Montana Hills Alive With Bicyclists

Bicyclists complain about hills but secretly admire them. The steepest are probably called grades for a reason: They offer a test of ability and will.

Fortunately, passing marks are given for style as well as speed. And style, in the case of a difficult 10-mile climb such as Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park, means reaching the Continental Divide at 6,664 feet above sea level without surreptitiously hanging onto the tailpipe of a passing Albertan’s camper.

The reward for staying the course is the chance to watch a largely ignored national park reveal itself inch by inch. Every turn up Going-to-the-Sun Road brings something new into view.

Unlike Yosemite and Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, parks that have been recorded in countless calendars and motion pictures, the images of Glacier Park are fresh. And the seat of a bicycle is an ideal perch from which to take in their magnificence--even if you have to wipe away a lot of sweat to see.

Joins a Group

My wife and I shared Going-to-the-Sun, and about 240 more miles through Glacier, with two dozen other members of a group organized by San Leandro, Calif.-based Backroads Bicycle Touring.

It is possible to bike the park by yourself, but why bother? Backroads supplies and maintains excellent 18-gear road bikes for $79 a week. Two guides lead the way, make lunch and tote the luggage. Not including the cost of flying to Kalispell, five days of fine eating and lodging runs $654 a person--not a lot more than it would cost to do it yourself.

The road starts at Lake McDonald, a vast glacial lake 3,150 feet above sea level. In late September thousands of bird watchers are lured to its shores to observe bald eagles, migrating south from Canada to winter homes, swoop down on Kokanee salmon that finish their four-year life in a fatal spawning drive up the Flathead River.

But only cyclists prepared to use snow tires to their bikes should attempt the ride that late in the year. Even in mid-September the temperature was 45 degrees when we pointed our bikes uphill at 8 a.m. Lycra tights keep the legs warm, while polypropylene long underwear under a cycling jersey and windbreaker keep the chill from the upper body.

After a nine-mile spin along the lovely, fir-lined eastern shore of Lake McDonald the road starts its climb. In two turns, riders begin to realize what they’ve gotten themselves into--especially as the long underwear and jacket become a plastic sauna. Backroads’ bikes are equipped with front panniers and a back rack, so it is easy to strip down and pack away the excess clothing.

The ride up is not a competition, and there were no hell-raisers in our group storming the hill to exert peer pressure. Everyone rides at his or her own pace, which in our case was a stop at every third turnout to drink water, take a photograph, admire the view or read a geology exhibit.

Medium-size pines and yellowing aspens cover the floor of the valley below, which has a curious spooned-out shape, as if the glacier had been a gentle ocean wave that carved a moat into and around a sand castle.

We stood at turrets of the castle, looking out to sea to the west, and to higher turrets to the east and south. At our backs was a massive stone wall. The road, built in 1933, is considered an engineering marvel for the way it was blasted out of rock.

Lee Sorensen, a 62-year-old ophthalmologist from Berkeley, caught up with me as I sped ahead of my wife along the high perimeter of the castle, below a spectacular cirque called the Garden Wall.

As the temperature rose above 80 degrees at about 10:30 a.m., I finally felt competitive--couldn’t let this older guy pass me--so we raced along like born-again knights until Sorensen had the good doctorly sense to pull over.

Bird Woman Falls

Lifting our heads for the first time since rounding a sharp left at full speed, we saw another valley stretch south about 2,000 feet below our wheels. At its end, about four miles away beyond Bird Woman Falls, Oberlin Falls, a snowfield and dark patches where huge white clouds cast shadows over the trees and rock, was Logan Pass and the Continental Divide.

The ride only took three hours, but the altitude and accomplishment made us giddy--and crazy enough to head off for a six-mile hike after parking our bikes among the campers and pickup trucks at the pass ranger station.

The walk across stark tundra to Hidden Lake, a gemlike tarn (small mountain lake) at the foot of Bearhat Mountain, gave us a chance to eat the lunch we’d packed and get to know some of the people on the trip: a child psychiatrist from San Francisco, an attorney from San Diego, a banker from New York, a geologist from Houston and a health-care consultant from Chicago.

The night before we had barely made their acquaintance at Lake McDonald Lodge, the flagstone-and-pine former hunting resort of a turn-of-the-century railroad magnate, over drinks and dinner.

We were told that some cyclists in Texas carry handguns in their panniers to ward off good ol’ boys with bad intentions, and that cyclists in Manhattan had gotten a bad reputation from wild-riding messengers who were knocking people over.

‘I’m From Brooklyn’

We also learned that some of our group trained for the trip by bicycling up to 150 miles a weekend over the summer, while others had done triathlons. Still others were fearful.

The woman from Chicago complained that her long rides along the cornfields of Illinois would not prepare her for the Rockies; the banker joked: “I’m from Brooklyn; I ride the subway.”

But now we were a tiny community of sweat and effort, and a compassion for each other began to grow. The friendship is really just a one-week stand, but the beauty of northwestern Montana is so enormous that the desire to share it is almost involuntary.

Despite the maximum effort, the ride up to the Divide was only half the day’s mileage. The other half was pure thrill, a rapid 15-mile descent to St. Mary’s Lake past more open glacial valleys and snowy peaks.

Riders are in a double bind, though: Enjoy the scenery (at a slow pace, stopping at turnouts to take pictures) or enjoy the drop (tucking into an aerodynamic posture, bending the bike into 18th gear and only occasionally coming up for air).

Either way, the day ends with five miles of rolling terrain along the lake around 5 p.m. as the shadows lengthen, the air cools and the colors of the purple mountains’ majesty seems to deepen instead of blur.

What a contrast to our choice of rides around Los Angeles: smog in the flats, smog and traffic up moderate hills such as Sepulveda Pass or Mulholland Drive, or the steep, hot pitches of the Santa Monica Mountains beyond Topanga Canyon.

Map and Itinerary

During the day and evening--as indeed for the rest of the trip--the Backroads organization is almost invisible. At the start of the trip tour members receive a map and itinerary. And each day one guide rides last, or “sweep,” while the other drives the van that would pick up any rider who does not want to go on. No one ever did ride in the van and no one got lost.

Each day is broken into two or three options: Ride the standard route (38 to 61 miles), additional options (an extra 20 miles the second day to Canada, for instance) or start with a boost (the first day, for example, the van would shuttle a rider to the top of Logan Pass.)

After riding along the eastern perimeter of the park to the Canadian border at Chief Mountain the second day, we stayed two nights at Many Glacier Hotel. Built by the son of Great Northern Railway magnate James J. Hill in 1915, the hotel is a monumental Swiss-style chateau on the rim of Swiftcurrent Lake.

Splendidly isolated more than 12 miles off a lightly traveled highway, its staff are college students majoring in music who sing at dinner and appear in a variety show in the lobby in the evening.

Directing them was a member of the San Francisco Opera, so the knockout performances of a soprano waitress from Miles City, Mont., a flutist from Santa Cruz, Calif., and many others had a weirdly professional spin even though the stage was closer to Moose Jaw, Sask., than to the Music Center.

Most of the Backroads group hiked 12 miles to Grinnell Glacier on our off day, then rolled out of bed at 7 the next morning for a 60-mile ride to East Glacier.

Scenery Changes

Traveling south along the southeastern perimeter of the park, the scenery changes suddenly from peaks to plains, from forest to farmland. Much of the route transits the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, and the meandering road was all ours for awesome views of the western start of the Great Plains.

The best accommodations were last. We spent our final night at Glacier Park Lodge, which, the guidebooks say, the Blackfeet nicknamed “Big Tree Lodge” for the 60-foot cedars that hold up the roof in its enormous lobby. Built in 1915 by Hill as a stop for travelers along his new railway, the suites and service are first-cabin, making the Ahwahnee in Yosemite look like a baby sister, which it is.

Many of the group’s cyclists were concerned about their ability to travel the distance the first couple of days. Not so by the end, even though the last day involved another 58-mile ride that included a long grade up to the Continental Divide at Maria’s Pass. By then, riders were sorry that they were about to leave their new friends and Montana for their work in cities. They tended to pedal much more leisurely.

Once the guides had taken back the bikes, packed up their van, accepted a tip and left the majority of the group at motels in Kalispell, we rejoined for dinner and got together the next morning again for breakfast.

To take the sting out of saying goodby, probably forever, there were fulsome promises to get together in the near future for a 12-day Alaska trip. And after that . . . Tasmania. Or Bali.

After having ridden up Going-to-the-Sun, the idea of competing for room on the road with kangaroos, or even challenging Mt. McKinley, sounded less like a trip to the moon.

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The Glacier Park bicycle trip is now an annual excursion. This year’s dates are Aug. 13-18 and 20-25, Aug. 25 to Sept. 1, and Sept. 3-8. Cost is $789, plus $89 for bike rental and $40 for round-trip van transfer from Kalispell to the starting point at Lake McDonald.

For more information and a free catalogue of trips offered by Backroads Bicycle Touring, write P.O. Box 1626, San Leandro, Calif. 91577, or call (415) 895-1783.