Bangtail Blast, Smashing Glass, and a drink with Neptune

This past Saturday was a really good day.

It started with a MTB ride with some GAS/Intrinsik Architecture guys on the Bangtail Divide Trail No. 504. This is the trail that I will be hosting the MSU race on next month. Because of this, I have ridden a lot of the trail at different times for route planning, but Saturday was the first time I got to ride the whole thing this year- and it was just as much fun as I remember it. The beginning and the end of this trail are about 7 miles apart from each other on paved road, so unless you have a shuttle car, you have to ride a little on the road, and we started on this part on Saturday. The MTB ride starts up the Stone Creek switchbacks, which makes for about a 45-50 minute pure climb. Most of the rest of the ride is along the ridge, and we had a tailwind for this section, so it was very fast. The ride ends with about a 20 minute pure downhill that is so much fun. Riding the trail got me very excited for the race next month- it is going to be epic. Below is an elevation profile for the course. The whole ride, including the road portion, took us 3 hours and 1 minute. The race for the A's is probably going to be about 2 hours.

After the ride, I had lunch at MacKenzie River Pizza with Rich and Lizzie, who were stopping through Bozeman on their road trip across the country. They actually spent a good amount of time in Canada and now they are (roughly) on their way back to Ann Arbor.

Then came time for a job that my friends and I had not been looking forward to for a long time. Bozeman does not recycle glass, and the nearest place to recycle it is in Livingston, a town about 30 minutes away (they don't actually recycle it either, they crush it and reuse it in roads and other projects). So we filled up the bed of my truck with all the glass we had been saving for the past few months and started driving.

None of us really knew what to expect, but I think we were thinking the recycling center was just going to have a big dumpster for all the glass. It turns out it was an area of pavement blocked off by cement road barriers (stacked two high and probably 3 long). It looked like most people simply backed into the area and brushed all the glass off their truck, which we were about to do as well. Then Tyson threw one of the bottles into the back of the pit and it shattered, and we realized how much fun this task was going to be. We threw each piece of glass in one by one (except when we wanted to try doubling or tripling up). At one point another guy came and dropped off his glass rather gently and gave us a weird look. We got especially excited with bottles such as Pendelton, which is really thick glass. I am pretty excited for when we get to return our glass again. The only disappointing part was thinking that all this glass probably could have been worth about $150 in Michigan.

On the way out of Livingston, Brad spotted a hole in the wall on a side alley called Neptune's Brewery. I had never heard of it, and it sounded excited so I turned around and we checked it out. It turned out being the best beer I have had in Montana. They had 11 beers on tap, and all the ones that I tasted were absolutely amazing. They also sold one of the coolest growlers I have ever seen, so naturally, I had to get one of those and fill it up. I filled it with an amazing Chimay. I wish I had a picture of the growler to show, but maybe I will post one soon just to show it off because it is so cool.

The day ended with some grilling over at 422 N. Fourth and a bonfire. Oh yeah, did I mention I had originally planned on going into work for about 10 hours after my bike ride. I am glad I got distracted.