History Rock, Bozeman, MT

I've been trying to get to Montana to ride for the past four years; defeated only by a blown out drive shaft in our vehicle on one of our Canadian Rockies trips in 2004. Spurred on by many incredibly photogenic trip reports by Tony from Bozeman Montana posted on the TGR forums, we made plans to ride with Tony. I had forgotten how long the freaking drive was and we ended up breaking the 20 + hours from Vancouver to Bozeman in two parts. Our first day of driving took us to Missoula where I tried to get hold of another old friend unsuccesfully. We spent the night in Missoula - remarking that this was such a refreshingly un American city ("can't believe Missoula is a real american city. It's clean. No-one's getting shot. There are people riding bikes. They are smiling. And of course the Mexican food is top notch" - were my remarks.

To make a long story short, we made our way to Bozeman arriving early noon on Sunday. Tony was still out trying to get in a ride (he got rained and thundered out) so we took a short spin from our campground at Langohr in the Gallatin National Forest to a popular local trail called History Rock. It's called History Rock apparently as there's a flat rock on the trail where people scribe their name. The climb up is short and mercifully not too steep - a perfect way to stretch the sea-level legs and try to acclimatize to altitude.

We climbed from approx 6500 to 8200 ft and were done in about 2 .5 hours with lots of stops for photos and playing tourist. You can make a loop out of this by descending the South Cottonwood drainage then riding N along the trail then road-riding back to Langohr but we declined due to laziness and due to the fact that the trail was pretty crowded with other users.

A useful resource for this area is the "Bozeman, Big Sky, West Yellowstone" topo map available from Beartooth Publishing. There's lots of free camping around the Hyalite Reservoir. Next time I wouldn't bother reserving at Langohr - this is more for the RV crowd.