My partner came into the room with a winter trail map. I haven’t seen this thing in a long time. Not since the Buck Ridge Incident anyway. She unfolded it out and we went to the ground to check it out. After deciphering different trail types our creative juices started to flow. Wow, we have never fat biked up the Storm Castle drainage.

That is what we will do. We packed up our gear, our bikes, the trail passes, and some snacks then headed out to the Gallatin Gateway.

The trail was in great condition and we rolled through the valley passing big  cliffs and encountering virtually no other users. We had numerous off-trail excursion options but stuck to the groomed trail. You see just two days before it had been groomed.

The trail turned and started up the ridge to the South. This was new to us. I think it is near the orchard trail or called something similar to that. And boy did it climb.

The surface was weird though. It is almost as if they groomed it in extremely cold conditions. The snow was so dry that it didn’t compact and set up. So we had this 3 inches of soft slightly packed snow. It was like trying to climb a slippery muddy hill. I was relegated to walking at times. Snuggles was able to climb just about everything because of her lightweight.

Soon enough though the sun was getting near the horizon and it was time to turn around.

The trip up was nothing like the trip down. All of 15 minutes we were flying as fast as we could peddle. The occasional jettison to the side because of a deflection rut or something could have caused a disaster … but hadn’t.

We arrived at the bottom safely with big smiles on our faces. We then spun down and back to the car. What a fabulous day.

All of this because snuggles decided to pull out some old maps. From there we got excited and our adventure juices started to flow. And when has anybody ever gone out on an adventure and had a bad time?