the day was the post office to mail the weight we had deemed excess back to California. We had gotten rid of both of our fork bags each and were hoping to up the mileage as we pushed for the finish line. After patronizing the post office and getting back onto our route, we passed the college and large parks on a bike path before hopping onto the main highway out of town. The stretch to our turnoff was brutal and we fought major headwinds and a steady upward slope before turning onto a gravel road and continuing the climb. The wind pushed us around until we finally entered the trees and started up a twisting mountain road. A little deterred by our slow progress, we finally finished the seemingly unending climb and stopped at the top for another snack, finding a rock off the trail to eat some cookies and various other treats. I stretched my back out by laying across Ziven as he stood and shook me up and down and we were a little embarrassed as a set of southbound riders passed us as we were doing these strange gymnastics. I took a picture of some funny white flowers and we continued on, enjoying the downhill only to start climbing again.
We delved deeper into the forest and slowly entered logging country, taking another quick break at an intersection where a huge logging truck came barreling up the sketchy road. We descended the road, which became a little too rowdy for me at some points, and continued along some logging roads with crazy drop offs on the downhill side. A series of abandoned shacks were clustered around the road as we stopped for a quick snack before popping out onto a tundra-like plateau where I had to lower my tire pressure due to the poky rocks that were making my life more difficult than it needed to be (I plead the fifth!) We continued to descend after that flat spot and passed a few southbound riders who complained about the steepness and bumpiness, which we agreed with before continuing on. After a quite steep avalanche chute-style slope, the road finally smoothed out and became flatter, entering a mellow forest with mailboxes dotting the edge of the road. We wound our way along this path and the road turned to asphalt as we neared town. Passing more spread out houses, I realized that I might have conflated Lincoln, Montana and Lincoln, Nebraska and rectified my expectation that we were entering a medium sized city. With this straightened out in my head, we were spit out on mainstreet and cruised through the town aka the few establishments and many cute log houses.
We located the city park that we had identified online as having camping and registered for a spot near the (free!) showers and next to some CDT hikers. We set up our tent and unloaded a few bags before heading across the street to a diner where we got dinner and a milkshake, soaking in the 50s decor and enjoying the people watching. We headed all the way across town (a two minute ride) to the grocery store and stocked up on food for the next few days, racing against the clock to checkout before the store closed. Believing we didn't have enough snacks that would get us through our upcoming long days (aka sugar), Ziven had us stop at the gas station and found our favorite yummy snacks and some desert for later as well. We stowed away our purchases in the bear box and took turns showering with our singular towel, enjoying the hot water then settling back into the tent for some TV and dessert before bed.