Awful Winds

We started off today by talking for a few minutes with a guy who was driving a tour bus-sized RV and towing a car.  Believe it or not, these behemoths of the road, these monstrosities of tourism, are common.  Taking your home with you seems to me to be too fast, too comfortable, and too expensive to really get to know the places you go.  It also seems extravagantly wasteful: not only do the drivers let their RV/tour buses idle, but upon stopping, they turn on the car they're towing and let that idle, too!  All this happened this morning right next to the sign that declared "B.C. is idle-free" and denounced idling for its impact on air quality.  Not everyone can bike tour, but it seems to me there are better ways to travel than driving a personal bus and towing a car.

Perhaps I'm just touchy today because the wind was as bad as it's been all trip.  The first ten miles weren't horribly headwindy, but after that it picked up and we struggled to maintain five or six mph on the flat sections.  

We were going this way: <----------

We would have stopped had Jade City, population 50, not been within reach just 20 miles farther.  So we pushed on through the gale and managed to get there just after it started to rain.  It turns out we weren't riding through a gale, just that this area of the country has severe and persistent south winds.  This is rather worrisome, as we'll be heading south for the next 500 miles.

They don't have a restaurant here, as we had hoped, but they do sell ice cream and provide wi-fi, which is how I'm sitting here now writing this.  They also have mountains of jade, as the name implies, cut in every shape and size you could ever want.  The table is jade.  There's a jade globe in the corner.  

What's not jade is painted jade-green.  It's pretty crazy.  There are two other cyclists staying here too; they've been here for two days waiting for the wind to lessen, and we're excited to talk with them more later on tonight.

On To the Cassiar, August 5th, 2014

RV parks in the morning are noisy places, but we're so exhausted from the 100 miles yesterday that we sleep until 9:30.  Our morning ride involves hills and long, flat sections.  The wind is blowing lightly, sometimes a headwind, sometimes a tailwind.  It's just under 25 miles when we start seeing signs for the junction with the Cassiar Highway.  Yay!  To make things even better, there's a restaurant/RV park/motel just before the junction, and it's open!  Since no other cyclist had told us about it, we had assumed it was closed like most of the other former establishments on this highway.  It's called Nugget City, and they serve food, baked goods, and ice cream.  The guy running the place is rather funny and advertises all the food to us.  We end up enjoying a large blueberry muffin and some ice cream.  A kilometer or so down the road, we turn south on the Cassiar Highway.  Immediately we are climbing a steep hill with a full-on headwind.  So continues the rest of our day.  Notable stops along the way include entering British Columbia (for good this time), lunch in the shade (it's super hot out today), and a stop at Blue Lake to fill up water.

 The area we're riding through was recently subject to a huge forest fire.  All the spruce trees are crisp and burnt.  In some places, they look striped, the inner bark creating a stark contrast with the charred outer bark.  It would look desolate if it weren't for the fireweed, which forms a dense, pink carpet among the trees.  And the smells!  The wind carries us the smell of chopped wood, fishiness from the lakes, wet burnt wood from the forest, and summer flowers.  It's really quite beautiful.  Thankfully there's much less traffic than the Alaska Highway, so it's easy to ride side by side and chat.  

Late in the day we enter back into green forest and reach our first campground.  60 miles.  We decide to push on, but the headwind has really picked up and it's tough going even though the road has flattened out.  At 70 miles we come upon a rest area where some RVs appear to be camped.  Exhausted, we stop and set up as well.

The Century! August 4th, 2014

We wake up to the loud chattering of squirrels.  It seems nowhere around here is quiet in the morning.  As we leave our campsite, the morning air is still.  Deep, thick, quiet forests fill the valleys alongside us.

Occasionally we see a lake tucked away behind the greenery.  The water is always clear and perfectly calm.  After about five miles, a light headwind picks up, but it's barely noticeable after yesterday's ride.  Above us, there's a high layer of clouds, and a giant rainbow forms in a circle around the sun.  Beautiful!  We leave the Yukon and enter British Columbia for a bit.  A sign says, "Welcome to Super, Natural British Columbia."  As we ride, there's no sign of civilization except for a wooden fence and a sign that says "horses at large."  Just as we are starting to think about lunch, a familiar car drives by.  Could it be?  It looks like our friends who gave us the ride from McCarthy, Jim, Janet, Dan, and Nannette, and indeed it is!  They stop just up the road to say hi, and we make plans to meet at a pullout just nine miles farther.  The next "pullout" is the old town of Swift River.  Once there were shops and a motel, but now it's deserted and run down.  When we arrive, Dan and Nannette are super excited about the rocks they've found in the area.  The rock shop that used to be here must have left some of their specimens!  They've prepared a bag of snacks for us for later, as well as PB&Js, which we eat with our regular lunch.  It's wonderful to hear their travel stories.  How funny and how nice to see them again.

Since this morning I've been thinking about getting to Big Creek campsite down the road, but it's pretty far.  Biking there would put us at about 100 miles for the day.  The only way biking another 60 miles from our lunch spot will be feasible is with a tailwind and some nice long downhill.  Lucky for us, that's exactly what the afternoon had in store. 

As we eat lunch, it begins to rain and the wind really picks up.  It's a tailwind!

We bike over rolling hills until we reach the Continental Divide.  The Alaska Highway crosses it at one of its lowest points.  We've just biked up from the Yukon watershed, which drains into the Bering Sea, and now we're about to enter the Liard watershed, which drains into the Beaufort Sea.  After the divide, we start an amazing downhill. The trees are blowing over in our tailwind as we race down.  I feel like they're cheering me on.  Go, go!  We pass Rancheria Falls Recreation Area and the run-down but still functional restaurant/motel at Rancheria, still going at high speed.  A bit down the road, we meet Xavier, a touring cyclist from France who started in Vancouver and is going to Anchorage.  He has an awesome recumbent bike with a dynamo hub.  We exchange road information then part ways.  Unfortunately our amazing downhill comes to an end, but we decide to keep pushing ourselves, sticking to our goal of reaching the campsite.  We must pedal over some steep and buggy hills, but we make it!  Our longest day yet!  Legs are sore, but spirits are high. 

Danny's odometer: 100.01 miles.  The mileage upon arrival read 99.6, so he rode around the campsite until reaching 100.

Danny's Writings, August 2-3, 2014

Hills and Headwinds, August 3, 2014

After we packed up, I met Tam in front of the bakery.  She was talking with Fred from Montana, and I joined in.  So we got a late start, around 10:15, but hoped to make up time as we went.  The road had other ideas. Steep rolling hills and a fierce, unrelenting headwind made progress slow and frustrating.  We still did our best to appreciate the surrounding beauty; Teslin Lake was so nice!  

We also saw a bear while riding: I was riding behind Tam on a downhill when I saw a small brown bear walk obliviously into the road a few hundred feet ahead of us.  Our system, so as to be specific about where an animal is and not to scare the other person, is to say what it is then point at it.  This only works, however, if the person in front sees the animal first.  I waited a few moments for Tam to see it, but when she kept cruising without any sign, I just yelled, "Bear! Look up!"  She had been reading a sign next to the road.  The bear skedaddled as soon as it heard us, but it was a somewhat exciting moment nonetheless.

By the time we reached Teslin, thirty miles in, we were exhausted.  This was the location of the last store we would see for about 300 miles, so to supplement our lunch and not use our food for the next few days, we bought some fruit. And a lemon-meringue pie.  The pie didn't help our biking progress, but it was a nice treat.  We biked for a few more hours after lunch, still into the wind (which was actually a nice cool breeze when we were stopped), and ended up stopping around 7.  We hoped to camp on the fringes of a rest area, but this rest area had a secret camping spot not marked on our government map!  We were rather happy about that and enjoyed sitting at a picnic table while having our dinner of couscous, various veggies, olive oil, and sesame sticks.  And dessert, the double-bagged chocolate with peanut butter.  Then a few minutes at the adjacent river to wash clothes, then bed.

The Chocolate Disaster, August 2, 2014

We said goodbye to Jeremie and Shannon this morning and headed out of Whitehorse, excited to be back on the road on a warm day under a clear blue sky.  We had talked about upping our daily mileage from 60ish to 70ish, so we picked up the pace shortly after leaving.  Unfortunately the mild yet constant headwind slowed us down, but we still made pretty good time.  We did stop for a few minutes at one point to eat wild raspberries!  They're always so sweet when wild.  Soon the low-bush cranberries should fruit, and hopefully we are still far enough north to find and eat some after the first frost; that's when they lose their tartness.  Anyway, Jeremie had sent us off with some freshly caught and home-smoked salmon, and we both enjoyed it with lunch as an hors-d'oeuvre to our tortillas and cheese.  Neither of us, as vegetarians, has an issue with eating home-caught and prepared salmon.  And it was delicious!

After lunch, we biked awhile more only to run out of water.  The place we had expected to get some said they didn't have any, so we went looking for a stream or lake.  A few uncomfortable miles later, we found a nice brook and took full advantage to quench our building thirst.  One of the nice things about Wrangell-St. Elias, the last national park we spent time in, was that all the water could be drunk straight out of streams.  The abundant glaciers there act as giant purifiers.  I've drunk straight out of streams frequently in remote areas of the Sierras as well, but this time, since we couldn't see the headwaters of our stream and weren't sure of the water quality, we made sure to purify the water.

Up the road, we met Joe and Cory, two cyclists coming from Victoria and Banff, respectively.  

We enjoyed talking with them and sharing our favorite places they would soon reach.  We learned that Joe had met two of the cyclists we had biked with in Alaska!  The northlands bike touring scene is a small world.  They informed us that there was a bakery about 20 miles up the road, so we set our sights on that and arrived a little while later having done almost 80 miles, our longest day yet.  

We sat down at a picnic table, and I opened my bear canister to retrieve my dinner food. Uh oh... The giant bag of bulk chocolate chips, our dessert for the next few days, had somehow been punctured.  The chocolate had melted in the heat of the day, oozed out of its confinement in the bag, and was now sitting freely in a puddle on the bottom of my bear can.  Tam helped me lick clean the other bear can contents that had chocolate on them: a pre-dinner dessert!  We scraped and cleaned the rest out later.  Lesson learned: double-bag the chocolate.

Exploring the Capital of the Yukon

After hanging out at Alpine Bakery (this is a stop you cannot miss if you are ever in Whitehorse) and enjoying the farmer's market yesterday, we decided we liked the town so much that we had to stay another day.  It was about time for a rest day anyway.  We made delicious pancakes this morning, then spent some time biking along the Yukon, exploring the shops on Main Street, and visiting local bike shops. 

Fireweed by the gorgeous clear blue Yukon River

In the afternoon we visited the dam and learned a lot about salmon. Whitehorse has the longest wooden fish ladder in the world: 366m long! Although the salmon were not jumping up the ladder, we saw them pooling at the bottom.  Huge and powerful fish who have traveled upstream almost 3,000km to get here!

The spillway at the dam and part of the fish ladder. 

Can you see the giant shadowy salmon?

But what has made our stay in Whitehorse so special is getting to know our warmshowers host, Jeremie.  He has been more than welcoming, opening his home (and hot tub!) to us. It's been wonderful having such a comfortable place to stay and getting to know Jeremie, his son Finn, and partner Shannon. Thanks so much for everything!
Tomorrow we're planning on getting back on the road.  We'll post some new stories as soon as we find more free wifi.