Missoula News

As the Summer Wanes

Riding a Doomed Trail

By Eric Warren, 10-29-06

I feel like an ant trapped in a cereal bowl. The mountains tower all around us as Aaron Teasdale and I pedal our mountain bikes up a near vertical wall toward a tiny notch called Limestone Pass. I am physically unprepared for the demands of this epic trail, but feel compelled to ride it before a possible ban on bicycling in Montana's proposed wilderness areas takes effect. My legs were spent even before we climbed two-thousand feet from the junction with the Monture Creek trail four miles back. Now, I have doubts I can climb that last two hundred feet. Even with the top in sight, my will crumbles. I am out of water and food is not far behind. We lost Rod Kramer on the way up -- leaving him back in the forest eating trailside huckleberries, napping and waiting for our return. As my legs churn more and more slowly up the switchbacks, more than one part of me thinks he has the right idea.

It's when my tire skirts the outside edge of the trail -- precariously hovering over a glacier-carved valley hundreds of feet deep -- that I realize how captivated I am by the beauty surrounding me. I am paying more attention to the late summer yellows and reds that slash through the sub-alpine grasses than I am to the trail. The vibrant green of the valley creates balance with the seemingly lifeless granite precipices overlooking it. The breeze smells of pine and tastes like dust. The only human expression out here is our tires crunching gravel. I swerve back to the center of the trail before I go over. A crash here would be life-threatening. Part of the beauty is that it could kill you. Forging ahead with no safety guarantee is the rush of adventure. It's pure and addictive with a street value too high for most. All I have to do to get my fix is trade my security.

It's a trade I'll make. And when I push up over the ridge I see that I'm getting a bargain. The land and the trail ahead of me drops away in a meandering descent into a primitive world where machines do not exist. Aaron and I have come face to face with the Bob Marshall Wilderness. This is the end of the line for us and lay our bikes down. Our bike shoes make poor hiking boots but we scramble to a high point to get a better look at the limestone capped Foolhen and Apex Mountains. The limestone slabs glow white in the low sun like fresh-fallen snow, but also seem to crush the rest of their respective mountains under their bulk. We sit as the sun drops behind one of the high mountains of the bowl. Though nothing would please us more than plunging into this untamed country, we must be getting back to our parallel universe of microwaves and concrete. I swallow the last bite of my sandwich as we walk back to the bikes. Chances are I'll survive the long ride back without food or water. I assume I'll make it down the steep switchbacks and unforgiving trail. In fact, I will love them. I hope, finally, as I coast over the lip of the bowl, that I will not be the last mountain biker allowed to take the risk and see the world the way I did today.

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