Day 2: Jennings to Callows Island, MT

The evening of day one we watched the DVD The River Wild. It’s a Meryl Streep film in which she’s guiding a raft and some murderers down the Kootenai River. It was filmed at Kootenai Falls. So on today’s to-do list was stop at Kootenai Falls. After Kootenai Falls it would be on to our destination of Callo Island in Bull Lake Montana.

But first we had to get to Libby from Jennings. Fortunately, there is a rode down the opposite side of the river from the highway. We rode 12 or 15 miles on it and saw maybe three cars and two other bicyclist coming out of Libby. It was wonderful. Of course it was an older Road and being Montana where they like to do everything big, like Big Sky, they have big potholes. We had to be careful because you could end up losing a bike in one.

We had such a nice ride from Jennings to Libby that we got a little lazy. We went to the grocery store, the hardware store and eventually bought some Subway and hung out at a park in Libby. When we finally decided to start our way towards Kootenai Falls it was probably in the mid-90s. Fortunately, the logging trucks, RVs, and semis blasting by at 70 plus miles an hour kept the air circulating around us. We did have a good shoulder and so it wasn’t too scary.

Kootenai Falls is one of those places that no matter how good the picture it would not do it justice. Suffice it to say that my expert kayak buddy Michael Beach might be challenged on these Rapids. Meryl Streep surely was :-). There were visible drops with holes at the bottom that would easily swallow a 20 foot raft. Despite that, by the time we got there we seriously considered getting in the water because our core temperatures were about 108 degrees.

After cooling down a bit we continued on highway 2 a few miles until we came to hwy 56 which was our turn off to go south to the Bull Lake.  At a rest stop between the two roads, tragedy struck. Most would wonder how we ever managed to raise five children and have them survive to adulthood. We have yet to travel on bicycles for just a few weeks and have gumby survive. In my defense, Gloria was in charge of Gumby this trip and only managed to keep him alive for 2 days. I got my Gumby 2000 miles to the New Mexico border. Honestly, I would rather be left in Montana than New Mexico. Hopefully he’s still enjoying the berries on the tree or a more responsible person has found him.

It may seem strange how we pick our route, but after leaving the rest stop we looked down on Highway 56 and there was a big hill. Accordingly, we found a meandering side road that bypassed that hill and only added probably 3 miles to the trip. It was beautiful and there were definitely fewer cars.

Bull Lake was lovely. We stayed on a small island with a bridge connecting it to the highway. That evening we went down to the boat dock and enjoyed cooling off in the quite pleasant waters.

The cabin looks good in the picture but inside it wasn’t that great. The kitchen was the size of a closet. That didn’t matter much because we had to carry our food to the cabin since there’s no local stores. We did enjoy some microwave popcorn.