The Divide, some critters, and a hiatus

We’ve crossed the Continental Divide.  That feels like a node in our trip.

The morning of our crossing it was 45 degrees with a strong, cold tailwind.  We zoomed up Rogers Pass: rewarding but anticlimactic because it’s such a gradual climb. Still, one gets to decide whether one’s pee break will aim for Pacific or the Atlantic. 

The descent on the eastern side is steeper and more dramatic.

The vistas on the Montana plains are flat out sublime. How I love these open sweeps of land and busy skies.

With our westerly tail wind, we could have sailed to Great Falls in an afternoon,  but the prescribed route took us on a detour to Augusta, heading north. The cross wind made it a slow 15 miles, but that gave us time to see some fabulous things.  

First, sadly, I killed a snake. I ran right over this guy, who turns out to be a Western Garter Snake.

A few miles later we saw what we’ve now concluded was a COUGAR. A large, medium-brown animal crossed the road about 75 yards in front of me. It was traveling too fast for me to get a good look, but it didn’t behave like anything I’ve ever seen, moving fluidly but frequently stopping to look around. A hawk harassed it. I thought coyote, but the next day I found this scat, too big for coyote or wolf. Locals confirmed that cougars are here. I’m thinking it’s cougar.

The next jaw droppers were Pronghorn antelope. We mistook them for deer at first but then noticed their round white bottoms and their peculiar way of running, with all four feet pushing off at once, like smug cartoon horses.

Next came a calf who had gotten on the wrong side of the range fence. It was trying to stay close to its mother on the other side of the barbed wire, but reunification wasn’t going to happen without intervention. We decided to help, a dubious decision. While Mark tried to herd the calf toward me,  I opened the latch of the machine-strung, extremely taut barbed wire fence. Instantly it was clear this was a fast-blooming fiasco. The six strands of fence wire sprang back in a tangle of posts and barbs.  Mark’s valiant herding was making the calf careen all over the two lane highway. The high wind kept Mark from hearing my plea for fence triage. I could just imagine a front page story in the Great Falls Tribune of how two Easterners had released the Mangnussons’ cattle all over SR 287. The end of the story is that with a lot of muscle power we managed to close the fence, and the calf remained unrescued. We hope the cougar didn’t get him overnight.

We spent the night in Augusta in a lovely old inn from 1905 we had stayed in about 10 years earlier on another Montana bike trip. All was well until 10 p.m., when someone down the street began playing country music in the empty street at rodeo grounds volume.  The second time Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” came on, I gave up trying to like this town.

Today we got blown to Great Falls with hardly a pedal stroke. I’m thrilled to say that I heard a Virginia Rail call loudly in a little marsh. (Thanks, Bill, for showing me my very first one years ago.)  While Mark was trying to get me to clean my greasy fingers after reseating my dropped chain, I watched my first Long Billed Curlews courting in the wayside scrub. Here are two recordings, though the wind gets in the way:

 https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_l7_GFIvxKgRHNtNGQxOE5kQms

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_l7_GFIvxKgbEtVTUhScWQ1RkE

We were in this beautiful spot: 

Now we have found our way to a great Airbnb in Great Falls. Tomorrow we fly back to Maine tomorrow for a few days at home and then our niece’s wedding. It’s kind of like dropping Hemingway and picking up Virginia Woolf. It’s a vacation from a vacation. It’s strange, but it’s delicious.

When we return, the plan at this point is to interrupt the biking again. Because we’d be following the Missouri River anyway, we decided to rent from an outfitter in Fort Benton and canoe 110 miles of the wild section. Mark thinks we can take the bikes in the canoe, but, really! We’ll see. I’ll take up this blog once we’re on the bikes again.

Thanks for reading!