The second to last ride was to be a repeat of one that howie and started last year, Little Wapiti and Slide Creek. We got in the Wapiti side but howie's bike broke on the way up the climb again to slide so we didn't get to do it last year. The picture above shows what the mountains looked like from the gas station, nobody said anything but I was less than hopeful as the trail turns to "gumbo" when it gets wet. Amazingly enough things were clear over the area we were to ride so we headed up along Taylor creek on the gravel road towards the Wapiti trail head. We climbed the very boring double track up through grazing field, hitting false summit after false summit.
Arriving at the top of that climb we were greeted with about 280 degrees of views like the one above.
We headed off for the forest and were in and out of trees and meadows, continuing to climb till we finally hit the top of the Wapiti trail. It follows the creek more or less back down to where we started the double track climb, but unfortunately the trail is really starting to erode and become quite rutted in places. Back down at the bottom we headed back up the oil well road double track this time heading down the other side of the ridge on a nicer track, encountering a meadow full of horses grazing on the way down. Its a popular horse trail and they have it a bit beat up and dusty in places but all in all a fun down hill that put us back at the truck.
We stopped a bike shop in Big Sky and got the lowdown on a few other rides on our way back to Bozeman.
On the shop's recommendation we headed out to Porcupine trailhead for our final ride. After a bit of a navigational issue, road construction seemed to have removed the sign for the turn, we found it and headed up. The first few miles were more up than down but nice single track through nice wild flower meadows. The ride was supposed to have a couple mile "balloon string" that we would also return on with about a 20 mile loop attached to it. We hit an intersection with a sign with one arrow pointing to the lake we were eventually heading towards but no actual trail names so we went that way. Turns out we really should have pulled out the map but Im getting ahead of myself. Things definitely were almost all up from there but at least for the next 4 miles, still pretty reasonable. It was more forested and more technical. Since howie had broken two of his bikes and my blur had a bad fork, Erik ended up having to rent a bike and its back wheel went super squirly and he ended up having to just about rebuild the stupid thing on the trail. I was not having the greatest day, 6 days in a row that late in the trip took its toll on me, i was hitting pedals every where and even endo'd on a fairly easy drop. The last couple miles were steeper requiring some hike-a-bike, more on my part than the others. We finally crested a ridge and headed down to ramshorn lake. The mileage wasn't making a lot of sense and there seemed to be some discrepancy in the topography compared to the map but we were at the lake.
Thats Erik n I using the water filter to refill our water bottles, not fishing. We needed to find a right hand turn but the only trail intersection had a trail coming in from the left as we headed back. Im not sure who finally came to the conclusion, I think Erik, but we were all getting a little frustrated, when we realized rather than taking the clockwise way around the balloon, we headed up what we were supposed to just come down. This was more or less confirmed with my GPS. Relieved we at least knew where we were and what we needed to do, we headed back down Porcupine the way we came up, A LOT easier and a lot more fun. Even on his crappy rental bike, Erik kicked our ass on the way back down (he did the same on the climb).
A little sad the trip was over but glad the ride was over, we arrived back at the truck, pretty spent, not so much that this ride kicked our butts, but we did a lot of riding in the past six days. Erik seemed pretty happy with his first and hopefully not last bike trip out west and I think howie would agree that it was probably our best trip to date, at least the most riding.
The drive back to PA from Bozeman was pretty uneventful, good weather for the most part. We drove 12 hours the first day, 14 the second, and about 10 the last including a good hour or so of construction traffic in I-80 in PA.
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