Slowly. Nothing like 1,000 miles of carrying your gear to whip you into shape. 😊

Glad you are having a blast. getting back in form I see.

Stay in the car!!! Moose are big and not afraid of much and I'm told they're ornery to boot. Same with bison, which I am nearly certain to encounter on Sunday. I just hope they are not close to the road.

Amy and I have seen mooses(?) on several occasions. First was from a train heading north to Anchorage we saw a big daddy moose not far from the tracks. More interestingly we saw a mommy moose with moose children about 20 feet from our car on a road in Nova Scotia. We and two other cars stopped and took pictures. A couple in one of the cars got out to take their pictures. That seemed a bit crazy to us, but the moose eventually just left without taking offense.

I noticed the same thing, but the total mileage is also posted at the top of your blog's main page, so that's how I've been keeping track.

I've yet to see a moose, here or anywhere else. But I hope to.

The two guys I overlapped with for a fe days were an hour or two behind me the day we went over Lolo Pass. I saw nothing; one of them would have collided with a moose had the other one not hollered out to STOP! and look up.

So it goes: you see what you see when you're there, not what someone else sees at another time.

I hope you get to see a moose up close but not personal. That’s a favorite memory of mine from ‘99. The bus is definitely the way to go in the park.
I can relate to speeding down hills. I would begin to whimper in the stoker seat when we exceeded 35 mph.

Yes I vaguely remember that trip. It had to have been 1965 or 67 I think. 1966 was an Adams reunion year and 1968 was a Lensink year. I don't think it was as late as 69, thought it may have been.

It's a common perception that the best time to invade the Netherlands is during the summer cycle touring season, because all the Dutch will be away on their bikes.

So in less than a week you've met both a father / son AND father / daughter cycling duos from the Netherlands, touring across the US! Interesting.

Congratulations on the climb! Linda S

Keith - I believe you've been to Earthquake Lake once before: I THINK it was sometime after 1961 that our family visited Ev and Mary in Bozeman, and on that trip we stopped at EQ Lake. I recall that - unlike other national assets - they said we could take away as much rock as we wanted. It was something like, if every visitor took 5 pounds, it would take 500,000 years to remove it all. OK, I couldn't resist doing the math: that would mean an average of 48,000 visitors per year. Seems quite plausible!

Hi Keith
I guess that we have different appetites for risk although I get the point that the bar bag on a Bike Friday is a greater distance from the axle than on a large wheel bike and this would affect stability and steering.
My single frewheels at 60 km/h and our touring tandem on 26 X 1.75 being heavier can get to 70 Km/h (43.7 mph )and as long as I have a good line of sight I am comfortable at those speeds.

Hi Mike

The blown tire was a 700c x 28 on my tandem.

I'm very leery of building up a big head of speed. The handlebar bag affects steering stability, for one thing, and I have a horror vision of what would happen lest *anything* go wrong at high speed. I don't even like 25 mph unless there's absolutely straight line of sight, clean road surface, and a visible reduction in slope coming up.

Emergency braking from 40 mph just isn't going to happen.

Hi Keith
Braking and over heating rims.
The conventional wisdom is to let the bike run and brake hard before entering a corner the rinse and repeat rather than feathering the brakes all the the way down. With panniers in the air stream and sitting upright you should not exceed 40 mph. The small diameter wheels on your BF do increase the risk compared to larger rims.
Finally you can cook a disc rotor and end up with no brakes but not lose your tyre.
When you blew a tyre off your rim a long time ago what was the tyre width?