June 26, 2010 - Day 1

June 26, 2010 - Day 1
The day began at 4:30am with a shuttle ride from Whitefish to Roosville on the US/Canadian border. Yes, a shuttle, as we knew we would not make it to the campsite without killing ourselves. At 7am we crossed into Canada, only to snap a photo, have our passports stamped and turn right back again into the US to begin our ride. We were blessed with glorious sunshine and blue skies. A perfect start!










10 miles across the border we had a great breakfast in Eureka with a grand stack of blueberry pancakes.

The ride was mostly on paved country roads until we hit the beginning of the Whitefish Divide pass, which was a forest gravel road.



This divide brought us from approximately 2,500ft to just over 5,200ft. We were quite tired but made it to our camp site, Tuchuck campground.


We thought we would have at least a few hunters or backwoods campers, but not a person in sight, just us and a few curious mule deer.

The area we cycled through on day one has the largest concentration of Grizzly and Black Bears in the continental US. We are each carrying bear repellent spray but have been fortunate not to have used it! We did not see any bears however, just some hairy bear poo on the road, although we did hear a bear cub crying for momma in the woods.



The campsite was a basic forestry service campground, just a pit toilet, a picnic table and a fire grate. Plenty of water was available in the nearby creek, to make our first dinner of dehydrated macaroni and cheese. This, along with cous cous was pretty tasty and hit the spot – we were just missing some nice cold beer to wash it down.


The trees in the campground were all Lodgepole pine, which have no suitable large branches on which to hang food from and hence, away from the bears. Since we were alone in the campground, we decided to investigate the possibility of storing all our food and scented items overnight o in the pit toilet. Fortunately, the Tuchuck pit toilet just has to be one of the cleanest and non-smelly toilets in the whole of the US! This seemed to work well, as we were not visited by any bears during the night, although a little critter did nibble through the bottom of the garbage bag.