I’m not often accused of being an optimist. In my baby book my parents described me as “solemn” and the jaundiced eye I have pointing outward is, I feel, perfectly suited to the current state of the world.

Except in the mountains—and especially on exploratory trips with a great number of unknowns.

In those situations you’ll find me rallying the crew with just one more hike-a-bike in my eternal search for the promised goods. I call it mountain optimism.

Case in point: I’m pushing my bike up a steep slope in southwest Montana with friends Erin Bergey and Nicki Trimble and looking for a trail I insist will appear any second. So far, all that has appeared anywhere near our feet are the cheatgrass burrs biting our calves.

“The next hill is the last bit of climbing,” I promise them.

“Aaron, please, you don’t have to,” Erin responds with a weary smile. This is clearly not the first time I’ve made such a claim. It helps to find friends who embrace the fiction.

With the pandemic pressing down and British Columbia bike trip plans squashed, I began looking for alpine-hut-based adventures closer to home. The Northwest doesn’t have the hut infrastructure for bikes its neighbor to the north does, but I’d found one in southwest Montana—the Big Belt Hut. Operated by Helena-based Montana Backcountry Yurts, the hut is a longhouse-style yurt on the cusp of 9,443-foot Mount Baldy’s tree line in the Big Belt range east of the state capital.

At only 80 miles in length, the Big Belts are a miniature tableau of small subalpine lakes, High Sierras-like dry forest, sagebrush meadows and alpine tundra. As mountain ranges go, it’s small in footprint, though it boasts a vertical relief of nearly 6,000 feet to the valleys below. And the trails, while raw, access promising terrain