Hammockeering Around: Guest photographer Emily

Emily joined me biking for three weeks from Jasper Alberta to Boise Idaho. She picked a great stretch to join. It included the parks I wrote about in my last post as well as Glacier Park in Montana. In Glacier we rode up the beautiful long climb to Logan Pass on Going-to-the-sun road. In Canada a man described it to me as the third prettiest road in North America. The second prettiest was from Jasper to Banff and the first prettiest he said I had just passed. I'll have to go back some day to see if he is right. In Glacier we didn't need to go over the pass so we just turned around after 4 hours of climbing and raced right back to where we camped the night before in less than an hour. It was really a spectacular Park and we spent one warm night biking through it under the light of a full moon, the trees cast moon shadows across the quiet road and the bats fluttered around erratically, as they do.

Continuing through Montana to Missoula we found a cycle tourist gathering. Nearly a dozen cyclists camping in the yard of our super generous host. We took a day off there to rest and watch the world cup. On the way out of town we stopped at the Adventure Cycling Association headquarters as I had done a decade ago on my first bike tour. They had a bike scale and with food and water mine came in at 138 pounds.

From Missoula we crossed into Idaho and caught a brutal heat wave that one day reached 107 degrees. We were in a hot springs area but always opted for a cold river instead. We made a friend along the way, Amanda and her little baby Wiley. She invited us in for tacos and we camped in her yard. She and her husband are forest fire fire fighters. It was especially interesting to hear about because we were biking through the smokey haze of a nearby fire for days.

Emily is an accomplished photography and has a blog about an around-the-world photography trip that you can read about here (Emily goes around the world) . She brought a professional grade camera and lenses and knows how to use them well enough to operate in manual mode. So for this post I am using her photographs. I think we'll all agree that they are very nice and maybe we don't take it a step further and compare them to my typical offering. Let's just say they are both good. As much as she wanted to stay and eschew responsibility she chose the high road and left to start medical school at Harvard, where I'm sure she'll be super successful. Good luck Emily!