I had decided to stop at every historical place we came across, and while they were interesting, I think the best way to do this road is to take all the little side roads and explore things in more detail. This is something I'd like to do in the future. One of the highlights of the trip happened here though. I was leading today and had a black bear (with more of a dark brown coat) come barreling down the mountain no more than 30 feet in front of me, left to right heading downhill. I expect we spooked it at some point and man he was moving! Of course none of us had our cameras on, but we were bunched up enough to all see him.
Not much longer after that we came across signs of a grader in front of us. We passed him and figured that was it when we got completely blocked by a track-hoe digging a trench to replace a culvert. It took them an hour to finish that and let us by, so we had an unintended break. We continued on down the Lolo, stopped at the Indian Post Office, and eventually found some expected pavement taking us into Peirce, Idaho. What was unexpected was how wonderfully twisty it was. I couldn't resist. I opened up that throttle and left Tim and Dave far behind. It was wonderful! But eventually I realized I needed to slow down and let them catch up. Meanwhile, I had worried my brother that I had wrapped my bike around some tree or something. I promised him I wouldn't do that again (on this trip that is).
We rolled into Pierce about 4:30pm for fuel and food. We decided on macaroni with spaghetti sauce, pork sausage, and garlic bread – Pierce has a pretty nice grocery store. We chatted with three other guys going our same direction (all on KTMs) about their ride. They decided to eat in town – I don't know where they decided to camp. I had heard of another guy that stayed at a campground named "Campbell's Pond Fishermans Access" so we fiddled around a bit and finally found it. It had no potable water, like most of the places we camped at, but we always made sure we had plenty of water with us so this was no big deal. But it was a nice quiet campground and that's what we were looking for after 127 miles of riding. We had a great campfire and being lower in elevation (3300 feet), had a nice night's sleep.
Tom Clark
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Intellitect, living in Spokane, Washington. I also do a little development work on the side. And I love riding motorcycles all over the country with my friends.
