Movie: cycling the GDMBR on a Santos TM2.9 with Pinion
Wow, it has been a while since we’ve posted a movie! So here it is: the Santos Travelmaster 2.9 with Pinion and Gates belt having fun on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route.
Wow, it has been a while since we’ve posted a movie! So here it is: the Santos Travelmaster 2.9 with Pinion and Gates belt having fun on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route.
With no more than one day left on our United States visa, we leave the States behind us and continue our ride into the last country we’ll visit here in the Americas: Canada! The smoke doesn’t care about borders though and follows us right into Canada as we cycle into Waterton National Park. I dare not ask for rain, since in 2010 I wished for it and it never stopped raining!
‘The track between Butte and Helena towards Park Lake is the most challenging part of the whole Great Divide Mountain Bike Route’, I read on the Adventure Cycling map. So, we give ourselves a day off in the mining town of Butte to prepare for this challenge. Stuffed with even more burgers (what else is there to eat in the US??) we hit the road to Basin on a paved climb to another continental divide crossing.
It must have been some perv to actually think about titties when seeing the Grand Tetons… Well, the guy was French, so maybe that says it all! 😉 I can think of many things, but I don’t associate those pointy rocks with boobies (maybe Elmar does?).
After crossing the state line into Wyoming the scenery changes dramatically. From the white peaked 14.000-ers we find ourselves on wide open, grassy land with cows and pronghorns. The first we’ve seen more than mosquitoes, but the pronghorns are new to us, but there are plenty of these animals running away from us. Not strange, since they are the fastest land mammal after the cheetah …or is it because we start to smell?!?
I guess we should not have wished so hard for water… Apparently Colorado is having the wettest summer ‘ever’! It has something to do with El Nino and some other bad weather situations and so we are experiencing a lot of thunder and lightning storms on this part of the Great Divide Route.
As we cycle into Pie Town (sounds a lot bigger than it actually is with just 60 souls) we run into Chris and Alex again; father and son bikepacking the Great Divide. They are just about to leave the famous Toaster House and Chris shows us around. We pick ourselves a room, drop all our stuff and run to the nearest pie restaurant, which was about to close. Lucky us, we are able to treat ourselves to a 8 dollar (!!) a piece blueberry pie. I guess you have to be here to really appreciate it…
“Hi y’all folks, how u’re doin?”
“Great, thanks!”
“Where ya from?”
“Holland.”
“Ah, I have a cousin in Sweden. That’s close to Holland, right?”
“Uh, sure, what’s his name? Maybe we know him…”