Written and photographed By SEPP JANNOTTA - Missoulian - 11/22/07

RATTLESNAKE NATIONAL RECREATION AREA — It’s 4:45 p.m. on opening day of rifle season when the incongruous phrase rises from a knot of hunters sporting mountain bikes and the typical array of camo, Carhartts and safety orange.

“Meat-cycle.”

Never mind that there is a mini traffic-jam nearly three miles beyond pavement’s end at the upper Rattlesnake Creek trailhead — sure, six bicyclists gathered on this wooded track is hardly news in a recreation area known as the epicenter of Missoula’s mountain biking scene — but something different is going on here.

“I call it the meat-cycle,” says Brian Koster.

Six men and their bicycles in three hunting parties with three kills of white-tailed doe among them and all eyes are on the meat-cycle. Koster looks over his ride, which is now wearing a smallish white-tailed doe like a medieval robe. Its head is tied to the handlebar, the gutted abdomen fixed over the lowered seat.

The contraption prompts laughter and the incredulous and inevitable reportorial question: “And you’re going to ride that down the hill?”

A glance at Koster’s hunting partners, Mishka Wisoff and Brian Krick, reveals an even more astonishing fabrication. The two are fashioning their two bikes into a cart lashed together with an impromptu frame of lodgepole logs draped over with a good-sized doe.

“You guys going to ride that down the hill?”

Rob Roberts, who by his own admission took a leisurely and unsuccessful approach to this day’s hunt, laughs and offers his assessment of the meat-cycle and carcass-chariot gang.

“I think they might be headed for a crash,” he says, pushing off toward his middle Rattlesnake home five miles down valley.

The meat-cycle crowd aside, opening day is a busy one. Other orange-clad hunters are rolling along with freshly killed deer in various bike trailers. At trail’s end, the parking lot is stacked with vehicles.

In fact, it seems nearly all the hunters working the Rattlesnake drainage this day came by mountain bike. Over the five-plus hours he spent out on his hunt, Roberts noted a single hunter packing in by horseback and one or two on foot.

“I’m sure that people have been hunting in the Rattlesnake by bike for a long time ... but this year it really seems like there are a lot more people running around than in previous years,” Roberts says. “We were passing people with orange on their bikes from the three-mile mark on, pretty much anytime we went near the trail we saw someone riding by.”

Missoula is a natural breeding ground for the sporting confluence that is hunting with a mountain bike. While mountain biking has become increasingly popular, hunting interest in western Montana has remained steady over the past 15 years, with more than 20,000 people heading out annually on average, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

While there are still plenty of hunters traveling to remote places in their pickup trucks, perhaps trailing a load of horses or ATVs, the biking crowd seems to have taken the fair-chase ethic on a more active, more eco-friendly — more Missoula — tack.

The evolution of hunting in the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area mirrors some of the demographic changes that have come to Missoula in general. Back in the day, hunters could take motorized vehicles up the Rattlesnake drainage, but as the number of hikers, bikers and other nature users grew, federal land managers closed the corridor to motor traffic.

Now, on any given snow-free day, in addition to its resident ungulates, the Rattlesnake NRA is home turf to a host of hard-bitten mountain bikers. Grant Kier, the 2006 U.S. national amateur champion, says he knows of some two dozen serious mountain bike racers who train regularly in the Rattlesnake.

Kier points out that brothers Sam and Andy Schultz, after growing up riding Missoula’s trails, made names for themselves on the national mountain bike scene — both are pro racers and Sam is currently on the U.S. under-23 squad.

For his part, Schultz says the biking scene in Missoula seems to be getting better year after year, with a community that gets high marks on being biking-friendly. The increasing popularity of mountain biking to the hunt makes sense here, he says.

“It’s definitely the blending of two distinct cultures,” Schultz says. “I don’t think you’re going to find that anywhere outside of Montana.”

Some sportsmen accustomed to riding bicycles to their Rattlesnake area hunts express dismay at the level of publicity the arrangement seems to be generating — Outside Bozeman magazine recently featured a bicycling hunter on its fall cover. Hunters rightly dread crowds that turn game skittish or push them out of an area altogether, but from longtime Rattlesnake elk chaser Craig MacDonald’s perspective that’s the nature of public land.

“It’s not like it’s my own private ranch,” MacDonald says, adding that the Rattlesnake isn’t even the best place to hunt an elk. “But I go up there because I’ve done it for years and years, and I like the idea of going out my back door and enjoying what’s out in my backyard.”

MacDonald, who gave up riding horseback in favor of a bike 10 years back, says he doesn’t fear the trendiness of the Rattlesnake bike-in hunt.

“It comes and it goes,” he says. “I think people come to realize that it’s not easy, and it really isn’t.”

Whatever it is, David Johns is not enamored of the bike-to-hunt scene. Johns, a longtime hunter and Michigan native, hiked into the Rattlesnake in search of elk during this fall’s bow season and was taken aback by the crowds.

The foray was his first hunt in Montana and by the end he’d decided he would venture farther into the backcountry for rifle season.

“Sure it’s easy access and you know where to go and you can take a bike in there if you want,” Johns, a University of Montana sophomore, says. “But seeing all the people in there took away from my hunt and, even though I also saw a lot of animals, it took away from how I felt about being in the woods.”

It was high noon as Roberts pedaled across the new footbridge connecting the pavement of Duncan Drive to the dirt path leading to the upper Rattlesnake trailhead, and from his point of view, simply being in the woods was as important as bagging a whitetail.

Along the way, he nodded to young mothers pushing knobby-tire strollers, couples walking dogs, casual Sunday bikers and a host of other people in search of fresh air.

With his orange vest tucked away and his .308 Winchester strapped to his pack in an inconspicuous, cinder-black case, he could have simply been just another Missoulian out for a look at the new snow clinging to the drainage’s upper reaches.

According to Derek Schott, a 14-year Fish, Wildlife and Parks warden for the Rattlesnake area, even when hunters roll past pedestrians with bloody carcasses nobody fusses.

“There just doesn’t seem to be that many conflicts that I’m aware of,” Schott says.

Roberts pedaled through the crowded parking area and on up the trail four miles farther. On a good day, the entire trip from his house would scarcely take an hour. With his secondhand bike stashed away, Roberts’ hunt resembles any other — a quiet stalk or a patient wait hopingz that game will present itself for a clean shot.

This day, it never does. If it had, he would have cut the animal into quarters, split the load between his backpack and the milk crate set atop a rear-tire rack on his bike, and headed straight for home.

And if the animal is too big?

Roberts says that is when you rely on the cooperative nature of the Rattlesnake’s bike hunters — the kindness of friends and strangers — to get your meat home.

In the case of the meat-cycle and the chariot, innovation wins the day. Wisoff and Krick manage to roll and push their impromptu cart down to the trailhead without mishap, using a coordinated braking system to both steer and keep their velocity from going terminal.

Wisoff’s big doe, his first deer, makes it home unbruised.

On a quiet street in the middle Rattlesnake, Rob Roberts pulls his bike into the garage. It’s almost dark. He says he’ll head back out next weekend and keep trying until he puts some venison in his freezer.

Roberts, 32, says before he began hunting in the Rattlesnake three years ago, he hadn’t hunted since he was a teenager. But the lure of harvesting game from his immediate surroundings got him thinking.

“I sort of saw this as a way, being so close to the Rattlesnake — only about five miles — to leave just from my garage on my bike, ride up there, hunt, and if I do shoot something, ride it right back to my garage,” Roberts says. “It’s a zero-carbon protein source — it hasn’t been shipped, it hasn’t been transported, hasn’t been processed.

“It’s just a grass-fed piece of meat that I shot, cut up and cooked myself. As far as I’m concerned, that’s about the best way to do it.”

Sepp Jannotta is a photography intern at the Missoulian and a graduate student in the University of Montana’s School of Journalism.