belly of the beast

the seeley lakes inbreeding festival gathered steam at sunset, with its participants mainly positioned adjacent to our tent site in the big larch campground. there was karaoke and profanity.

want drunken behavior? shirtless men with big guts pulling a boom box in a wagon? a father telling his son he was “gonna kill you”.

‘merika!! 👍👍💪💪

at about 23:00, a calm swept over camp rub-a-dub and i slept like a baby. good sleep. deep sleep. old man sleep.

yesterday was another hot one, with temps in the 90’s and a heat-sucking sun for most of our ride.

pedaling started out with a 6.1-mile jaunt taking us up to 6,800 feet, followed by an 800-foot descent on single track. the descent was exhilarating.b

both the up and down took place in an area called the “grizzly highway.”

we didn’t see any grizzlies, but their reminders were frequent…big piles of bear poop. there were lots of overgrown areas without line-of-sight and to travel through that and not have a surprise encounter was a great relief.

later in the day, a couple of bikepackers, luke from england and irena from austria, sauntered in to our campground after following our path, and said they had encounters with 4 grizzlies.

grizzlies are always at the back of your mind. they can out run you and out climb you, but like any apex predator, their reputation exceeds their biology. humans beget most of the grizzly bear misinformation and misfortune.

last year in ovando, mt, a grizzly had been seen frequenting a campground and a woman biker brought food into her tent because that is a smart thing to do. she was was summarily killed by a grizzly.

of course, that bear was dispatched because well, how dare a carnivore with constricted habitat and increasing human intrusions behave like a wild animal and seek a meal.

you’ve all seen video of the dumbphuck in yellowstone carrying a baby bison, right? animal destroyed, man told “don’t do that again, dumbphuck.”

no disney ending in that shit.

we are going to push for lincoln today, but have a mid-point reserve chute site if the temps do what they are predicted to do: hit the mid-90’s. lincoln is a 67-mile journey with about 6,000 feet of climbing, so a challenge with an unknown outcome at this point.

the mouth-breathers are awakening. it is time to leave camp rub-a-dub.