Our route for today is here.

Our cumulative route is here.

    “Hey, was that a parrot on her shoulder?”

                                             Ron leaving a grocery store in Lincoln, MT

    We’d landed in Lincoln, Montana for the afternoon and were buying supper for the night when I noticed the lady with the parrot on her shoulder.  It’s not everyday you see something like that.

    Lincoln is a nice little one horse town with a small grocery store, one gas station, and 17 saloons.  Hey, we gotta keep our priorities straight!

    We left our motel in Kalispell and headed south, following a valley with huge mountains on both sides.  The temperatures were quite low and we had our heated vests and grips percolating nicely as we bopped along.

    The Continental Divide Trail follows excellent roads of gravel through the Lolo National Forest at this point. 

   

Less than an hour after leaving our motel, we passed a lake.  Looking over, we saw a person water skiing (no wetsuit) and we felt a bit inadequate with our heated clothing.

    But the scenery was too outstanding to keep us down long.  We soon found our first gravel road and we followed it for hours, rarely seeing a person.  It was delightful.

    At one point, we came to a fork in the road where one side had a gate across it.  The other side had a pile of dirt placed across the road.  I had read about this section on other ride reports.  I knew that over that pile

of dirt, and down the road a mile or more, were rocks set across the road to deter people from driving down the road.  I’m not sure the reason for this, but we weren’t to be thwarted.  (For those of you wondering if we weren’t supposed to drive on it either, there was no sign saying not to.)

I rolled over the pile of dirt and Meredith quickly followed.  Ahh, motorcycles are nice.  T

he trail after the dirt pile was an old road grown over with grass and flowers.  It was obvious that people had still been riding on the road, but very few.  It was single track.

    We came to the end and had to thread our way through the rocks.  Soon we were rolling down the gravel thoroughfare again.

    The scenery just got better and better.  We soon rolled into the burg of Seeley Lake and had a fantastic lunch.

   

Back on the trail, the mountain scenery kept showing itself and we kept lapping it up.  Mile for mile, it doesn’t get much better than this.  We passed numerous lakes that were impossible to tell how deep they were, even though we could see the bottom.  The waters were that clear.        

    About 180 miles after leaving Kalispell, we rolled into Lincoln.

    All in all, we met less than ten cars while on gravel roads during the day.  Neato. 

    See y’all down the trail.

                                                        July 16