What makes for the best ride? Exploring unknown singletrack and finding something extraordinary. That’s what we did on the 3rd weekly Jill/Dave ride, and that is why this evenings ride (spoiler/beta alert!!) is thus far the years best.
Drive out of town, park at the base of the Mormon Peak road, get climbing. Enjoy 8 rythmic miles of steady gain. Grunt another 3/4 mile up the Carleton Ridge trail. A bunch of windfall had us thinking about worst case scenarios for the trail ahead.
Tech riding around Missoula usually means tight switchies, and we had plenty of them. Once we turned onto the Mill Crick trail, a scintillating ribbon led through the spruce forest, rooty, loamy, blissfully free of deadfall. Then things turned downhill, and we began what would unfold to become the best descent I’ve ridden on a bike in the greater Missoula area.
It may not be as long or as varied as Sheep, but inch for inch the Mill Creek descent is of substantially higher quality. Narrow tread, steady but not excessive down-grade, roots, rocks, off camber, multiple expansive viewpoints, and plenty of switchbacks that in their dimensions seem made for bikes. I was challenged by plenty of them, entertained by them all, but only choked on one, which was especially narrow and especially sandy.
At one granite view platform I vocalized a thought that had been running through my head for the last half mile, that the trail rode like one of the best of Flagstaff (high praise indeed). That was before the rock gardens appeared. I miss rock gardens dearly, more than any other single outdoor thing. My favorite has always been the (new) Supermoto style of embedded boulder dodging, mid-slow speed line picking, body english-ing, rock crawling trying to not endo and bust your teeth rock garden. And I’ll be damned, but well into the descent, Mill Creek delivered several Flag-style rock gardens. I charged into the first one waaaay too fast, rolled the first boulder, slammed the stoppers, and stared in disbelief, then flipped it and hiked back 50 yards to take a run at it. That was the first of Jill seeing me charge through the rocks, gaudy paroxisms of involuntary laughter running ahead of my mouth in torrents. Serious, serious fun. I couldn’t help myself.
The rock gardens gave way to a maze of fire road crossings, but the quality one track kept arcing graceful lines through the forest. We popped out of the obscure trailhead with zero moments of route futzing on the day, coasted back to the highway, and railed the white line for 15 minutes to close the loop. We had thought about doing this last week, but bailed because I thought it might get epic. We both brought lights, but the loop took us almost exactly three hours. Amazing.
With respect to fitness, its encouraging to see that I can ride a serious three hour loop and feel fresher after than before. But more importantly, we opened the best ride in the area tonight. Have at it folks.
Bedrock & Paradox 
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