Anarchocyclist

ok, here’s the continuation of this entry.

Day 4: starting back to vancouver (kelowna to near merritt, 85km)

We woke up at about 7am on sunday, intending to be out the door by 8am. But…as things usually happen, we took a bit longer. i think it was more like 9:30 when we finally started moving. We had some warnings the night before that we would have a lot of hard climbing ahead of us and we wanted to start early, but we really didn’t know how hard it would be. The ride through kelowna and west bank was easy enough, and then we started up the hill at the start of the highway that connects kelowna to merritt and the coquihalla highway.

we rode upwards for a seemingly endless amount of time. the road wasn’t crazy steep or anything…maybe 5%…but it kept going and going. we stopped for a break at a large hill with very regular geometry, which i suspect was created from the dirt hauled from the nearby Brenda Mine. We put our bikes at the side of the road, and then walked up to a fence that said it was the start of the road to the mine, and was monitored by live video feeds. after seeing that the cameras faced only the entrance to the road where a car would drive in, we went perpendicular to the road and slipped under the fence and behind the cameras. The hill looked small from the road, but i think that was just because it was so regularly shaped. you couldn’t get a sense of its immense size because it had no outstanding features. just a big flat-faced hill at a perfectly consistent angle, covered in wheat or grass or something.

we sorta scrambled up the side of it, which was a little tough because it was mega steep, but on the top was just more wheat. We had hoped for a rad view down into the mine or something, but the mine was way over on another hill behind this one, maybe about 5km further on. After i got back home i mentioned this to my dad (who’s a pilot) and he says that when he flies over this mine, it looks huge and immensely deep. i kinda wish we’d walked out there to check it out. next time, maybe.

after a whole bunch more climbing, we finally reached the summit of the road at 1740m elevation. A comparison that might help the local vancouverites is Cypress mountain in north vancouver, which is 1200m high at the peak. this spot at 1740m was just the regular highway. It was super chilly up there. below 10C for sure. my hands and feet were getting kinda numb, and i had all my clothes on except for my extra underwear….not that i brought tons, but whatever i had was on. We ended up riding several kilometers across the top of that high-altitude area before finding the descent, which was then very steep and swift. we were just starting to think about camping up near the top when we finally found the downhill. we dropped about 500m over the next couple kilometers, and the temperature went up by several degrees.

that night was pretty chilly for me, still. My hammock is great for convenience, but it really needs something extra for cold weather conditions. I have no ground-mat since i’m not on the ground, but with cold air whistling under it all the time, it was pretty cold. My down sleeping bag was compressed between my back and the hammock, and it needs to be fluffed up in order to provide insulation. I’ll have to find something to get me more insulation next time…there’s a nice lookin add-on on the hammock website that i might get.

The spot where we stopped to sleep was about 40km east of merritt. We hadn’t yet reached the highway junction at Aspen Grove, but we had descended enough altitude that it would be much more comfortable to sleep. We found a creek, and went down under the overpass to check it out. The water turned out to be flowing pretty weakly, and the whole area smelled like cow shit, so we figured it’d be a bad idea to use it to cook. I strung up my hammock between some fenceposts of the deer fence where it formed a right angle at a corner, and we went to sleep after some cold food.

Day 5: into merritt and out again (40km east of merritt to near the coquihalla toll booth, 106km)

waking up cold, we proceeded on our way to merritt. After reaching that summit the evening before, there weren’t many more hills. the hills we found were pretty short and not that steep. generally, it was an easy ride and then became even easier when we hit the last downhill before merritt. Merritt is in the bottom of a valley, and it’s a big, fairly steep descent into it.

Once in merritt, we just hit the grocery store for some food and got out of town. Here’s where we used an important tip from another cyclist; on a previous trip i met a guy in Hope who was about to go up the coquihalla highway from that side. He told me that if i ever tried it, after i conquered the ferocious climb to the summit i’d have to worry about another climb just before Merritt. He said that it was really futile because the highway goes way up the side of a mountain and then comes down to the exact same elevation when it reaches merritt, so you undo all of the climbing you did. The way to avoid it is to take Coldwater Road, which follows the Coldwater river right into town and has no challenging elevation gains on it…just some mild ups and downs.

So, naturally, as we were leaving town we got onto Coldwater road and did it in reverse to get closer to the coquihalla toll booth. It was a fantastic ride. you could count the number of cars that we saw on one hand, and we had a nice view of the river, with no challenging hills at all. just like the guy said. it was awesome. We could also see the highway climb way the hell up the side of a mountain…it looked horribly exhausting. all the Road Maggots (aka motor homes) were struggling up it really slowly. (another cyclist introduced Ryan to the “road maggot” terminology somewhere out in the rockies. Motor homes are fat, white, and they crawl around consuming resources like mad.)

After Coldwater road, we hit the one necessary climb on the route. It was pretty easy…probably 5% grade and only a few kilometers long. smooth sailing for a long time after that. We stopped at the last rest stop before the toll booth, since we had this mental image that the toll booth was way up on some forbidding peak (when in actuality the toll booth was on the same elevation we were already at). We cooked up some really great slop out of the dried food that ryan brought along. Dried shiitake mushrooms, dried refried black beans, freeze-dried peas, some lentils, and lots of salt :). It was gourmet.

We had a little bit of light left, but decided that it wasn’t enough to try to get down the rest of the way to Hope, so we snuck into some trees next to the rest stop area and set up camp. another chilly night, since we were at about 1200m above sea-level.

Day 6: from the toll booth to home (coquihalla toll booth to abbotsford, 131km)

We got up late on the last day…partly because it was fuckin cold out and our sleeping bags were warm and cozy, but also partly because the sun didn’t really shine into the dense trees we were hiding in. When i finally got up i thought it was about 8am by the amount of light, but it was more like 10am. After breakfast, we got on the road by 11am.

It was a surprisingly easy ride to the toll booth. we thought it was on a remote mountain peak or something, from all the stories we heard, but we didn’t realize we had already climbed all the elevation we needed to. we rolled right past it, since bikes don’t have to pay any toll. Soon afterwards came the crazy downhill. the top of the highway is at 1200m, but the bottom end down in Hope is only slightly above sea level. The first part of the descent is really really steep, and it lasts for a long ways. I was heating up my wheel rim quite a lot as i used my brake. I tried to use it sparingly, but the hill was so steep that i couldn’t really use the force of my legs on the pedals to slow myself down (because this whole ride was on my fixed-gear bike, remember).

i zoomed through an avalanche tunnel, which was super scary. it was really dark, still crazy steep, and several large trucks were using their engine brakes in the confined space. In the middle of the head-splitting din and extremely dim lighting, i had to steer around debris and try not to overheat my brake. quite the wild ride. after that, the road grade lessened a bunch, maybe down to 6% (which is still steep, but a lot less scary). after that i was able to hold my speed almost constant by just using backwards force on the pedals, with occasional pulls on the brake lever.

The road continued to be between mildly steep to really steep for the next 50km. It has some beautiful scenery on it, and took us about 2 hours to descend in full. In case anyone is thinking about riding up it, i strongly recommend against it. the coquihalla is insane enough to go down….going up would be nuts. The big uphill from kelowna towards merritt was about the same length, but it never had the crazy steep parts on it. it was just consistantly medium in grade, whereas the coquihalla is really steep in many parts.

ok, so i guess that’s enough about the coquihalla. you get the idea. We got to Hope, and then continued on to Agassiz through a tough head-wind. it took us 2 hours to ride that stretch instead of the normal 1. I called my dad to say ‘hi’ at some point, and he offered to come out part way and pick me up, so by the time it started getting dark around Chilliwack, i gave him a call back and asked for a lift.

So, i ended the ride on an easy note, while ryan was determined to do the whole thing door-to-door on his bike. He ended up camping in aldergrove that night, while i was at my parents’ house lounging on the couch watching star trek. After over 800km of riding up hills with only one gear, i figured i didn’t have to prove anything by riding the last 100km from chilliwack, but i’m pretty impressed with ryan riding across the whole damn province and back over 36 days under his own power. i think he said he went something like 2800km altogether, but i guess we’ll find out if he ever gets around to blogging his adventure ;)

Ride hard, ride free

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 19:06 pm and is filed under Cycling, Front Page, event report-back. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.