Adventures on the Cassiar, August 6-11

All You Can Eat, August 11, 2014

Bell II Lodge.  All you can eat buffet. We made sure to wake up and get there early, and we're glad we did!  There was fresh fruit, yogurt, cereals, blueberry waffles, scrambled eggs, potatoes, and four types of fruit juices!  Our taste buds and stomachs were in heaven.  

Numerous groups came in, ate, and left.  One guy asked the waitress the elevation of the lodge, and when she didn't know, he estimated 10,000 feet due to the temperature and her remark about the heavy snowpack in winter. We had passed a tiny sign the day before noting the elevation of that spot as 466 meters.  The highest point on the highway, which was about 150 miles north, was just over 4,000 feet.  Had I been traveling in a car, like this man who overestimated the lodge's elevation by probably 9,000 feet, I probably wouldn't have known those details either.  And while those by themselves aren't all that important, all the little things you notice and learn about the area while cycling add up and, in summation, equal a greater connection with the place.

After we finished our giant, yummy breakfast, we rode for awhile through beautiful mountains, sometimes next to rivers.  The road was mostly moderately graded, and the headwind was minimal.  And, contrary to yesterday's cold rain, it was clear and hot!  

The beautiful sunny weather and moderate road 

Fueled by the morning's calories, we rode all 60 miles in one go, stopping just a few quick times to pee and refill water.  We arrived at Meziadin Junction expecting to see a lodge with a restaurant, but it was all under construction.  So we proceeded to Meziadin Lake Campground and ate lunch.  It was $18 for a site, so we planned to leave and find somewhere along the road, but then we met Monica and Pam, two other cyclists, and they agreed to split their site.  So we stayed at the campground, went for a refreshing dip on the lake, and talked with them late into the night.  

-Danny

Wonderful Coincidences, August 10, 2014

We woke up this morning to the sound of rain.  No go.  Back to sleep.  Around 9:30, the rain stopped so we got up and debated whether to go or stay.  The ever-present headwind didn't figure in; it was the same every day.  To find out the weather forecast, we talked with the campground host, a nice German lady named Margaret who always lets cyclists camp free.  She said that tomorrow and the next day would probably be the same: overcast, windy, rain here and there.  We decided to go.  The wind was pretty bad, as expected, but we pushed through it and tried not to get frustrated.  The rain decided to stay as well.  About 25 wet miles in, a car pulled alongside and rolled down the windows.  It was Berel and Chris, our German cyclist friends we had spent some time with a few weeks ago in the Yukon! They were unsuccessful at getting a ride down the Alaska Highway from Whitehorse, so they took a ride to the Rockies down the Cassiar Hwy, where we were.  We made tentative and hopeful plans to meet up with them in a week or two.  They left us with higher spirits and two yummy muffins, which we had scarcely finished when a van stopped just up the road.  Out hopped Jeremie, Shannon, and Finn, the folks we had stayed with in Whitehorse!  They were driving south on vacation.  Tam and I were floored at these coincidences; good thing we had braved the cold winds!  Jeremie invited us inside their van/RV and generously shared some chocolate covered almonds, chocolate almond milk, and apples!  The food, the company, and the respite from the inclement conditions made for a perfect break from riding.  Thank you!

We stopped a few miles up the road for lunch.  I guess we were hungry, because, in addition to our regular ration of tortillas, hummus, and cheese, we each had a substantial dessert of 10 or so cookies with peanut butter.  And those extra 1200 calories or so fueled us well, because I didn't need any snacks for the rest of the day.  We were thinking of camping just outside of the Bell 2 Lodge and getting there early the next morning for the all-you-can-eat breakfast, but the thick brush and a couple of bears we chased off the road persuaded us to camp in a site at the lodge.

- Danny

August 9, 2014

Today was the second of our two shorter days.  We slept in at our quiet campsite then, feeling rested, began our 37 miles for the day.  The headwind was expected, and it started to rain as well after a little bit.  Fortunately the clouds were high enough that we could still see the beautiful, surrounding mountains, some with patchy snow in places.  We stopped in Iskut, the final grocery store we would see for a number of days, to supplement our food supply.  Along with beans and veggies, we picked up a pack of 45 cookies for only $5.99!  They will be a nice dessert for the next few days, or at least tonight.  We rolled by crystal clear lake after lake, finally reaching the Kinaskan Lake Park campsite, our destination, around 3:30 pm.  It had stopped raining, thankfully, and we enjoyed a late lunch at a beautiful site right on the lake.  

After, while setting up the tent, we heard approaching bells, as if someone had attached cowbells their car and they were now bouncing on the pavement.  Our attention was piqued, and we turned to watch about twenty horses trot by, some with bells around their necks, unaccompanied by anyone or anything.  What a random event!  We laughed and laughed.

We used the afternoon to change the tires on our bikes and catch up on writing postcards and whatnot, all to the pleasing beats of Toto.  Then in the evening I undertook shaving in the lake.  You may wonder why I bother shaving when I'm traveling all day and out in the wilds of Canada, or wherever.  Some people look like rugged mountain men after not shaving for a few weeks.  I, on the other hand, look like a scruffy teenager trying to look older.  It's awful.  So I try to keep the "scruffies," as Tam calls them, to a minimum.  

- Danny

August 8th

After a stop at the grocery store to fill up water, we're on the road again. We've been warned about the big hill we're going to hit going out of town- it's the Arctic-Pacific divide pass, more specifically called Gnat Pass. It's the highest point on the Cassiar Hwy. For those of you who are wondering- we don't see a single gnat. The climb is much more gradual than we expected and soon we find ourselves at the summit. A large sign says "Trucks check brakes! Steep grades ahead." What an exciting sign to see when biking! 

On the way down we meet Simon, a cyclist from Vancouver who's headed to Whitehorse. He's super energetic and excited about his first bike tour. We enjoy talking to him for a bit. 

After parting ways we continue down through gradual rolling hills that take us by more lakes and streams. It's partly cloudy today, and every once in a while we bike through a burst of rain. The headwind is ever-present.  Our road begins to follow a large river, then suddenly makes a giant U turn and crosses the river. Just after the crossing we stop to have lunch, then immediately start to climb again. No better way to digest lunch than a large mountain pass- right? Luckily, just over this pass we find our campsite. Our shorter "rest" day of 40 miles has taken us until 4:00pm to complete! 

The campsite is called Morchuea Lake. Down a long bumpy road we find the beautiful lake, providing us with a view of what the natives call the "ice mountain," the snowy, volcanic Mt. Edziza. Unfortunately, much of it is hidden in the clouds. As we bike away from the lake to look for a campsite we are stopped by a family who asks if we would like their site- they're leaving soon. Their site is right next to the lake and they already have a fire going- it's perfect!  As they take down camp, we talk, and they loan us their axes so we can chop wood to sustain the fire. This exercise reminds us how much arm muscle we have lost biking all the time. They're a wonderful family, and it's rather too bad that they're leaving. Thanks again! 

In the evening we enjoy the fire and take swims in the lake. It's great to wash off all the sweat, sunscreen, and bug spray! 

-Tamara

August 7th 

Fearing a horrible headwind, we wake up early and get on the road. Luckily for us, although we do have a headwind on and off throughout the day, it's not nearly as bad as yesterday. We do our best to ignore it. We're pretty low on food and determined to get to the Dease Lake grocery today! 

The morning ride is great. We descend into a beautiful valley surrounded by rounded peaks, each cloaked in dense forest. 

Then the road flattens out and we cruise from clear blue lake to clear blue lake. Occasionally we cross a delightful bubbling stream or roaring creek. It's only when we pass the occasional mine, or the town of Good Hope Lake, that I'm reminded that we're not cycling through a National Park. As we ride, we talk and listen to new music that we acquired from James's computer. So fun to have new music!

After lunch, our road follows the shore of the enormous Dease Lake. Naively we predict that the road will be flat. Wrong! It winds steeply up and down between the mountains along the shore. At points we are awarded with amazing views of the lake, but most of the time we can't see it at all. 

Tired and hungry, we finally reach the grocery and devour some garlic cheese bread before doing the rest of our shopping. Outside the store we meet Babette, a touring cyclist from Holland. She started her trip in Calgary and is headed to Anchorage. We camp with her behind the small college in town and enthusiastically share stories about what to expect along the road. 

-Tamara

August 6, 2014

I already wrote an update for August 6, but that was before we met James and Laetitia!  

This is the worst photo ever. Please forgive me for posting it.

They are world travelers, Laetitia having cycled all through Europe and Asia and James soon to.  They were planning on heading south to Argentina, but their hearts aren't in it, at least for Canada and the States, so they'll be heading soon to China.  Tam helped Laetitia with her Chinese while I talked with James about biking, music, birds, and all kinds of other things.  Together, we enjoyed a vivid double rainbow and a large, bright moonrise.  We would have loved to stay and bike the next day with them, but we were almost out of food and had to get to the grocery 72 miles away.  I'm sure our paths will cross again down the road.

- Danny

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.