Polebridge to Whitefish, MT - 42 miles, Avg speed - 8 mph
Up early, on the road about 7.10am, had to hang on for the bakery to open so we could pick up another order of cinnamon rolls for the road, fresh out of the oven! The road back up to where we left off was steep, but not too horrible. The road up to Red Meadow Lake was beautiful, and started off with a benign gradient which steadily increased to around 10-12% until we were all hurting.
Finally, we hit the Red Meadow Lake, which was stunning, and celebrated with a quick brew and, yup, you guessed, a cinnamon roll. We tried out Starbucks instant coffee for the first time. This was so good we thought about filming ourselves and sending it to Starbucks for a commercial! Another bit of good news is that there is a teeny error in the Adventure Cycling maps, which show another 2 miles of climbing after Red Meadow Lake. It’s wrong, Red Meadow is actually pretty much the top! So instead of facing more climbing we enjoyed a fantastic downhill on some pretty good dirt road. Numb Stuff’s made up for the torture inflicted on the uphill by flying down the downhill. At one point, Jiggleless saw his bob flying about a foot off the ground! We are thinking of renaming Numb Stuff “The Flying BOB” Other than a few little uphills, we cruised back into Whitefish around 3:30pm. First stop, bike shop (Jiggleless’ chain needed adjusting and Dirtbaby needed a new tire – another few bucks paid to Glacier Cyclery!)
Second stop, of course, the brew pub, where we celebrated hooking up with our support team as they arrived from their 3-day drive from California to meet us! First agenda…introduce the support team to Going to the Sun India Pale Ale. Second agenda…find a place to spend the night. Judy hooked us up at the KOA camp in Whitefish, where the nice showers and clean facilities were greatly appreciated. Jiggleless got a rub down by Judy. Numb Stuff was totally out of it, following beer, wine, Crater Lake vodka.
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