Glacier Cycling 2011: EFI - Saturday's ride

Last year on the cross country ride, we met some veteran cyclists who asked us if we were into EFI. “What is that?” we asked. “You know - guys who have to bike ‘every frikkin inch’”. We declined to be EFIers today as we contemplated of a ride of 77 miles over extremely hilly terrain returning from Waterton Park in Canada to East Glacier. As we had already covered 30 miles of the route entering Canada, we decided not to retrace those miles. The fact that these miles were mostly uphill for us was not, believe me, a deciding factor.

Our new route took us out of the park into the Blackfoot Indian Reservation. This entailed 30 miles of prairie and horse farms, with the Rockies looming to our right as we headed south to our destination of East Glacier Village. The sky was blue and cloudless, the prairie grass golden and waving gently in the breeze. Were it not so dang hilly, we would have been in hog heaven.

We had lunch at the Blackfoot “capital” of Browning. It is a sad place. Junk everywhere, half-finished buildings sitting in overgrown fields, and hungry dogs, eying us as potential meals. It is an all too familiar site on reservations in the west.

Our destination today was a beautiful glacier fed lake called Two Medicine. Tim Geisse had told us it was a not to be missed destination, Tim claimed that the strong winds off the lake blow cyclists up the hill without having to pedal. In fact, we found that the lake was UP hill from the main road, and that the wind would not blow even a thistle back to the road. But none of this mattered, for Vanna arrived and our ride back was assured.