When we told the folks at Glacier Cyclery that we planned to bike through parts of Glacier National Park later this week they shook their heads gravely and noted that due to construction we could only bike on the weekends. Though our derrières hurt every time we tried to sit from a 25-miler around Whitefish Lake (on less-than-comfortable seats, I might add), we looked at each other and made the decision to bike on both weekend days. Glacier Cyclery employees recommended Going to the Sun road, a 50-mile highway closed to traffic for most of the year due to snow (the West is less efficient than the East). Going to the Sun road, they said, was due to open to cars next weekend, and although there was construction that would stop us from riding about a mile from the peak at Logan’s Pass they still suggested it. We could go about sixteen miles up and sixteen miles back.
“Where’s the worst uphill part?” my sister asked.
They laughed at us. Eventually one of them said, “Well, when you reach The Loop you’re halfway up the mountain, and then you can see how far you have left to go, and you think, ‘Oh, God, I’m never going to make it.’ That’s probably the worst part, but with sixteen miles of uphill it’s really hard to say.”
When SB and I were around nine and ten the Judge took us on a 14-mile ride up the Blue Ridge Parkway, so we rolled our eyes at the obviously inferior hardcore-ness of the bike guys and loaded our three bikes into the back of our rented Chevy Traverse. (Unfortunately the bike rack Montana R lent us – or any bike rack, according to the Glacier Cyclery crew – would not fit on the back of the Chevy and so our only transportation option was to remove the front wheels and jam the bikes in the SUV. It took some work and some lessons on how to remove a front wheel for SB but in the end it saved us from having to buy a bike lock.)
I guess we should have been more intimidated by the bike boys’ reactions, but all I can say is that if any of us had known what we were in for when we drove through the West entrance of Glacier National Park we would have turned the car around – or at least turned our bikes around at the halfway point. However, we were too stupid to pay attention and too naïve to know what we were in for, so we happily bounced through the park until we reached the gate that closed off Going to the Sun road to cars and then used SB’s new skills to reassemble the bikes. The car thermometer read about 43˚F at 9:30am. We kept on our sweatpants and hurried to attach our bag to SB’s bike, which had a small rack over the back wheel, with clumsy gloved hands, hoping we wouldn’t freeze at the top.
A note on the bag: after riding around on Saturday without a good way to carry extra sunscreen, snacks, keys, phones, layers, etc, we decided to find a nice lightweight backpack for the rest of our trip. We ended up at a store called “The Sportsman and Ski Haus”, which boasted numerous bags – but none felt quite light enough or rolled up small enough to fit into our bags for the plane ride home. The salesman helping us – a burly sportsman who probably spent his spare time hunting on skis – tentatively suggested we look at fanny packs. I laughed in his face.
We spent a bit of time speaking with the cycle guys at The Sportsman, too, and SB and the Judge kept returning to the fanny pack idea. To quell this notion, I announced that I refused to carry or be seen with a fanny pack unless it was a camouflage fanny pack.
Later SB asked me, “Did you say that because you saw a camo fanny pack?”
No. I thought of camo because to get from bags to cycles we’d passed through the hunting section, and I thought surely no one would manufacture a camo fanny pack.
SB and the Judge promptly found a camo fanny pack, and it turns out the thing had the added bonus of costing only $9.99. To my shock and dismay we purchased it and SB and the Judge chatted the entire ride home about how they could fill it up with little baggies of granola and bananas for our Going to the Sun road excursion. I’m glaring at the bag now as it sits across me on the table. Somehow it simultaneously screams masculinity and yet emasculates even such unisex objects as that table.
Anyway, we packed the camo back with granola baggies and Craisin packets and M&Ms and cookies (rewards for reaching the top) and shed our sweatpants, hoping we would warm up during the ride. If the Glacier Cyclery guys were reading this they would laugh out loud at that last sentiment.
We reached The Loop and took our first food break. The entire way up we’d been dazzled by the scenery and even came across a mule deer that calmly crossed the road in front of us. We were exhausted but pretty sure we could make it halfway more, and by The Loop we’d shed most of our outer layers. We chatted with some veterans who said they biked the road every weekend starting in April and liked to see how much further the road was open to bikes each week. They said we would be able to make it almost to the top, about sixteen miles up, which corroborated the bike boys’ opinions. Encouraged, we turned the corner and saw how much further we had to ride.
I almost choked at what lay ahead, but we kept going.
The difficult part of the ride turned out to be not the incline but the lack of any relief whatsoever. For sixteen miles we never even pedaled on flat land; the entire road unrelentingly continued to slope up and up. Occasionally we encountered steep sections after which we stopped to catch our breath, but most of the time we just slowly pushed ourselves up a peak in the Rockies.
When it seemed as if we’d gone at least halfway more we took a break to get our bearings and rest. We realized we hadn’t even reached a major landmark, the Weeping Wall, after which the peak languished three miles ahead; we figured due to construction we’d have about a mile after the Weeping Wall. That calculation turned out to be correct, but we still had no clue how far away from the Weeping Wall we rested. Figuring we had to be close, we got back on the bikes – my own backside was so sore that I had avoided sitting down on my bike so far because amazingly standing and pedaling hurt less than the relief of sitting – and kept going up.
Eventually the Judge just said, “Uncle.”
We pulled over to the side again and I took more pictures – I took so many pictures yesterday that my camera ran out of battery. We almost turned around, but SB was determined to get as far as we could, so we kept going again.
I don’t know how many more times after that we stopped and restarted, but I was almost convinced that we weren’t going to make it when we reached the Weeping Wall. I recently ran a half marathon and most days spend an hour biking in addition to my runs, but my legs felt like Jell-o. I thought we were done for.
Once we passed the Weeping Wall, where we unavoidably showered in glacial streams, the road turned rough and the railings disappeared. I refused to look over the side of the mountain for certainty of vertigo. A mile later we reached signs that announced further travel ensured persecution. I have never been happier for the threat of persecution.
We celebrated with cookies and more pictures and took our time back down the mountain, pausing for mountain goat sightings and a more cookie celebration. When we reached home we realized we’d been sunburned in strange cycling shorts patterns, but it was hard to care.
We barely made it to Pescado Blanco for a delicious Mexican supper and passed out upon returning home. Now we’re on our way out the door for horseback riding. I hope our rear ends survive.
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