Rodeo Drive

Ovando, MT to Great Falls, MT

2 days

139 miles

For most of the 54-mile ascent out of the Rockies, I wouldnt've known I was climbing were it not for the Blackfoot River beside me cascading down in the opposite direction; the pleasant tailwind and decorous slope left me wondering at times if I wasn't just stuck in some gravity-defying Escher-like wilderness. The final mile before Roger's Pass, though, was unequivocally up. That morning, the Ride the Divide guys had warned me of rain later in the day and although I wasn't in a particular rush, I had my eye on the cloud layer that had been creeping in around me starting mid afternoon. As the vertical climb became increasingly impossible to deny, so too did the impending rain. By the time I reached the peak -- the great continental divide -- there was only a moment to contemplate its significance: now my blood, sweat and tears will flow ultimately to the Atlantic. I hope they'll be happy there. I stopped to snap a quick picture. There were open skies beyond to the east, but above me the rain was starting to fall. I locked back into my pedals, held on for dear life and flew down the opposite side like I was escaping an imploding death star.

After a couple swashbuckling miles of descent, the rocky mountainside, like a damped sine wave, crumbled into rolling grasslands. When the warm air of the plains rises, it creates a vacuum filled by the cold air rushing off the mountains; I sailed on this air until my maps sent me, at mile 62 for the day, on a hard left for 20 miles north toward the town of Augusta (elev: 4000 ft; pop: 315). I desperately missed my tailwind and cursed my cartographers for the tedium I was suffering. For what? The mountains now to my west were all but invisible behind the storm clouds; the grasslands to my east were great and all, but pretty standard fare as far as grasslands go. After a bend in the road 15 miles later, a verdant swath in the distance announced Augusta's valley home and my end for the day.

I hadn't ridden a block into town (downtown Augusta is 3 blocks long, 1 block wide) before some folks waved me down. They were park rangers from Helena National Forest here for a week of fire training and they insisted I join their makeshift camp on the rodeo ground's lawn. They handed me a beer before I was off my bike and pointed me to everything I'd need to know for my one-night stay. It took me a minute to recognize that beer flowed more freely on the streets of this town than in most, but a mood of harmonious lawlessness certainly made me feel instantly at home. I set up camp and then, beer in hand, walked over to the Buckhorn bar.

Augusta isn't a city. It's county land. It's got a sheriff who works part time and seems to prefer the laissez-faire approach to law enforcement. In the month of June, Augusta's raison d'etre is its rodeo. This year, festivities culminate June 26. Right now it's the Senior Rodeo (participants need only be 40, which doesn't bode well for the profession). It used to be there was only one cop for the county and the jail was some 50-odd miles away in Helena so you could get away with just about anything during the rodeo ("Short of killing someone, the police wasn't gonna mess with you."). In the past two years, the state has sent in a fleet of 10 officers to maintain order during the rodeo's final weekend. This -- paired with the fact that Sotheby's seems to've just caught wind of the area -- has calcified the town's antiestablishmentarian/frontier ethos.

For me, indeed, it was a frontier. This morning, the clouds had cleared and to my west was a wall of rock; the wind whipped eastward just as eagerly as it had yesterday. There's only one direction for me to go. It feels real now.

I hooked up with the wind and rode an easy 57 miles downhill to Great Falls.