Category Archives: MTB

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Back to Canmore – Roadtrip Complete

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To finish off the three months of driving I decided to drive all the way back from Vancouver to Canmore in the middle of the long weekend. The logic there being that Jasper would be a zoo on a sunny holiday weekend & I’d be better off checking it out a little later when there were less people around.

So Saturday morning I set off on a wonderfully sunny drive east across BC. The traffic was pretty good & BC was beautifully forested – it really is a large province when you drive across the bottom in one day. After Kamloops I was back on roads I’d driven before & there was a half-hour wait near Shuswap – but I had the Kindle out so I wasn’t too fussed. Over Rogers Pass & coming into Golden there was an ominous big cloud of black smoke billowing into the sky. I was near the front of a queue for almost an hour as some poor family watched their RV incinerate. The rest of the drive was uneventful & I was soon driving below familiar peaks – just they had a lot less snow (almost none) on them than I remember. It was a little odd getting closer to Canmore – being away for three months & doing so many other things must have lessened the blow of leaving such a great place as I wasn’t too concerned that I’ll be gone in three weeks.

So that was it really, just under 22000 km, 87 days, 13 states, two provinces, 45 MTB rides totalling a thousand kilometres, at least 15 National Parks & 5 National Monuments, only 2600 photos & 435 gallons of gas. What a great trip! We were blessed by the weather – notably it never got really hot, as it did the last time I visited Utah, Nevada, Arizona & California in 2009.  Highlights are hard to list as there were so many. But I’ll try anyway:

A separate list for the riding highlights, which is even harder as I rode so much quality singletrack.

That’s that – thanks again Valerie for coming along for the ride & sharing the experience (& financing a lot of it too!).  I’m in Canmore until mid-August before flying back to London to catch the last of the English summer.  Mum’s coming across to England for the last few months of the year, so it’ll be great to see her & plenty of other friends & family in the UK.  From then on, I only have vague ideas as to what I’m going to do with myself… But riding better figure in there somehow.

bikes, Canada, MTB, roadtrip, travel

Whistler Riding!

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If Moab is the most famous overseas MTB destination when you live in NZ, Whistler is definitely a close second.  So it was great to get back up there yesterday with (what’s left of) my bike & get some cross-country & downhill rides in.  It was a slightly later start to the day after finding my car had been towed from the Visitor Garage in Karin’s building; but with that sorted I was in Whistler & riding by 11.30.

I started from the village & followed the Whistler Valley Single Track route that ended up being just over twenty kilometres. Mid-week, the trails close to town were still insanely popular – especially with large family groups. There were plenty of small kids out there & they were doing well as the rocky trails weren’t exactly a cake-walk. Mind you, I was climbing & they were mostly going downhill so maybe it was a little easier that way. The quick-fix of the dogbone on my bike only lasted three kilometres before the stresses of me pedalling uphill bent it, most annoying. The trails were good, but the names were even better – I rode Peaches, en Regalia, Dinah Moe Humm, The Torture Never Stops (it wasn’t that bad), Fountain of Love, Pinocchio’s Furniture (lots of wooden bridges & so on), & Gee I Like Your Pants among others.

With a little time on the road & cyclepath I was riding Cut Yer Bars & then A River Runs Through It. ARRTI was rated a black & had a lot of structures to balance on, jump over & so on. With my bottom bracket wobbling around & being worn out after three months of traveling I wasn’t really in the mood for what is quite a boring trail if you’re going slowly. There were a few see-saws/teeter-totters, this was the most interesting one & I managed to ride over this quite OK. I think it was the first one I’ve seen on a bike trail with industrial bearings for pivot.

I wonder what the lubrication schedule is for this, I could probably put it in Maximo if required

I spent an hour or so going around bike stores in town trying to make my bike more rideable so that it was worth going on some lift-assisted rides. Eventually I found the side of a long-cage derailleur in a crate of old ruined parts & after some filing I got it to fit. I was a little confused by the accent of the girl I bought my ticket off – turned out she was from Auckland, NZ; I’m disturbed by that. Off I went to join the DH set, feeling completely out of place as usual with my open-face helmet, clipless pedals, only four inches of travel & a 27lb bike.

I got one good run down B-Line that was great fun before the derailleur cage broke & my bottom bracket started thwacking around. The next two runs were good too, just I was a little distracted. More good trail names: I rode Ninja Cougar, Karate Monkey Samurai Pizza Cat, Heart of Darkness & Crank It Up. A mildly frustrating day all up with the bike, but the riding was good (if not completely my cup of tea) & I rode Whistler! I do hope I can find some solution to the dogbone issue back in Canmore as I’ve been so looking forward to doing all my favourite rides back there for the last few months – I still think Jumpingpound Ridge/Cox Hill rates as highly as any I’ve done on this trip (but just might be a nostalgically distorted view of what was a really good ride).

bikes, GPS, MTB, roadtrip, travel, USA

Lewis River Trail

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Crossing in to the final state of our trip, Washington, it proceeded to get more & more grey as misty clouds descended down the hills as we drove northeast towards Mt St Helens.  Washington, well this part anyway, was a bit more down in the tooth than any parts of the country we’d been through in a while – just older, less maintained houses with plenty of rusting pickups lying around.  My great idea of a ride was looking more & more damp as we pulled in to the Forestry Service HQ – their webcam of the volcano was just a screen of grey.

The road continued east along the top edge of Swift Reservoir before crossing the Lewis River just as it entered the lake.

Closer inspection of the GPS trail showed that I could cut the 33 km loop in half by getting Valerie to shuttle me up the road to the Lower Falls.  We lunched in the very dark & tree-lined parking lot before heading out to check out the falls.  Once again, the river was high & the falls were interesting as the drop curved around to be mostly parallel with the overall flow of the water.

Still rather chilly, I had to put on all my long-sleeved riding clothes before heading down the trail.  The river only had a gentle drop along the length I was riding & it didn’t really feel like I did an overly large amount of downhill.  In fact, there was quite a bit of climbing amongst all the moss, trees & ferns.  It was nice to have decent bridges that didn’t require dismounting, although some were a little slippery in the damp.  Annoyingly, the dogbone on my bike snapped early on so I had to do most of the ride with my bottom bracket (& therefore, pedals) floating around.  [This part has been quite difficult to find a replacement for, I may have a bodge job that will do the trick for Canada.]  There were occasional pretty glimpses of the river & creeks flowing in to it.  The short pinch climbs kept coming, but I was soon meeting Valerie at the pick-up point.

This bridge wasn’t so great, showing the signs of such a damp climate.

It was very well-timed on our part that the road along the east side of the mountain was opened the day before our visit.  We got a few glimpses of Mt St Helens & the reemerging forest along the drive in to Seattle.

bikes, GPS, MTB, roadtrip, travel, USA

Out of Bend & Gunsight Trail

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We got the call just before ten o’clock that Subaru Guru in Bend had finished the head gasket replacement. Excited by the prospect of getting back on the road again, we made the big trek to the south of town & back, packed up & were pulling out of the driveway by eleven o’clock. We had ended up staying a week in Bend – not the ideal circumstances, but a great place to be stuck (even if the weather was a little unseasonal) & we were so fortunate to have Allen & Lisa’s kind hospitality.  I was toying with the idea of a big drive & then the classic Lewis River ride near Mt St Helens, but in the end decided that was too optimistic.

But I had a back up plan – the Gunsight Trail near Government Camp that I had intended to ride the day the car problems started. Mt Hood was once again shrouded in cloud, but it was a lot warmer than last time we drove through the area. The GPS trail I had showed riding from the highway, but as I had Valerie to shuttle me I managed to skip a few kilometres of paved road in the forest. When it turned to gravel I got on the bike, but the doubletrack is so good I would have been confident taking the Outback up there quite a way. I could see the ridge that I had to get up to & it was a long way up. Mostly the doubletrack was steady climbing, but it got pretty steep at one stage – climbing 150m in 1km. I was sick of pushing that middle ring around halfway through that section.

Diving off through the trees to the left, I soon popped out on an old dirt road that went up more gradually to the start of the singletrack. As this road met another, the trail dived off into the trees. I was immediately concerned by the amount of blowdown that I had to climb over – it was going to be a long ride if there were many trees down. But trees weren’t much of a problem after a few hundred metres as I continued climbing on the singletrack. I quickly became reacquainted with my old friend Mr Snow at about 1700m. So for most of the ridge I pushed over quite a bit of snow, rode on a little of it & climbed over the odd tree (breaking a spoke in the process). Pleasantly the cloud was retreating from Mt Hood & by the time I was on the top of the ridge at a burn-site I could get a decent view. There were also good views out to the east of the High Desert.

After slowly making my way along that ridge between 1700 & 1800m for quite some time the trail finally turned down & the snow became scarcer & scarcer. Unfortunately, the screaming good downhill was often interrupted by fallen trees. Nonetheless, it was a great run down – a nice wide trail with just enough rocks to keep one from getting too complacent. Unlike the descent from Surveyor’s Ridge last week, the switchbacks were so far apart I wasn’t annoyed by them. It ended up a pretty short ride at about 17km/10 miles, but after all that climbing, snow & trees I didn’t really mind as I dozed on the drive into Portland.