Felix Canyon: Back in the Saddle

March 2nd, 2016

Alrighty then! I’ve already been in Bozeman a week and I’m starting to feel like I’ve lost it all to this God-awful cold when I meet Dane, introduced to me by my sister.

Dane is all for going on adventures and he motivated me to once again get my butt out of the house (despite still having a LOVEly cough). We brainstormed back and forth for a while about where the heck to go and what the heck to do. If you are a reader of this blog, you may notice that my forte is hiking (CUZ I’M SO GOOD AT WALKING). Unfortunately, the Gallatin valley has been hit with a rather early spring, and the hiking is not at its best. The skiing is still pretty good, but I’ve fallen out with the whole alpine skiing thing, trading in my downhill chops for Nordic gear. Long story short, our list of possible activities was a bit limited.

Luckily, Dane seemed to have much experience in coming up with adventure ideas, and suggested we go check out a seldom-explored canyon in the Northwest section of the Bridgers. He got ahold of some fat tire bikes and we piled into his rattly-sprinter-van-slash-house-in-the-making and headed up, up, up until we reached Felix Canyon road.

Luckily the land to the West of the Bridgers is a heck of a lot flatter than the land to the East, so it didn’t take us half the day to get there.

Once we reached the road, however, we found that it had been closed for the winter.

“No, problem! We brought bikes, we’ll just use them to get up the road!” I said to myself, so innocently. Yeah. Do you see that picture? Do you see how straight that road is? Do you realize just how deceptively long that road is? Remember, I’m BARELY recovered from my cold, so the moment we hopped on the bikes my “No problem!” turned into a big old, “Yikes! Back in the saddle!” I’ll keep it simple and just say that I was considerably challenged by the 1-ish or more mile up the road.

The snow soon became very soft and riding became very squirrely (real word), so we ditched the bikes in favor of walking, much to my relief. As I’ve said before, I’M REALLY GOOD AT WALKING. We wandered around the many intersecting roads, just feeling our way to what we thought would lead to…something I didn’t know at the time. About two hours in, after a good amount of slipping and a glorious amount of sunlight we finally reached….the TRAILHEAD.

YAAAAAAAYYYYYYY.

Dane asked if I wanted to keep going, but I had to decline. Getting back into the saddle is mighty hard, my friends. I’m proud to say, however, that we did end up going about six miles in total, and our track looked like this:

Coming down the road on the bikes was a little terrifying due to the squirrely-ness (another real word) of the snow, but once we reached the dirt it was pretty fun!

DID I MENTION THAT THERE WERE COWS? OR MORE ACCURATELY BEEF CATTLE THAT WE HAD TO RIDE BY?

The doleful gazes of the cows brought me much joy as I sped by them (top speed, appx 10 mph-wooooooo!)

So, while Dane and I may have just spent the afternoon walking on a jeep road, it was still pretty intense, and still an incredibly worth while adventure. We even spotted a Golden Eagle on our way back to town!

Thanks to Dane for getting me out! I leave you with our dopey, smiling faces.

Cheers,

Molly