Great day – Friggin’ cold start.  Woke up in the middle of the night and put on more clothes.  Chatting with Felix (neighbour across the way from Netherlands), he claimed it ‘wasn’t bad’.  His thermometer apparently said it was -4C.  Packing up the tent, there was frost and ice on everything.

But once you were in the sun, it was a beautiful day.  Some good bits of pavement… And some nice dirt roads packing a small lesson.  Then more random highways down south and winding up in Flaming Gorge.   Much of the day was thoughts of Red Dead Redemption and World of Warcraft…

Signal Mountain panoramic shot looking east.

To the dirt!

Back up. She’s a bit too heavy for me to lift with the roll and top case on.  I still had to dig down into the very deep gravel to back her out.   Once on solid ground, I foolishly tried again and went up the hill…  Promptly getting myself stuck again a third of the way up.  Spinning the back tire, I dug down until her belly stopped me from digging any deeper.   That took some more time to dig out and then I just gave up and turned around.

Never good when a stop requires access to tools. Good thing I bought that Hex key set!

The final resting place of “The Sundance Kid”

Cold day for the Travelling Salesman.  Crazy winds in the night making the tent smack me in the face again.  Hard to sleep through that.  Very cold, put on all my clothes and tried to go back to sleep.  Woke up to gusting winds and hail.  Very unpleasant.

Today was a day riding with all my thermal gear – including the down vest.  Made moving around very cumbersome.  And even that wasn’t enough – eventually I resorted to putting on my rain mitts just to keep the wind off.   That helped a lot – the heated grips were able to keep up after that.  I think I made a lot more stops than I normally would have – just to

Tried to ‘finish off’ the roads in Yellowstone.  Had to double over a few paths, but very glad that I did.  Especially the last bit along the lake.  The skies had cleared up and it was almost warm and the scenic byway off US20 puts you right on the water.

Not sure why it’s ‘Chinese’…

Old Faithful!

Riding on Water.

Day 5 was all over the map as far as riding goes.  Temperatures ranged from 2C – 35C.  Sunny calm mornings to gusty afternoon winds.  Clean dry pavement to snowmelt-wet asphalt.

The goal was to swing out and do the ‘fun’ sections of US212 and WY296.  Unfortunately, I didn’t stick to my original plan and enter Yellowstone from the Billings and coming out of the North-East exit would mean I would have to double up one of the sections. Is it bad that all I kept thinking about for these 2 days is the Travelling Salesman Problem?  I chose to do WY296 twice since it was shorter.  I wasted a lot of time getting back onto 212 at the 310 Junction instead of going through 308 at Red Lodge.

Beartooth Highway(US 212) and Chief Joseph Scenic Highway (WY 296) are definitely ‘must do’ highways if you like to drive, ride, enjoy scenery or just road engineering.

WY296 – See all those twisties?  Beware the tar snakes, they will bite you!  Too bad, otherwise it would be just so much better.

US212 – Cold and gusts of wind when I went.  Still amazing.