Hi, just got my first packraft which I shall be taking with me when I cycle the Great Divide from Canada to Mexico later this year.
I’m planning the trip now and looking for good places to packraft along the route - which could be either gentle bike-rafting or side-trips leaving the bike behind and hiking light.
If anyone has some suggestions or recommended trips I’d really appreciate it. I won’t be following the great divide religiously, so any good places nearby I’ll consider too - would like to see the best parts of the US! There’ll be two of us. We’ll be passing through or near Glacier NP, Yellowston and Grand Teton to name a few places and we were thinking of a side trip to Utah and the Grand Canyon too.
Thanks
For starters you’ll go right along the North Fork of the Flathead, which unless it’s running high (more than 3,000 cfs) is a great mellow bikerafting float. You could put in by Polebridge and float all the way down to Columbia Falls, which IMO is a good trade for Red Meadow Pass (which is cool) and road riding from Whitefish to C Falls (which is not).
On that subject, you could take out at the confluence with the Middle Fork, and ride the only bike-legal singletrack in Glacier NP (http://www.singletracks.com/bike-trails/flathead-river-ranger-station.html) to Apgar, check out Lake McDonald, then bikeraft back down McDonald Creek (mellow and scenic) and down the Middle Fork to C Falls.
There’s lots of fantastic packrafting in the Bob Marshall, but hard to see how you’d make that work with riding the divide.
Thanks for the Glacier NP tips - I’ll get looking into those routes. Sounds good to me.