After our normal huge breakfast we hit the road around 08:30. Leaving Boulder we turned onto a nice gravel road alongside a beautiful river. And that was what we rode pretty much all the way to Continental Divide crossing #5. We had a 30 mile climb up various beautiful drainages and really enjoyed the ride. The descent was found lacking- only 7 miles and we had to pedal hard in several places… and did I mention the headwind? Every day we have had a headwind- we are both excited to ride with a tailwind when it finally turns.
We ate dinner in the very historic, cool and mountainous mining town of Butte, MT. It is a place to which we would like to return and do some exploring one day.
We had a lovely pizza dinner (where I had a pale shale ale and Johnny D had a galena (PbS) gold) did laundry and picked up our supplies at the PO. Tomorrow AM we will do breakfast, hit an outdoor store to replace a water filter, pick up lunch supplies at the grocery store and then go to the UPS store to mail some stuff back. We don’t rest much…
Daily totals: 44 miles and 3,400′ climbing
Our new friends John & Peggy we met at dinner tonight – surely two of Butte’s finest:
The Boulder river:
Some pretty roads today:
The landscape has changed to sagebrush plains and forested hills:
We rode along a drainage that was worked with a sluice a long time ago; miles of this stream bed had been dug up and then sluiced for gold, with pile after pile of tailings deposited on site:
Lots of wildflowers:
Beautiful fields of vermilion thistle:
Johnny D took a picture of me photographing a wily thistle:
A beautiful Montana homestead in a very remote area:
Butte has old head frames from abandoned mines everywhere:
And beautiful old homes dating back to mining boom times in the late 1800’s:
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