Today, our last full day of riding, was filled with stunning scenery and many indications we are now very close to Yellowstone. This includes, on the challenging side, much more traffic than we have experienced for much of the trip. Some of the campers we now share the road with are enormous and some of these tow full sized pickups or Jeeps. We looked back fondly tonight on the day we spent most of the morning climbing up a pass in remote Idaho through many switchbacks and shared the road with less than ten vehicles the entire magical morning.

On the other hand we’re able to start enjoying some of the amazing things which bring people to the Yellowstone area in the first place: stunningly beautiful mountains and streams, and the rich blue skies of high Montana .

We rode the entire day riding south in the valley of the Madison River, with the Madison Range directly to our east, climbing gradually all the way as we followed the Madison River upstream . Tomorrow we go into the Madison Range mountains and gently climb to West Yellowstone.

In the late afternoon today Chris and Joe took a side excursion ride up to Quake Lake, a lake which was formed in 1959 when there was a 7 plus earthquake here which caused a mile wide side of a mountain to break off and crash to the bottom of the canyon of the Madison River, creating a natural dam that then flooded the area upstream of it, resulting in a large lake which still exists, and remarkably contains the trunks of many trees which died in the flood – sixty two years ago.

With side excursions we covered 51 miles today and have now ridden well over 1,200 miles on this journey. On to Yellowstone tomorrow!