Kimsjo's blogg: July 2011

Me and Rob is Bootskiing up at Lake O'hara

Howdy Folks!

Hope all is well with everybody. Sorry for, once again, poor updating on the blog the last weeks but I've been busy fooling around in western Canada:). Yesterday I crossed the border and arrived to Bellingham in the state of Washington. I'm staying with the Drew family that me and Emil met on the trip last year and problably gonna hang around here for a week or so. Here's the full story of traveling from the end of the Alaskan Canadian Highway. Epic times, enjoy:)!

Fort Nelson, Fort st. John and Grand prairie are all of them relatively big towns in Canada. You would think that after traveling for 3 weeks on the Alcan hw, It was nice to enter a decent sized city for a change. That was wrong thou. According to me this towns were not more than dirty industrilazed potholes in the middle of the oil ratrace that are going on up there. After a long day with biking southeast from Dawson Creek across the prarie I ended up in the town of Grande Prairie. As soon as I got into town I just felt for leaving it as I realized that the last couple of days a really missed the small loghousecomunitys I been passing by In Alaska and northern Canada. ahead of me waited hw 40 that would take me 340 km south to Hinton and Jasper NP. I knew that along this road there was one place to get hold of food and water, the township of Grand Cache in the middle. I had two options. the first one was to load a lot of water and spend a day extra on the hw. the other one where to take minimum amount of water and try to cream out the miles in a fairly high speed. I knew the scenery was gonna be really boring for the first half of the hw and the weather weren't to good either so I decided to go light. Right after the Grand prarie the sign shows up that says "No goods or services the next 173 km". I put up camp right after that and decided to carry on the day after and hopefully reach Grand Cache.

When I woke up in the morning it was drizzling and no wind to talk about. during my first miles I realized that there were no creeks along the road and further forward nowhere to refill any kind of drinkable water. I start to think that I probably underestimated the amount of water a little bit and realized that I definitely are gonna run out of it before I reach my goal. The distance itself was not a problem but combined with a serious headwind it made my day rough. Just a week or so before my start on HW 40 I met a Canadian guy from Grande Prarie. I heard before that that there was a lot of mining going on along the hw and I asked this guy about it.

- ooh no no, it's only just outside town and after that you'll be fine.

He just forgot that just 20 clicks north of Grande Prarie they are digging out half the range of the Rockies in a big coalmine which meant that I was sharing the road with big and heavy trucks and the shoulder was bad. With the wind punching me in the face and the level in the waterbottles going down I struggled along. With no speedometer on the bike and no signs of distance along the road I had bad idea how close I was to Grande Cache. In the distance I heard and saw nasty weather coming towards me and with this wind it was over me very fast. A thunderstorm made me park my bike towards a post along the road and the rain became heavier while I was putting on my full raingear. I thought for my self that if this is not over in ten minutes I'm gonna up the tent right here and call it a day. While I was standing there with the cold water from my hair running down my spine towards the pants, my hands and feets freezing cold and the water dripping down the cap just inches from my nose I felt pretty miserable. For a while I was thinking that this sucks but later on I started to think about what I done and experienced the last weeks for not talking about the last 8 months. Meeting the Enslow family in Alaska, seeing Denali, the people I met and the animals I seen. My grumpy face shifted to a smile because I knew the trip ahead down the parks and the coast was gonna be excellent. A wondered what people in the cars passing by thought about me standing there soaking wet in the middle of the thunderstorm with a big smile on my face.

The wind brought the thunderstorm northwest fairly quick and I continued my journey with the thoughts that it shouldn't be longer that 15 km to Grande Cache. By this stage I was all out of water and with no knowledge GC was about 50-60 km away. I carried on for a couple of hours a little bit annoyed over the lack of distance signs along the road. I reached the coalmine north of Grande Cache and thought, finally, end of the day. No sign of anything else than big trucks and a big dusty mudhole thou and right after I met another cyclist and I asked how far it was left. 25 km with a big hill to climb just before town. about 10km before town just in the bottom of the hill I felt really exhausted for biking 180 km in bad wind and short of water. Fortunately the town is the beginning of the mountains and from a small waterfall just along the road I filled up my waterbottles before I stepped of the Hw and put up my tent a little bit into a gravel road. Fall asleep like a baby.

The coming morning I walked up the hill to Grande Cache which is a really nice town on higher altitude and with a view with the mountains in the south. I parked up outside the grocerystore, went in to by 2 cinnamonbuns, a granolabar and a coke that I layed down with in a park outside. The trip later on on Hw 40 was more pleasant and a couple of days later when I arrived to Hinton I could see the mountains of Jasper National Park rising in the west. After leaving Hinton on the afternoon I decided to stay at at a campground just outside town. Leaving Hinton I could feel my rearwheel was starting to come loose again and I been tightening it up 2-3 times from Alaska. I pulled over on the evening at campground 50 km from Jasper. I met a really nice guy called Gary with his family there and he invited me over for BBQ and later on Brekkie the nextcoming day.

The coming days of biking on the Icefields parkway was just amazing. Fantastic weather combined with one of the most beautiful stretches of hw in the world made life pretty easy. The road goes in a valley and on both sides you got big jagged snowcapped mountains rising towards the blue sky. The lakes has an color hard to imagine and every ones in a while an animal you normally only see on a zoo passes the road in front of you. The first night I pulled over to camp at the campground Honeymoon Lake campground. I laughed and thought for myself that that would be the closest I ever get to a honeymoon :). well on sight I started to chat with an older guy on a mc on the campground on the side of mine. we had a long chat and it turned out that he had crosses the US different times with mc and pedalbike. after a long chat we came in to the subject climbing and I told him I used to climb a couple of years ago. He asked me if I knew about the climbingequipment "friends" and I said yes, I guess everybody who ever been in to climbing know about those. He said, well, I invented those, with a smile. It turned out I was camping with Ray Jardine www.rayjardine.com .

After spending 2,5 days on the Icefields I arrived to Lake Louise were I was gonna met up with Rob and Zoe to spend some time at Lake O'hara lodge www.lakeohara.com. I met Rob and Zoe down on the westcoast of New Zealand last year and when I told them I was gonna do this trip they invited me to the lodge. The place is just amazing with great people, Fantastic scenery and if your're into some kind of outdoor activity's, just perfect. I became extremely jealous and thought that it must be the perfect work:).

After a couple of days up there I said goodbye to my friends and headed of west with about 1000 km to the coast. I was planning on 2 days to Revelstoke. 70 km and less than 2 hours later I was in Golden, it was a lot of downhill going on to there. People told me about Rogers pass and that it was suppose to be a BIG climb. when I was thinking about that the step climbing probably gonna start in any minute I came to the Rogers Pass visitor center and the lady there told me that was the top. With downhill and flats pretty much all the way down to revelstoke I knocked of and put up my tent under a hw bridge just beside a river. The wheel started to become very bad and a lot of sound is going on there, ma plan was to take it to a bikeshop in Revelstoke the nextcoming day.

I arrived to Revelstoke in the morning. On the bikeshop they told me that hub, cones and berings is totallly worned out but with some uncommon measurement they had to order the stuff, which turned out after several phonecalls to other bikeshop along the road, was the same deal. deliverytime about a week. I hanged around in town for the day spending time at the library and tried to get hold of bikeshops along the road that might have the things but unseccesfully. I decided to stay in the town for the night at the backpackers and when we went out to the grizzlys which is one of the bars later on during the night I start to have a chat Al from NZ. He Was working on a farm in Saskatchewan and had 6 weeks of before the harvest. He was heading for whistler and later on Vancouver and I asked him if he could fit a bike in his car. Ooh yeah for sure, was the answer and next coming morning we headed of to Kelowna in Okanagan Valley. we spent 2 nights there and during the second one late on the night after way to much to drink we realized that the stampede is still going on in Calgary so the nextcoming morning we took a drive to calgary with a stop for one night in Banff before. Calgary Stampede is a enormous rodeo, country and western festival during 2 weeks every summer. we had shitloads of fun there but was suddenly kind of far away from our goal, Whistler.

A couple of days later we arrived to whistler with another stop in Revelstoke in between. The plan with whistler was to do downhill biking for a couple of days. After biking from alaska down to revelstoke in about 5 weeks and later on spent another week on the piss with an average of 3-4 hours of sleep every night my body told me he doesn't wanna do this anymore. Well in whistler I spent 3 days with a cold and a sore throat. when we left whistler Al dropped me of at the american border and a biked 20 km down to Bellingham on the american westcoast