Montana Trail

This looks Great! So much to see up in Montana. Noticed that some parts look similar to where the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route is. Thanks for posting!
 
This has been kicking around for a few years, and has always been long on promotion and short on specifics. I'm glad that they're making progress toward their goal of a viable route! Montana certainly has some great terrain, and I think this proposal has promise.

A fundamental tension think they need to resolve:

A serpentine wandering through the best terrain, versus a desire to hike border-to-border

It seems like this trail is trying to make everyone happy by taking a circuitous path through some awesome terrain in western MT, while also trying to be an east-west border-to-border journey. Of course, whey you try to make everybody happy, you end up making nobody happy. Put another way, if your goal was to hike the entire east-west breadth of Montana, you'd have to be crazy to take a route this circuitous. On the other hand, if your goal was to see the best terrain Montana had to offer, you probably would stop somewhere around the Crazy Mtns and call it a day. By trying to incorporate two incongruent visions, I fear they've developed a route that isn't ideal for either purpose. A canary in the coal mine is that this route requires multiple modes of transport in order to be viable.

Consider two analogs, both 'state' trails that simply end where the best terrain ends:
  • The Colorado Trail ends at Denver, where the mountains end. I'm certain that the CT would be far less beloved in the trail community if it were bloated with a couple hundred miles through the high plains to the Nebraska border, particularly if the best way to approach those miles was by switching modes of travel. The promise of the CT (and all the other truly top-shelf trails), is an all-killer-no-filler experience.
  • The Florida Trail ends at Big Cypress National Preserve. South of Big Cypress, Florida continues, but it's more water than land. I think it was a prudent choice to end the trail there, rather than designating some sort of 'water trail' south through the Everglades.
In my opinion, they'd be prudent to drop the border-to-border thing, which only dilutes their proposal. Hiking from Mexico to Canada is perhaps cool. Hiking from North Dakota to Idaho seems significantly more arbitrary. Remember, the AZT isn't a classic because it runs from Mexico to Utah; it's a classic because the terrain throughout nearly its entire length is some version of outstanding.

A modified proposal

Montana has some truly awesome terrain that the is not served by existing long trails. If I were tasked with a Montana Trail proposal, it'd go roughly as follows (keeping in mind I've considered this for a whole whopping five minutes):
  • Beartooths
  • Gallatins
  • Madisons
  • 'Butte Super Cutoff' route to Butte
  • Pintlers (short CDT concurrency)
  • Bitterroots
  • Cabinet Range
And I suppose you could turn east on the PNT and end in Glacier if you wanted. You'd still get a border-to-border experience, albeit a N/S rather than E/W. And it'd be fundamentally different from the terrain you see on the CDT and PNT. And it'd be almost entirely awesome terrain. Heck, it makes me want to go out and do it!

Finally, if anybody from the Montana working group happens to see this and wants to talk further about vision and what hikers look for in a trail, hit me up (PM here or social media). I've done a couple DIY routes in my time :)
 
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