Yellowstone National Park is an absolute madhouse. As to be expected. We headed into the park on both Thursday and Friday afternoon after work in hopes of hiking some shorter trails. We entered from the North Entrance since we are technically still in Montana and it actually wasn’t insane. The insanity didn’t come until we were about 6 miles into the park and near the visitors center. Anyway, Mr. TCP had found a great mountain bike trail that we could check out over the weekend. It was rated the best mountain bike trail in all of Yellowstone. Sign us up!
Bunsen Peak Road Trail is intended to be biked down. As in, you start at the peak and then just bike down the six miles with very little peddling. Well, as you already know, we like to do things the hard way and since we didn’t have a ride back to our truck if we started at the top and road down, we decided it would be best to bike UP the mountain and then ride down.
As we started out on this terribly insane bike ride we quickly realized we were in backcountry Yellowstone. You see, the harder the trail, or longer the trail, the less people. We hate crowds so we enjoy trails with less people. However, when there are less people, there are fewer bear snacks. Meaning, you could be the bears number one snack.
We weren’t a mile in before things started to get hairy. I was huffing, puffing, and about ready to die AND the scenery wasn’t anything to write home about. This is where the complaining started. I might have thrown my bike down at some point and made a big scene.
Here, I am trying to keep from passing out.
At this point, I was having to stop about .25 miles to catch my breath, say some choice words, and then make a big deal about how terrible this was. At this point, Mr. TCP was growing increasingly concerned about the bear population, and all I could think was how if one just took a small bite out of my left arm, we could get airlifted out of this nightmare bike ride. A helicopter ride sounded just fantastic, even at the expense of a small bear attack.
Apparently, there was a waterfall.
The ride up the mountain didn’t level out until after we have started into mile 3 and then we hit an open meadow that was somewhat level. However, we did go down a slight grade which only made me think how terrible going back up was going to be.
I’d say the scenery wasn’t all that fantastic, but I spent a majority of the bike ride staring at the ground willing myself to not vomit and die. I am going to blame this on the altitude. If Mr. TCP wrote this blog, he would talk about what a blast the trail was and how it was SO MUCH FUN.
I survived. Barely.
