HEATHER
If you were to ask my mother to describe me in a few words, easy going and flexible are probably not the first words that would leave her mouth.
I have a love of plans. And a life-long uneasy truce with anxiety has left me with a tendency to want to control all outcomes of a situation, or at least know the outcomes ahead of time.
The funny thing about an expedition of this magnitude is there is a multiplicity of unknowns and a need to be able to go with the flow.
Amaya preparing to cross Hell Roaring Creek
Enter: bottomless sugar snow.
Amaya and I knew we would encounter snow, we even brought snowshoes with us for this first section with this eventuality in mind. What we didn’t count on was the sheer quantity of snow. That, paired with warm temperatures (no freezing overnight to form helpful crusts for easy travel or to consolidate concerningly loose slopes), meant we were often slogging through knee deep mush, even with snowshoes on!
While snow like this may not have been an anomaly perhaps 10 years ago, as a lovely fishing guide named Miles said as he helped us on our way to Lima, MT, “these mountains were almost dry up until a month ago, then we had more snow in April than we did in January!”
Jasper and Amaya descending a snowy slope in the Centennial Mountains
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good sufferfest. And the reality was we were actually having a TON of fun up in that snow globe world! The problem is that we have a timeline to keep. We need to make it to the USA-Canada border by the first week of July.
We made our distance goal easily on day one, but day two and three (which were planned as longer pushes) were another story. Amaya said something on day two that has stuck with me “if we had unlimited time, we could spend 10 days doing this section instead of 6 and complete it just fine and even enjoy ourselves doing it!”
The first few days of any trip are hard, I’ve done enough trips to know that, but Amaya and I also planned this expedition as an almost half-year venture and with a goal of having fun exploring the beautiful regions along the way. To meet our distance goals and timeline in these snow conditions was going to require pushing ourselves to the limit of our endurance from the start and, while definitely possible and within our capabilities, this is a 5 month endurance event not a sprint.
So… we channeled our inner flexibility (and trust me I dug deep into my reservoir of being open to going with the flow) and came up with a new plan!
We still wanted to make this a human powered traverse of the Y2Y region, but how to accomplish this first section in a timely manner when there is this much snow??
It just so happens that there is a bike route that traverses the Great Divide… and you know I LOVE bikes so…
AMAYA
In contrast to Heather, I struggle less with figuring things out on the go and more with having a structured detailed plan to follow. Planning the Canadian section, booking all our sites half a year in advance, and having to stick to those dates, stresses me out more than almost anything else on this trip. Switching plans and adapting to the new situation has felt pretty comfortable. I am, however, super happy Heather is here with her detail oriented brain to keep us on track while we figure out A) Where we will go on our bike route and still make our timeline, B) Reorganizing our resupplies to fit our bike route, C) Getting bikes to this little one horse town of Lima, Montana, and D) Finding a place for our trail dog Jasper to go while we cruise around on our bikes.
After a day and a half holed up in a great, no frills hostel, this is what we have figured out:
We will spend the next 51 days biking approximately 1,840km on backroads through ranchlands and mountains roughly following the Great Divide bike route, stopping to explore different parts of this region of the Y2Y, and going on day hikes. This will essentially be a switch from the hiking we'd planned in the USA. We will still be donning our boots and packs in Canada!
Screenshot of our new route (on bikes!)
Our journey will start with us backtracking to Yellowstone where we will spend just under a week checking out the park. Next we will head back through Lima (pronounced Lime-a not Lee-ma as we were corrected by a local) and continue north through the Beaverhead Mountains to Leadore (apparently pronounced Le-door), as we already have a food box waiting for us there. We will then get our next food resupply sent to Butte. The Pioneer Mt Scenic Bi-way, which we'll use to connect Leadore and Butte, is likely going to be one of our trip highlights. There are a lot of lovely campgrounds along the road, not to mention the Elk Horn Hotsprings!! Next we will head up past the Boulder Mountains while stopping in at a few quintessential Montana towns. Lastly, we have planned 10 days to take our time riding through Glacier National Park (the one in the USA!) and up to the border.
Despite the craziness of scrapping part of an itinerary made in December and coming up with new plans in a matter of days we are both feeling very excited! We are going to have time to explore Yellowstone Park, something that wasn't included in our original itinerary due to time restraints and traveling with a dog. We are also going to stay longer in Glacier and have more time in general to spend in places we like or find particularly interesting.
A glimpse at the reorganization taking place inside Heather’s brain.
So thats problems A) route finding and B) resupplies figured out. Now for C) Getting our bikes and D) Dogo.
All I can say here is thank gosh for incredibly supportive parents. Heather's folks are going to road trip our bikes down to us from Kamloops!! They will also take Jasper back to Canada where he will spend his vacation with my Grandma and other family members before rejoining us in Waterton to hike the GDT in Canada.
I cannot express how supported, grateful and lucky I feel right now. We have asked so many people for help in making this trip a reality, from writing us reference letters to hosting us, mailing us resupplies or bringing us resupplies, borrowing gear, brining us bikes... the list goes on.
If you are reading this, there are pretty good odds you are one of those people so thank you from the bottom of my heart!!!!
Goodbye for now to the snowy, snowy, snowy mountains and hello to backroads and bikes (and still a lot of mountains if we're honest). Here's to working on the fly, friends with different skill sets, and finding solutions that allow us to keep having fun and keep the dream alive!