Darren suggested breaking up the journey from Glacier NP to Missoula, a college town in Montana, by staying at a mountain bike retreat. Located just outside Whitefish Montana, it serves as a bike rental shop, bike playground and campsite in one. I was bribed with “a bike ride to a brewery, and a camping spot to boot”. OK, I’ve done brewery bike rides before, how hard can it be.
It was actually a cool place to camp – individual spacious camp spots, complete with a bike rack. The finer details were bike-themed, re-using old bike parts in some ingenious way – a bike fork for a campfire poking stick, wheels for camping pitch numbers, pedals for toilet roll holders.
While we were preparing for our bike ride, some deer dropped by to keep us company. Meanwhile, a frenzied woodpecker was head-butting a nearby tree.
I liked the bike I was given. Nice big 29” tyres and even though it wasn’t full suspension, it felt nice and bouncy.
We started with the ‘fun’ on-property trails, which Darren said would be good practice for the ride to the brewery. This turned out to be a set of looped single track trails with banked curves, hazardous drops, and bridges made from single planks of wood. Essentially an obstacle course of steep bits and narrow bits. So of course that didn’t go so well. Darren tried to teach me some basics, but soon got frustrated with my lack of talent and ambition. Better to just bite the bullet and get on with the proper ride.
Having survived and subsequently recovered as I’m writing this, even I would admit it was kinda fun. But my god it was hard. It was all single track which is enough to freak you out by itself. I’m pretty sure I set a new max heart rate on the uphill sections, I could hear the blood pumping in my head with the combination of adrenaline, altitude and general unfit-ness. As for the downhill sections, well – I thought I was going to die. My lungs got to take a bit of a breather but not my heart, that was in my mouth. As for my arms, they took the brunt of it, gripping on to the handlebars as if my life depended on it (which it did).
By the time we got to Bonsai Brewing Project in downtown Whitefish, I was so in need of that beer. I think maybe tomorrow, I’ll do a hike instead!