Summer plans

It occurred to me, as I made my excuses yesterday for missing Monday's post, that I'm going to be missing at least six weeks of posts this summer, and that summer isn't really all that far off now. I think I'll start making my excuses now. Since it's already an unusual week, stat holiday and all, I won't fret over the fact that this has very little to do with Howe Sound. I'll get back to the local thing on Thursday.



Last summer, five adventurous young lads (two of them with a Gibsons connection) rode their bikes from Banff to the USA-Mexico border along the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. They made a video of their trip, which I've cleverly embedded above (new skill!) for your viewing pleasure. We saw this video on some cold, damp evening last fall, and before it was over, we'd decided to go on a long-distance bike trip ourselves.

Our first instinct was to, like the Great Dividers, go south. But we'd go on pavement, following the 101 from Gibsons to San Francisco, or possibly even further. It seemed like a good idea. Everyone who does that ride likes it, or at least everyone we know who's done it has liked it. So we fixed our daydreams for a while on a ride to San Francisco.

But who likes riding on the shoulder of a highway? Last summer's bike tour from Victoria to Nanaimo (via Salt Spring Island) only included about thirty kilometres of main highway, but that stretch was so unpleasant - flat tires, loud trucks, exhaust - that it left us good and rattled. The 101 is a slower road, but there would still be motorhomes rumbling by, and who knows just how wide the shoulders are?

So we settled on a plan B, which might turn out to be more ambitious than plan A was. We're going to ride across BC this summer on the Trans Canada Trail. We leave the week of July 12th, and we have six weeks for the trip.

The Trail is a combination of secondary highways, logging roads, abandoned rail beds, and dedicated trails, and it winds its way across the province from Victoria to Elk Pass. Except we'll be going the other way. We'll start in Banff, head to Canmore by trail, and from there we'll pick up the Smith-Dorrien Spray Lakes Trail (actually a gravel road), heading south. We'll cross out of Alberta over Elk Pass, and from there, follow Bruce Obee's trail directions in reverse - logging roads and rail beds to Cranbrook, over the Grey Creek Pass to Kootenay Lake, down rail beds to Salmo, up side roads to Castlegar, and then along rail beds almost all the way to Hope. From there we aren't certain of our route. The official Trans Canada Trail route winds up and over a steep pass into Chilliwack Lake - we might instead ride to Mission and hop a train to Vancouver, and from there take a ferry to the Island. We've got to be in Victoria by the end of August, after all.

That's about eight weeks off now, and yes, I'm getting excited. I haven't decided if I'll be blogging the trip as we go - it does sound like great blog material, but I'm not certain that there'll be Internet terminals where we'll be going. Stay tuned.