Riding The Great Divide Three Cyclists Find Challenge And Adventure Biking Down America’S Spine

When Kelly Greenwood read the newspaper story about the Continental Divide Mountain Bike Route last year, he knew he had to try it.

Mud, ruts, grizzlies and lung-busting high-elevation climbs—what more could a biker want?

“But the trail is 2,500 miles long and I have a job and a family,” he said. “There’s no way I’m going to get away for months at a time.”

The Spokane biker took the long-term approach and plotted to tackle the route from Canada to Mexico one section at a time.

First leg: Montana.

Greenwood recruited local biking buddies Matt Fenske and Clark Richards in June and planned to head for the Canada border only to find that snow still plugged the route near Glacier National Park.

“No problem,” Greenwood said. “We’ll go back in September and do that first stretch. We just changed our plans to do the route from Columbia Falls to Helena instead.”

Originally the group thought they could grit their teeth and do big daily mileages to save time. Greenwood said he’d already logged 1,000 miles of training on his legs in 1999.

“The guys at Glacier Cyclery in Whitefish laughed when said we wanted to average 60 miles a day,” Greenwood said. “They said 40 is much more realistic.”

Indeed, on two days, the group covered less than 30 miles in a long day of pedaling, although they had a couple of 50-mile days when the riding involved improved dirt roads or pavement.

By the end of their week, they averaged about 40 miles a day.

Getting a vehicle shuttled around the mountains to the end of a 235-mile, six-day bike tour isn’t a simple problem.

“It’s very helpful to have a retired uncle on hand when you’re planning something like this,” Greenwood said.

The other key component is having a mechanic in the group.

“Clark was our savior,” Greenwood said. “When you break spokes and chains far from the nearest main road, you’ve got to be self-sufficient.”

Problems on the trip were fairly minor: two broken spokes, two broken chains, a disintegrated tire and tube and minor repairs to the BOB trailers, which carried their gear behind the bikes.

Clark apparently was less effective in taking care of their gear. “He’s really into bonfires,” Greenwood said. “We were drying out after a day of rain and he torched his shoe and my socks.”

Adventure Cycling, based in Missoula, has taken the mystery out of route planning. Last year, after four years of research, the group released a set of superb maps detailing the route that links dirt roads and trails along the Continental Divide. Only about 10 percent of route from Canada to Mexico involves pavement.

“The maps are excellent,” Greenwood said. “But to get the most out of them, you need at least two or three calibrated odometers in your group.”

“We had pavement at the start out of Columbia Falls,” Greenwood said. “But we were surprised at how quickly we got into the backcountry on forest roads that are closed to motor vehicles. We saw very few people during our trip.”

The brief description of the route in northern Montana can be condensed to three words: up and down.

“There’s plenty of gentle stuff, but we had a lot of long climbs and fast downhills,” he said. “This is supposed to be one of the toughest portions of the entire 2,500-mile route.”

They found primitive camping spots, some with great views of lakes, the Swan Range, and the eastern edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

“Of course we didn’t see much on the days it rained,” he said. “We had a fast learning curve on how to pack our trailers so we could get our rain gear and extra clothes without getting everything else wet.”

Waterproof booties were a big help in keeping his feet dry, Greenwood said.

They kept pepper spray handy, especially after seeing a huge bear track in the mud. They saw three black bears, elk, moose, deer and other creatures.

The group probably carried more weight than they needed, since they found they could resupply with food at places such as Seeley Lake and Lincoln, and pick up a meal or two at a backroads saloon.

`The trailers weigh 15 pounds and we each had about 60 pounds of gear,” Greenwood said. “The weight wasn’t too much of a problem except on some of the single track trails where we had to lift our bikes over blowdowns,” he said, noting that they had to team up to get the bikes and trailers over the obstacles.

The group figured they pedaled 37 hours during the six days to cover 235 miles, and still they didn’t quite reach Helena before they were picked up.

A Forest Service ranger at Holland Lake told the Spokane riders that two groups riding the trail end-to-end were just a day or two ahead of them.

Ah, to be jobless and free to devote an entire summer to such a trip, Greenwood dreamed.