Why I keep returning to this bike haven in Northwestern Montana again and again
By Ammi Midstokke
Cover photo courtesy of Ammi Midstokke
Sometime around a decade ago, recovering from a divorce in which I lost everything but my kid and my bike (the stuff that matters), I found myself at the Whitefish Bike Retreat in Montana on one of my first and few breaks from parenting. Back then, it was just the lodge, owned and operated by legend Cricket Butler, who let me stay there for free, sent me out with a bike guide, and subsequently became a friend.
Time passed, and as it did, with the imperceptible shifts of slowly built trails, campground expansions, and a PR campaign run by every cyclist who ever passed through, the tiny retreat became something more. Something embedded in the fondest memories of riders from all around. While the retreat added a sauna, a kid’s pump track, a skills course, more trails, a cabin, and booked out months in advance, my own life took on new shape. As did my riding.
I returned every year at least once, sometimes for the spring bear grass, sometimes for the autumn larch. The sound of the front door always took me back to that first day—a kind of hope and peace were gifted to me there, and then met with a playfulness I had lost.
Whitefish has other trails beyond the system linked to the retreat. There’s the Whitefish Mountain Resort trails with lifts running all summer, the beloved Spencer Mountain, the Tally Lakes area, and more. It’s a community that has rallied to create and protect trails, a town that teems with bike-covered cars all summer and fall. But the sheer number of ridable miles means there are seldom crowds. Still, I was always drawn back to Lion Mountain and Dollar Lake and beyond for the ridiculous grin I wore the whole time.
The trails there are built for play—the climbs gentle, the corners banked. There is a section that serpentines through a canyon at just the perfect grade to promise the kind of zen moments that make us one with our bike and nature. There is a mile descent toward Beaver Lake that, in October, is first glowing with larch and then on fire with birch. It is impossible to roll that section without giggling with joy.
I rode those trails with boyfriends in summer when the soil was perfect and with girlfriends in winter on our fat bikes in the silence of heavy snow. I celebrated my 40th birthday there, broke up with a boyfriend there (I guess at 40 you realize you don’t have time to fuck around anymore), napped with my toddler nephew in the hammock, rallied with my dad and brother there, and met other kindred spirits.
Eventually, I brought a husband there. We brought our children and their bikes. We rode through years, new bikes, new trails, new friends. We kept returning because it always felt like coming home.
There are trails on which I know the camber of each corner, how they smell in one season or another (petrichor in spring, sweet decay in autumn), when to let go of my brakes, when to make sure they are working. I don’t know if it’s because the place became symbolic of my freedom and my transitions, or if it is just how damn fun the trails are, but it is a place to which I will keep returning. Some trails are simply old friends you want to stay in touch with.
Ammi Midstokke lives on the Syringa Trail System in Sandpoint, Idaho, and regularly communes with others by bike and foot. This spring, she’ll be making some new trail friends and visiting old ones throughout the Pacific Northwest.
