4: Polson
Polson sits at the south end of Flathead lake and is home to the infamous monkey space helmet park.
We again loaded the bikes on the roof, organized the cars and took off for Polson. Another convienence store shopping spree, postcards, gas, ice, beer, jerkey, candy, more postcards. Talking with the local clerks and customers and buying pointless shit was always a welcomed break from driving. “Where y’all headed?” was the usual.
Car Checks from no bikes on Vimeo.
We made it into Polson late that afternoon, passing all the hotels, motels, docks and yaughts. This was a summer town of maybe a few thousand people. The skatepark seemed so out of place, in the back of a big open field stood the biggest bowl ive yet to see. Its had coping sections 30-40 feet long, hips, perfect quarters of all sizes, one had a cut out tunnel going thru it so you could ride into the bigger bowl where the wild over vert capsule was. Shaped like a football helmet and in kind of a crazy corner. Both Hango and Andrew managed to get right upside down but the thought of someone usuing the extra extension seems impossible. After an hour or so the sun started to go down and turn into one of the best sunsets ive seen. I was quick to ask Hango to shoot a photo, arms stretched, 6-7 feet out of the deep bowl with the postcard like view in the background.
Hango. Photo: Ridgeway
The plan was to drive to our proper, pre booked campsite a little ways out of town. Once the tents were set up we took 36 beer, 1 party cigar and $8 worth of gas down to the beach for a fire. Several beer and a midnight swim later the rain started and so did the thunder and lightening. Already soaked from the swim and drunk from the beer Ty and I saw no reason to head back to the tents so we set forth on finishing the rest of the beer, and burning all the gas. You don’t need dry wood when you have gas, we had the only fire on the beach that night.