"If the roar of a wave crashes beyond your campsite, you might call that adventure.  When coyotes howl outside your tent--that may be adventure.  While you're sweating like a horse in a climb over a 12,000-foot pass, that's adventure.  When a howling headwind  presses your lips against your teeth, you're facing a mighty adventure.  If you're pushing through a howling rainstorm, you're soaked in adventure.  But that's not what makes an adventure. It's your willingness to struggle through it, to present yourself at the doorstep of Nature.  That creates the experience.  No more greater joy can come from life than to live inside the 'moment' of an adventure.  It may be a momentary 'high', a stranger that changes your life, an animal that delights you or frightens you, a struggle where you triumphed, or even failed, yet you braved the challenge.  Those moments present you uncommon experiences that give your life eternal expectation.  That's adventure!" FHW 

On the St. Mary's Lake "Going to the Sun" campground, Glacier National Park, Montana.

Riding 62 miles the first day of the tour, and the next day, climbing up a huge pass road for six hours, well, it kicked our butts. We enjoyed hot showers, and then, hit our sleeping bags.  Dead asleep in seconds!  Slept 12 hours!

During the night, I woke up for a bathroom break with an ornery feeling of unfairness at the ticket the ranger gave us at the top of the pass. A warning would have been sufficient.  I wrote the letter to the park superintendent in my head several times.  At the end of this ride, he will, or at least his office secretary, will get a piece of my mind.  In it, I called him on the lack of communication at the entrance as to bicycles, and that single sign "Bicycle restrictions 11 to 4" carried no understanding of any penalties or exactly what it meant.  It gave no indication of a $130.00 fine for riding your bicycle up the mountain. 

In my letter, I said, "Who else picked up 10 pieces of trash on the way up the pass?  Who ran over eight little critters up that road for roadkill? Cars not our bicycles!  What 'safety concerns' when it was bumper to bumper traffic from 8:00 a.m. onward? Who else ascended that highway with no carbon exhaust that's melting all the glaciers?  Who else rode into the parking lot NOT creating an overcrowded nightmare?"

I discussed the problems in the park and presented solutions. It'll be interesting to hear back from him.  Most bureaucrats sit on their rotund butts, and usually, accomplish very little.  That bicycle law should have been clarified long before we arrived.  Most distressing: that money goes to the U.S. Government.  I asked him to take $130.00 out of his pocket and set it to my favorite charity where it would do some good: North American Blue Bird Society.

Beyond that, I slept like a rock.  Also, on tour, you just have to forgive and forget.  You just have to get down the road.  No sense letting any incident bother you.  Otherwise, you suffer more than the transgressors.  For all the litter I have picked up over my lifetime, I forgive every one of the "trashy little bastards" who desecrate the natural world.  

 "Energy is the currency of the universe.  When you 'pay' attention to something, you buy that experience.  So when you allow your consciousness to focus on someone or something that annoys you, you feed it your energy, and it reciprocates the experience of being annoyed.  Be selective in your focus because your attention feeds the energy of it and keeps it alive.  Not just within you, but in the collective consciousness as well."     ~ Emily Maroutian

David and I walked over to the restaurant in the morning.  We talked to the campground host, Sue, retired, and loving every summer at Glacier. She worked for 20 years at 14 hours a day, received a retirement package and with it, bought a motorhome.  She loves being a campground host, I think for no pay, as she meets people from all over the world.  She loves their stories.

We broke camp under some rainy skies.  We rain-suited-up.  A fine mist wafted over St. Mary's Lake.  We stopped at a view point to take some pictures of pink fireweed in the foreground and mist breaking over the lake.  A couple drove up, "Did you see the two grizzlies back a half-mile?" 

"No!" David said. "Are they still there?"

"Yes," the man said.  "They are eating berries alongside the road."

"Let's get back there," I said.

We hopped on the bikes, with a slight drizzle leading us back to the grizzlies, and within a half-mile, sure enough, a big mama grizzly and a yearling right alongside the road.  We kept our distance and, of course, I always have my bear spray ready at all times in grizzly country.

"Seeing these grizzlies makes my day," said David.

"Ditto," I said.

The brochure said: grizzlies eat 1/3 of their calories in moths.  They consume 100,000 berries in a day. They live 25 years.  They range from 600 to 1,200 pounds. Inland like Glacier National Park, they dine on berries, moths and grubs.  In Alaska, they devour salmon, which allows them to grow twice the size of inland bears. 

The mama bear wandered back into the woods within 60 seconds. The little one stood by the road with nothing much to do.  Finally, he too, wandered after his mother.

We turned the bikes toward the exit at the end of the park.  As we pedaled along St. Mary's Lake, the mist wafted into different shapes in the slight breeze.  As the sun rose, it played on the peaks and lit up the mist into different color light shows.  Man, Nature continues to entertain all of us willing to enter into the wilderness.  At one point, a mile-long cloud snaked down from the south and made its way along the shoreline between the mountain and the water. As the sun rose, it created quite a beautiful picture.  

Of course, we rode alongside it, admiring such ephemeral beauty.  Catch it quickly because it vanished into something else as the sun rose and the temperatures changed.

The man responsible for our national Parks, John Muir said, "The mountains are calling, and I must go.  In every walk with nature one receives far more than he or she seeks. The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."

"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life." John Muir

At the entrance station, we met a young lady named Emily, a medical student who decided to go backpacking for 10 months before doing her residency and committing  to the next 40 years of doctoring.

We filled our water bottles before a long climb up a three-mile grade that carried us over a pass. As we pedaled up the mountain, St. Mary's Lake grew smaller, while the mountains dominated the view. Millions of tree skeletons stuck out of the green undergrowth from a fire five years ago from that careless person who tossed a cigarette.  Nonetheless, birds, butterflies and wildlife once again inhabited the wilderness.

Soon enough, we cranked over the pass. At the stop, plenty of beer cans, pop bottles and debris loaded up on the overlook.  I'm forever confounded and bewildered that people visit such places of beauty, yet toss their trash without thinking.  Inside our national parks, they hire full time litter picker-uppers.

Heading down the road toward Browning, we saw several trucks and trailers abandoned in the woods.  It will take millions of years for Nature to decay those metal carcasses. 

We rolled up and down, and snaked along the road until we met a couple, Greg and Kayla, who rode a train out from Seattle and pedaled the loop around Glacier to train back on Sunday to report for work on Monday.  

We finally reached the plains heading toward Browning, and the Indian reservation for the Blackfeet.  Very sad to visit the grocery store with drunks outside the doors, everyone purchasing soda pop and chips with EBT cards, and the consequences of losing their culture, way of life and health, to junk foods served up by our modern society. Terrible obesity problems, diabetes, heart disease and worse.

When I see such things during my travels, it causes a heavy heart.  When I pedaled through Asia years ago, my heart broke every mile.  When I realized I couldn't do anything about it, I simply rolled onward with my own secret hurt.

We watered up; we packed more food; we hit the road southbound.

"My parents taught me honesty, truth, compassion, kindness and how to care for people. Also, they encouraged me to take risks, to boldly go. They taught me that the greatest danger in life is not taking the adventure." – Brian Blessed

David Christie, Frosty Wooldridge, summer 2019, Continental Divide Ride, Canada to Mexico

Newest book:  Old Men Bicycling Across America: A Journey Beyond Old Age, available on Amazon or ph. 1 888 519 5121

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