Cycling Adventures with Brian Toone – Page 3

Cycling Adventures with Brian Toone

TD 2022 – Days 7-8 – June 17-18th, 2022 – Idaho Park, ID to Pinedale, WY via a “Falute” Eddington 250

The day started out cold but with a beautiful sunrise over many flooded fields of flowers leaving Idaho as pictured above (39 degF and I had to hike/ride through that water in my sandals), traversed many flat miles of powerline ATV trails, merged with the Great Western Trail (rails-to-trail) for only a few miles, and…

July 29, 2022
TD 2022 – Day 6 – June 16th, 2022 – Lima, MT to Idaho Park, ID via hot headwind hell

This was the first really hot day of the Tour. You’d think with that picture above that it would be nice, pleasant riding. But the gravel road got quite a bit rougher, and the route went past those mountains in the distance before I reached any shade at all, nearly 75 miles later riding from…

July 28, 2022
TD 2022 – Day 5 – June 15th, 2022 – Butte, MT to a cave outside Lima

Note that the “cave” was really just a deep recession in a cliff, but it was enough to get me out of the steady wind that made the 30 degF temps feel that much colder. Also, note that I fell asleep in less than a minute after getting settled and even with a down blanket…

July 26, 2022
TD 2022 – Day 4 – June 14th, 2022 – Lincoln, MT to Butte, MT via the most of everything (except peanut butter mud)

This day had it all – the most climbing per mile of the entire race with three passes and four big climbs, the most technical single-track, the most traffic of the entire race, the strongest winds of the entire race (knocking me off my bike once) and knocking over trees uncomfortably close to me, finishing…

July 24, 2022
TD 2022 – Day 3 – June 13th, 2022 – Flathead National Forest, MT to Lincoln, MT via an epic store stop in Seeley Lake, MT

Don’t fall. The collage pic at the top of the post is a side-by-side comparison from June 13th when I crossed, from June 15th when David Landis crossed a couple days behind me immediately after the winter storm, and from June 11th 2021 one year ago when my friend Michael Rasch crossed the same stretch…

July 23, 2022
TD 2022 – Day 2 – June 12th, 2022 – Eureka, Montana to a Montana Hilton in the Flathead National Forest via miles of beautiful winter scenes in SUMMER

Yes, I know that summer technically doesn’t start until June 20th. Sure, sure, but our summer starts by the beginning of May way down in Alabama. So for me, June 12th feels like the middle of summer. If you go far enough north and high enough into the mountains, though, you start to appreciate that…

July 22, 2022
TD 2022 – Day 1 – Fernie, British Columbia, Canada to Eureka, Montana, USA

“Hi Brian, all I need is to see your passport,” said the US border patrol agent as I rolled up ahead of Theo. I dug in my backpack not registering that he already knew my name until I showed it to him and he wished me “good luck”. As I pulled away, I realized he…

July 21, 2022
TD2022 – Day 0 – Banff, Alberta, Canada to Fernie, British Columbia, Canada

I will come back to this video later, but this is about 40 miles into the race, and it really captures the jaw dropping nature of the scenery. Really, the first 300 miles of the race had scenery similar to this … or we were climbing up and over the snow on one of the…

July 20, 2022
Tour Divide 2022 plus home via Uvalde and Santa Fe

Let’s start out with a quick TLDR – my adventure totaled 4,077 miles with 2,715 miles of that being my 11th place finish (see pic above) in the 2022 Tour Divide southbound grand depart taking 18 days and 11 hours to complete over 16 rides. The remaining 1,362 miles included a 1,044 mile crossing of…

July 18, 2022
Three Rivers Way, the tree-fall edition

Here is the link if you want to zoom in on the map above. It’s 7500px image (width) so it may take a while to download and open: https://toonecycling.files.wordpress.com/2022/05/annotated-heatmap.jpg Summary The Three Rivers Way (Vista 300) race was awesome again this year. I’ve called it the “tree-fall” edition because there was a noticeable increase in…

May 13, 2022