An Excellent Adventure

Day 31 After a good night's rest following a great Yellowstone vacation, we spent a long morning at the Man Cave re-packing our things in biking mode as well as doing various chores on the internet. We finally left around 2pm and rode to the Warm River Rail Trail where our journey continued southward. The rail trail was an old railroad bed that had been converted to a multi-use (bike, hike, equestrian, snowmobile, atv) trail. Originally built in 1908, this was the railroad that took passengers from Salt Lake City to West Yellowstone via Ashton to access the park. Remember the old railway station in West Yellowstone? This was the railroad went there. The railroad was later owned by Union Pacific who operated it through 1979. A cool old tunnel along the rail trail At the end of the day, we camped at a nice National Forest campground called Warm River. Apparently the river was not all that warm (like 50-something degrees); it is just warmer than some other rivers, especiall...

Day 26 With backcountry permit in hand Jonathan and I packed up at the Yellowstone Canyon campground and set off for three days in the woods. We planned to spend five more days in the park and would spend the first three on a hike to "4B1," a backcounty site at the Joseph's Coat hot springs. To get to the site we (1) hitchhiked to the trailhead, (2) hiked 8 miles down the Wapiti Lake Trail, then (3) bushwacked for  2 more miles off trail. This was my first ever experience with bushwacking (map + compass) travel-- I somehow never managed to go on the map and + compass hikes our college's outdoor rec program (ORGT) hosted. Jonathan had been to this site before when he worked at Yellowstone in the summer of 2009 and is versed in map + compass so he lead the way, and I learned a lot. We successfully arrived at Joseph's Coat that evening after a fun day of hiking and set up camp where we would stay for two nights.  It was a really special place-- both because Jonath...

Warning: this post contains fewer pictures than usual near the beginning, but there are more near the end :) Day 24 We began unpacking our camping gear from our bikes to get ready to take it into Yellowstone in backpacks, but we quickly ran into a snag: no backpacks to pack. Travis had kindly offered to lend us his backpacking backpacks for our Yellowstone trip, and we were planning to use these for or Yellowstone mini-vacation, we arrived earlier than we originally said we would, and Travis was not there, and neither were his backpacks. This was our fault for gaining time and changing our plans and arriving early. We began looking for alternatives that would allow us to get into the park on an earlier schedule, like renting backpacks from local outfitter stores, but it turns out that while you can rent ATV's, snowmobiles, bicycles, and a host of other things in the area, nobody rented backpacks. On the plus side, we would still get to backpack in Yellowstone a few days later ...

Day 20 We climbed out of the Wise River Valley and descended into the Grasshopper Creek valley, which was completely different and hardly had any trees. We stopped to resupply at the small Ma Barnes' Country Market off by itself a little way off the byway. We mailed some postcards in the town of Polaris, MT, whose only two establishments appeared to be a post office and a school. We camped at a state park at the town of Bannack, Montana, whose main distinguishing feature is that it is a ghost town. We met several other bicycle tourists who were staying there: a California man, a double father-son duo from Pennsylvania (all four traveling together - this was the sons' college graduation present), and another solo rider from Montreal. All were traveling our same route. Day 21 We left the state park and crossed Bannack Bench, a relatively low ridge that took us out of the Grasshopper Valley. We had read that the main route that day (which involved a pret...