ULTIMATE ADVENTURE

We left Ultimate Adventure last month snoozing at camp after climbing to the top of a mountain to visit the incredible McKelvey Lake outside McAllister, Montana. And while unique museums, ghost towns, and abandoned train tunnels were in the event’s rearview mirror, that’s not to say our bag of surprises was empty. On the contrary, Ultimate Adventure had just been warming up to this point, with visits to several of America’s bucket-list destinations in store, as well as some truly world-class wheeling.

DAY 5: Gold Mine Ghosts, Old Faithful, and Road Day Carnage

We awoke on Day 5 to another chilly early fall Montana morning and wasted no daylight packing up camp. Our site for the night had been down toward the end of the unpaved North Meadow Creek Road, but it would be hours still before we’d see pavement. We backtracked just a bit, finding the turnoff onto South Meadow Creek Road and following it as it shrunk from a two-lane through the valley into a single-track shelf road that followed the rising grade up alongside South Meadow Creek. With very few turnoffs and 26 wide off-road vehicles we’re