Story by: Rob Sturney
Photos: Shannon Hurst
Every second or third summer the blacktop calls and I answer. Since 1999 I’ve gone on four, self-supported, month-long cycling tours through British Columbia. Hazelton has always been my starting point and Osoyoos, where my mom lives, has always been the mid-point. So the movement is always south then back north, though via different routes. Like my road race training rides, these excursions are always there and back.
During the winter of 2007 I decided to take an ambitious journey the following summer. I knew that one particular southern route was hook shaped: southeast past Prince George, south through the Kootenays and finally west. It was the longest meander I could take through B.C. to get to Osoyoos and still stay (mostly) in the province. The leg through Alberta would be the kicker. Entering the National Park system near Jasper, I would cycle the Ice Field Parkway, ascending four Rocky Mountain passes before exiting the parks at Radium Hot Springs. After that the summits of the Kootenays would be a breeze. This assumption would turn out to be only partially false.
It would be the hardest bike trip of my life, although guiding my brave, twin 14-year-old nephews on a 2,600 km outing in 2002 had its own unique stresses. But the Rocky Mountain-Kootenay trip (RMK)— covering the same distance as the Twin Tour —was also the best, for it often felt more like exploring than traveling. Thankfully, I’d never been more consistently strong on a tour even though the climbing was brutal. Crested mountain passes led to exhilarating descents through river valleys lined with ranks of rocky sentinels.
I’d spun the Hazelton to Prince George leg so many times—both coming and going—that it’s like an old pal, though this time the old pal was uncharacteristically damp and chilly. In fact, it rained every single day from Houston to Radium Hot Springs, necessitating the purchase of a high-tech wool undershirt in Jasper. Highway 16 to Prince George has mild climbs that I was thankful for; my legs needed warming and a little more fitness before the Rockies. At P.G. I turned southeast, enter- ing the 1,200 km part of my journey that I not only had never biked before but also had never even driven. In two days I made it to McBride, encountering my first ever grizzly bear in the wild just outside of town. He ran off into the dripping bush, and as I sprinted away I thought, “What’s he scared of?” In McBride, fortune smiled in that smart-alecky way she does only on tours, and an ex-student appeared out of nowhere to take me in and shelter my soggy, appreciative bones for a night.
By this time, I had adjusted. My legs were accustomed to the idea of spinning O’s for at least four hours a day, day after day. I had fine- tuned the seat until I couldn’t feel it anymore. I could remember which of my four waterproof panniers held what. Most importantly, my mind had altered to accommodate life on the road, one of riding the (mostly) wide shoulders with 45 pounds of gear—a stripped down life of essentials and basics. I was even getting used to being wet all the time.
Mount Robson was like the guard at the gate. I whistled in appreciation as I pulled into a café across from the provincial camp- ground. As I straddled my bike, tired yet joyful, a squadron of cyclists on slick road bikes dropped one by one down Red Pass coming from Jasper. They were all Americans on a supported tour—one large van was waiting for them at the café and the other was sweeping up behind them. When I encounter these sag- wagon cyclists while on my own tour, there’s always a bit of embarrassment on their part, as if they think we self-supported, gear-laden yahoos have some kind of hard-core credibility they lack. An older fellow on a loaded recumbent bike wheeled over from the campground and the lot of us talked excitedly about what was happening at the Tour de France.
The next morning, after the usual three envelopes of instant oatmeal and mug of coffee, I tackled the Red Pass. Surprisingly, it wasn’t too cruel; similar to how Mount Rob- son served as an introduction to the Rockies, my first pass was like a warning shot. Mike, the recumbent guy, had left a half-hour ahead of me, but his bike, though comfortable, was a terrible climber. When I caught him, he was going rolling at 6 km/h. I pressed on to Moose Lake at the top of the climb and had a wondrous day pedaling to Jasper. The only bump in the day was finding out at the park gate how much it would cost to spend five days in Jas- per, Banff and Kootenay National Parks before the road spat me out at Radium Hot Springs.
A day off in Jasper after only three days since my last break in Prince George turned out to be a fabulous decision. It helped enable me to crest many passes and summits before the next rest in Creston. With little sleep thanks to some obnoxiously drunk nearby campers, I left Jasper at 6:00 a.m. and entered a glorious world of endless mountains posing in stunning vistas; I had to pull over every 15 minutes or so to snap pictures. It was a mobile geography lesson writ large.
Pausing to take some photos of the Sunwapta River showing itself off against a background of sharp, snowy peaks, I drew the attention of a German woman. “You know there are mountains for you to climb?” she asked. My first impulse was to react with shock and surprise, but instead I answered in the affirmative. In that charming German bluntness she replied, “That is mad.” I just smiled in my polite Canadian way and inhaled a small bag of peanuts.
I remembered her words as I laboured in the pouring rain to climb up to the Columbia Ice Fields. Coming at the end of a long day, the as- cent was relentless. I recall swearing a lot—at what I know not. The rain ceased just as the ice field came into view, teeming with ant-like tourists. I was content to plop myself down on a picnic table at the big, pricey lodge across the road and take pictures of it from far away. A couple of kilometres down the highway was a campground. The rain started up again. I set up camp and cooked a can of beans under a sheltering tree while a couple argued next door in their tent. That night, thunder made me think the ice field was shattering into pieces.
right: The open road beckons.
Gravity works both ways, of course, and before I hit the day’s two passes, Sunwapta and Bow, the Rockies treated me to an in- credible descent from the ice field in the freezing rain. There was no traffic, so I hung it out as if I was being chased. The drop snapped me awake like an intravenous double espresso. At Saskatchewan Crossing, I pulled in to eat. A Japanese cyclist was there and we both removed layers and ex- changed pleasantries. I had one of my rear panniers open and looked over to see a mouse emerge from its depths, leap to the ground and scurry away. The stowaway had chewed his way into a plastic bag to gnaw on my sugar cubes.
The mountains seemed to shrink. These weren’t the majestic crowns of the previous day. Maybe it was because of all the climbing; my eyes tend to get fixed to a spot about a metre in front of my tire when the road tilts up. At the Bow Pass summit I set the bike in the grass beside a dirt road turnoff. A car stopped before turning on to the highway and a lady emerged to give me a chilled 7Up. “You, madam,” I said, sound- ing slightly drunk in unfamiliar midday heat, “are an angel.”
Mountain views are spectacular everywhere you look in the Rockies.
A lovely night in Lake Louise and I was ready for the last day in the parks. It’s always a morale booster to awaken in the morning and not hear the pattering of rain. Unfortunately, by the time I headed south towards Banff, a hole ripped open in the sky and a deluge pelted the pavement. Dead flat, the road ran for 24 kilo- metres before I had to turn southwest. I pulled into a rest stop before the big climb towards Kootenay National Park and was so miserable in the cold rain that I stuck my upper body in a big, bear-proof garbage can and recorded a bitter, whiny video that I erased later that day.
The next six kilometres were excruciating. The water ran down the highway towards me and I could hear squishing in my shoes every time I turned a pedal. The clouds lifted as a small lodge came into view. I stepped off the bike, sloshed into the restaurant and ordered a cup of coffee from a young woman whose beauty was enhanced by my oxygen depletion. A lodge guest wandered in for his breakfast. He informed me that Vermillion Pass was almost over. I was incredulous, since my guidebook indicated that the ascent was more than 10 kilo- metres. I was thrilled to find out he was right.
If the beginning of the day was a sodden nightmare, then the next four hours were an accelerated dream. True, great swaths of land running past were burned, with hundreds of hectares of scorched matchstick trees emerging from verdant green undergrowth. The Kootenay Park Lodge displayed pictures of how close the flames of the great 2003 fire came to immolating its log buildings. Soon after the lodge I came across a prone deer, victim of a car. By this time, I’d seen dozens of ungulate carcasses on the trip, but this unfortunate creature had a red tag on its ear. I took note of its location and left written instructions at a ranger station where it could be found.
Just before the last big climb of the Rockies, I turned a tight corner to find a little gathering of cars. Tourists were filming a ragged looking gang of mountain goats. I joined them, taking the time to explain vehemently to an Italian man that I was not a Lance Armstrong fan like he assumed. On to the last pass. A couple at the Kootenay Park Lodge who were taking off on a little pedal of their own as I arrived had informed me, “When you think Sinclair Pass is over, it isn’t.” Inconveniently, I forgot this and was horrified to find that what I thought was the beginning of the dangerous descent into Radium Hot Springs was actually a teaser—an- other two kilometres of steepness awaited me.
Then came the hairy downhill. The shoulder came and went, tiny avalanches provided loose rock to avoid and at one point, a ranger herded a group of big horn sheep—even more motley than the goats from earlier in the day—off the highway. Once she had cleared the road of the beasts (and tourists), I decided to tell her directly about the ear-tagged deer. She replied, “Ah, you’re the guy with the note, eh? Well, we went to find it, found the bloodstain, but the deer was gone.”
The first leg of the tour wasn’t even close to being done—there were still over seven hundred hot kilometres and the horrific summits of Paulson and Eholt to come before Osoyoos— but as I tried to sleep in the heat that night in Radium, I felt that a glorious challenge had been met.
A couple of days later, as I checked my average speed for the day, I began to think that I’d actually come out of the Rockies stronger, not shredded by all those ramps up to the sky. The rarified air, the stratiform-faced mountains, the slow green rivers—they had all beckoned me forward and upward. I had left a lush, sharp- edged, chilled world to emerge in a dryer, hotter, more rounded one. But the peaks were still in my legs, lungs and heart.
