Hey Everyone,
We're pretty exhausted from today's ride so apologies in advance if this post isn't very coherent.
To start, we forgot a few details from yesterdays ride. Around 10 or 11 yesterday morning a guy pulled up beside on a touring bike and we talked for a minute. His name was Mark and he had biked from California to Vancouver and was biking across Canada. We finished talking and before we knew it he was out of sight...a very fast rider(he averages 180km a day!) . Anyways, when we made it to Revelstoke we just happened to run into Mark and JD(the tourer we saw once on
Day 4 ) by chance when we took a weird way out of town. We then went our seperate ways for the night.
Which brings us to this morning. Around 3:30 am this morning I(Chris) swore I heard a bear outside of our tent and within seconds I was up with a flashlight and had the safety off the bear spray...it was all clear and was just the sleeping bag rustling. I fell back asleep and woke up around 4:30 and the sun was coming up(it comes up really early here) I asked Patricia if she wanted to get up...she declined(don't know why?). We slept until 5:30 and slowly got ready and were on the road by 7. At our first stretch/water break Mark and JD rolled up to us.
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| Getting ready this morning. |
All four of us biked together for most of the day. We all biked at different paces so whoever was ahead usually stopped to wait at the top of a hill or at a good rest spot. It definately made the day go a little faster with other bikers around and to know we weren't the only ones suffering.
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| Mark and JD coming up a hill. |
The first large climb of the day was at Albert Canyon. We could always tell a good climb was coming up because, there are lots of signs warning truckers to put chains on their tires. Oh, and today we also saw tons of no stopping avalanche area signs.
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| Checking out the sign. |
And, we also saw some devastation from an avalanche. It looks like an avalanche went right across the road a while back. It was amazing to see the power of them - trees were everywhere and full size trees were snapped like toothpicks. It was very surreal - just glad we weren't going through here in snow season.
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| Avalanche path. |
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| Food and water break. |
Little later on we saw Mark up ahead with his camera out and pointing to the side of the road. When we caught up we saw what he was pointing at - a black bear walking along the train tracks. We took a bunch of pictures but the one below turned out the best. We watched the bear wander down the tracks and then we continued on our way.
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| We saw a bear! |
You know your gaining elevation when you can make a snowman on the side of the road.Oh, and I think it was somewhere around here that we saw a sign telling us to set our clocks one hour ahead. So now we are only two hours behind the time at home.
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| My super quick mini snowman. |
Finally, we saw the sign for Rogers pass...only 1km. Wooo hooo.
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| Only one more km |
We had been nervous and scared of Rogers Pass all day and when we finally got to the top were thoroughly underwhelmed. I am not sure what we were expecting but, there was no welcoming committee at the top for us. We were underwhelmed too because, there was no big steep climb at the end...just a really long somewhat gradual climb all morning. We all stopped at the top to take a few pictures and JD set up the timer for his camera and all four of us got in the picture...he is going to email that picture to us so we'll update when we get it.
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| Patricia posing at the summit |
At the pass it started drizzling and was quite cold so we didn't spend much time up there. There was a gas station and an expensive motel so there wasn't much to do so we headed down the other side. Mark and JD stopped to tape their cameras to their handle bars to get video of going down the other side. It was definitely nice to not have to pedal for the few km down the other side. We went through a bunch of tunnels that protect the road from avalanches - some of which were covered in snow and mangled trees(so they definitely work!). We continued on and thought the worse was behind us - we were wrong. There was another pass or two and some huge climbs after rogers pass. On one of the climbs Patricia spotted a mountain goat so of course we stopped to take some pictures. We watched him graze on the side of the cliff for a few minutes - during this time he knocked a few rocks down while he was walking around the cliff. Eventually we had to continue up the hill and leave him behind.
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| Mountain goat. |
A few minutes later we saw another mountain goat but none of our pictures of him turned out well - but he looked the same as the one above. Just after this Mark easily biked past us and yelled big showers coming. We still don't know how he knew but sure enough around the next corner it started pouring and didn't stop the rest of the day. And we never saw Mark again today...he must be at a motel somewhere in town.
The last 50km were supposed to be one of the most beautiful rides of the trip but we were soaking wet and freezing cold so didn't stop to take any pictures after the mountain goat. We somehow managed to grind out those last 50km and just as we got in to town we caught up to JD. We checked into the same motel - the first one we saw in Golden. It felt so good to get all of the cold wet clothes off and have a nice hot shower.
Patricia, JD and I went out for dinner at a restaurant right beside the motel...it was delicious and we had several coffees to warm up.
Thats about it for our day and I'm trying very hard to stay awake while typing this post out. Tomorrow's ride is looking pretty worrying since we can't find anywhere to camp between here and Banff(160km away). Hopefully we figure something out in the morning because I don't think our legs or butts are up for another huge day so soon.
Good night,
Chris and Patricia.
