Day 3

Thursday, September 08, 2016
Great Falls, Montana, United States
Woke up to a nice sunny day. Temperature was about 15 C at 7:30 AM.

We went on a bike trail on the south side of the Missouri River . It was a scenic trip with many attractions (namely hydro dams) along the way. The trail was mostly a single track trail the was essentially a goat trail. At some spots the trail was so warn (like a trough) that both pedals bottomed out.

I counted five dams that are located east of Great Falls. There is not much for falls left come summer and fall. There is more water sent through the dams in the spring and was told by the lady at the information booth that the falls are far more impressive at that time.

Our bike trip started at the second dam, the Rainbow Falls dam, that ended at the third dam, the Cochrane dam. Each way was 3.5 miles for a total trip of 7 miles. Great Falls is much like Drumheller with the cactus, the dry grass and general dry conditions.

Traveling east bound on the trail was good because the wind was behind us. But coming back we pushed a hard wind all the way . On top of that there was a storm heading our way from the west. We were about half way back and rain drops started to fall. Luckily there were only a few drops and by the time we reached the truck we saw the storm had missed Great Falls and was heading south. The wind was so strong when I got off my bike at the truck instead of getting off on the one side the wind pushed me over and forced me to get off on the other side. In all we were biking for about 2.5 hours.

After the bike trip we went down to the old town section of Great Falls. There were a lot of micro-shops and wasn't very busy.

We made a plan to hit up a Wild Bill's Buffalo Wings and a Golden Corral while we are here. After some long bike trips we will look to treating ourselves.

Looks like we will try the north river's edge trail tomorrow. We will need to study the map tonight to see where we should start and what distance would be good based on today's trip.

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2025-02-15

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