Day 31---From bears to freeway in a day, Conner to Missoula

92.2 miles, 7:32, 12.2 mph

Quote of the day, "I took my kids to Disneyland in 2006, and you know, there were 10 of them for 2 of us."

The day dawned clear, with a few high clouds, high up in the Bitterroot Valley.  It was lovely and cool, and after yesterday's climb, I was well rested, having been the only person staying at Rocky Knob.  I had some granola and fruit, and planned to get a real breakfast in Darby, about 15 miles down the valley.

The fire zone from 2000

It was a lovely cool ride through Conner and I finally exited the year 2000 fire zone into a wide agricultural valley, with many log and trophy homes (and some log trophy homes!).  The landscape is much gentler here in Montana than in Idaho, and the houses seem more architecturally consonant with the landscape; so although there are just as many houses, they don't look so out of place.  I also passed at least 5 establishments that make log homes, and I can only guess that they ship them premade around the country, because this little valley surely can't support that many builders.

I rolled into Darby around 930 and went to Deb's Restaurant, a classic little breakfast and lunch place.  Had a great breakfast, and enjoyed eavesdropping on all the conversations around me (I'm becoming quite expert at listening without reacting, and people say the darnedest things).  The upper Bitterroot Valley is white working class flight from southern California territory, and many of the people I've talked to have had something to say about 'them,' which I'm pretty sure means Latinos (I'd be afraid to ask actually, it would be like not being white enough or something like that). 

I heard similar conversations and comments in the bar and restaurant last night, and also at the Sacajewea Center in Salmon.  Interesting, and now that the economy is bad, they're all headed for North Dakota.....

I finished my breakfast, catching up on a few emails on my phone, and then continued down the valley to Hamilton.  Hamilton looks like Hemet in the Montana mountains.....highway lined with strip malls and tacky suburban development.  Could be anywhere, and it's a shame really.  However, the lady at AAA told me that the bicycle path starts there, and goes all the way to Lolo, 40 miles down the valley, and I was grateful to get off the loathsome multi lane US 93, which has a wide shoulder full of debris and rumble strips next to the white line.

US 93 is covered with billboards, many of them for guns and ammo, unfortunately on a bike you don't get to just look at the scenery

The bike path had good pavement and was pretty clean, but it basically runs along side a freeway for 40 miles, with nothing but traffic noise.  So far I was very unimpressed with the 'famous' Bitterroot.  While it's pretty, it's also urbanized in a really cheap and ugly way (think Inland Empire), and wasn't really enjoyable cycling.

What you get to see is quite beautiful, when you don't have to look at the road

When I got to the little town of Stevensville, the first town in Montana, I detoured off the highway, and found a lovely little village with the St. Ignatius Mission right on the edge of the hayfields. The Jesuits arrived here in the early 1840s at the request of the local tribes, who had traveled all the way to Saint Louis to make their request.  The mission was occupied on and off until the 20th century, and the museum and log cabin-style chapel were delightful.  The volunteer docents were great, with a lot of clearly accurate knowledge, and happily the mission is not run by the Catholic Church, but a local nonprofit. 

My docent joked that she was even a Protestant!  There were many interesting photographs from the 19th century, and a good history of how the mission and local Indians interacted until they were deported in 1905.  The current museum works very closely with the Salish tribe, and there is an annual pilgrimage from their current home, the Flathead Reservation, to the mission every year.  Father Ravalli, a Jesuit from Italy who ran the mission for many years, was well respected by the local Indians, and has both a county and a town named after him in Montana.  It was interesting to learn how important the Jesuits had been to the local tribes.

The mission chapel

 

Father Ravalli's cabin

The locals in Stevensville warned me off the narrow road that runs on the other side of the valley from US 93, so it was back to the bike path, where I got caught in a thunderstorm.  While sitting under the eaves of a warehouse building, I watched a woman in a giant pick up truck miss her turn at 40 mph, and take out both the stop sign and the directional sign at the intersection nearby.  She then drove out of the ditch, back onto the road, and sped off like nothing had happened. 

This was to be the first of numerous scary driver incidents I would witness today.

At Lolo, the bike path ends, and you are forced onto a narrow four lane freeway through the Bitterroot Canyon where it cuts through the terminal moraine.  It was one of the most harrowing entrances to a city I've ever experienced.  The speed limit is 70 mph, despite the tight curves, narrow shoulders and non existent median.  The roadside is littered with the white crosses that Montana maintains to remind people of road deaths.  For the vaunted bicycle city of Missoula, it is a shocking way to enter the city, and one that they sorely need to address, given the volume of cycle tourists.  After traversing this almost ten mile stretch, I now understood why the cycle tourists I'd met coming up the valley were so pleased with the cycleway, despite is poor aesthetics.

Once into Missoula, the "Bike Route" which follows the old US 93, appeared, disappeared and reappeared, with seemingly no rhyme or reason.  Another thunderstorm found me under the canopy of  a Jiffy Lube until the rain stopped.  Heading into the downtown the bike path was basically in the gutter, which was filled with water from the storm. 

It was not a happy entry into Missoula to be sure, and that was exacerbated by the non-working wireless at the hotel. I did a little tour around town to see if I could find another room, but since the Missoula Marathon was on Sunday morning, the only places with rooms were the drug and prostitution motels, so after another ten miles of riding around, I settled in for the night, found a nice restaurant with good wifi and then went back and crashed.