198 miles

I was really quite cold. I thought that maybe I had already had my last night below freezing in the northern hemisphere, but I was mistaken. Even though the daytime temperatures right now are consistently in the mid-60s, the temperature plummets at night. I peeled back the zipper on my bivvy to reveal a world draped in a fresh coat of frost. The hardest part of my day is getting out of my warm sleeping bag. I’m not joking, the biking is easy in comparison. I managed to get up and get on my way. I wasn’t that hungry in the morning because I had awoken at 2 AM and eaten the rest of my food. That’s been happening the last couple of days, I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night ravenously hungry. I guess I simply cannot get enough to eat during my waking hours. I need to figure out how to balance this all together because it would be nice to sleep through the night every night as my sleep is already constrained and waking up for a snack every couple of hours isn’t doing my recovery any favors. I broke camp and peddled hard for the first couple of hours to try to warm up my body and get my legs spinning again. My legs feel really strong every afternoon, but they’re starting to wear down in the mornings, which is to be expected. It just takes a while to get the engine turning over properly every morning. The cold starts, certainly aren’t speeding up my activation either.

Wonowon is really just a glorified truck stop. A sort of last staging ground for all these truckers headed into the remote sections of British Columbia. I started to see a large uptick in the number of vehicles on the road last night when I got about 30 miles north of Wonowon. In place of all the RVs and vans that I have been seeing for the last 10 days, the road is now busy with massive tankers, semi trucks, and pick ups. All those gas compression wells necessitate a lot of equipment and manpower. In Wonowon there were trucks absolutely everywhere. Almost all of them were idle as the truckers slept in the back of the cab. As my time on the Alaska highway comes to an end so do the quiet roads that I have been riding on. The road continued much last night with consistent hills, never quite flat, but never too steep either. After a couple of hours of riding, I got to Fort Saint John, the second largest city I’ve been through just behind Fairbanks. Now, after 10 days of riding, I am finally to a region that has consistent development. There are obviously benefits of this, but also many negatives. The first downside, and the one that became quite apparent right away, is the massive increase in vehicle traffic. The truckers want absolutely nothing to do with me and see me as an imposter on the road. Today I faced consistent animosity from truck drivers like I have honestly never experienced before. I have biked all over the world and I’ve never seen so many people get so mad. The ironic thing is, I’ve been on the Alaska highway now for 1,400 miles, when I rode through Dawson Creek today, it marked the Southern terminus of the Alaska highway, meaning I have biked the entire thing from Delta Junction, AK, USA to Dawson Creek, BC, CAN. I feel like I’ve earned my right to ride on that road, an opinion many of the drivers here in British Columbia do not seem to agree with. I never felt too unsafe, truckers will try to give me trouble, but they’re going to make sure that they don’t hit me because that is their career over and they work for companies which really would rather not have the optics of their truck drivers plowing over young ambitious cyclist. Nonetheless, it’s incredibly nerve-racking to have an oil tanker blow by you at 80 miles an hour, just a foot away. Something about the aerodynamics of the cylindrical oil tankers means that they have a much stronger and more vicious affect on the wind behind them. I am used to being buzzed by boxy semis, which isn’t ideal, but the turbulence in their wake is usually quite manageable on a bike. Many of the large trucks that passed me today had intense turbulence that would first suck me into their draft and then push me back out. I soon found that if a large truck passed me either going to same direction or coming from the opposite direction, the turbulence after their pass would jerk me first into the middle of the road, then push me back out. If I was caught in my aero bars when one of these trucks came by, it would often feel like I was on the edge of losing control. I had to really pay attention to the cars passing me. For many of the roads I have ridden thus far this trip it is not uncommon for me to have gone 30 minutes without seeing another car. When I don’t have cars to worry about it is much easier to zone off and exist in my own mind or in the world around me outside of my bike and the road in my immediate presence. Now that I have to be constantly on the lookout for the next truck that might flatten there, I have found that the time passes much slower. After passing through Fort St. John, it was a couple more hours of rolling terrain before I reached Dawson Creek. Here I stopped for a grocery run and lunch. Lemon meringue pie, delicious. I also managed to get down 200g of protein for lunch between some protein bars, protein shakes, meat, and cheese. People seem to enjoy when I share my meals on these blogs, but I often over represent the junk food that I eat and fail to mention much of the food that is sustaining my muscle mass day after day. The sweet, sugary carbohydrate loaded foods are what sustains my short term energy output throughout the day, but I cannot bike for 80+ days straight fueled just by carbohydrates. While riding, I generally aim to consume about 120 g of carbohydrates per hour. I need to be trying to get around 200g+ of protein per day, which is ridiculously hard. When I was training back home and could cook and design my meals with balanced macros that were planned out weeks in advance, I could occasionally get to 300g of protein a day. Out here I have found it incredibly difficult to even approach 150g a day. Now that I have more ready access to grocery stores and gas stations it will be easier for me to start picking up my protein intake. Although Dawson creek marks the end of the Alaska highway for me, I continued straight on what became Highway 2. I still haven’t made a turn in 1500 miles. Shortly before reaching Fort Saint John I started seeing the first large agricultural developments of my trip. For the first time it feels like there are more to these towns, then oil, gas, and tourism. Agriculture of the type I saw today represents the first evidence of self-sustaining communities in the sense that food is grown here, and not just shipped in from a long ways away. That being said, the only crops I have seen so far seem to be grains. I think many of the fields I see our wheat, all of which have recently been harvested. A lot of trucks on the road are transporting this grain. By the time I reached Dawson Creek, the land around me had totally opened up into expanses of farmland, punctuated by rows of deciduous trees and gentle rolling hills. While not the prairie that I was expecting, it does feel like I might as well be on the prairie, as there are very few trees, and just open fields all around me. I always seem to be climbing or descending, but never at grades more than one or 2%. The land is gentle, which is a nice way of saying boring. Yes there’s still beauty to be found here but to be completely honest, the land is now quite boring. The towns are nothing to write home about, which is what I am ironically doing right now, but I don’t have much to say about them. There are large grain silos and warehouses full of oil and farm equipment, but beyond that they’re just seem to be the regular multinational corporations that you would find in any average American or Canadian town: McDonald’s, Burger King, Petro-Canada, Conoco Phillips, Walmart, all these brands that while providing necessary services, aren’t that exciting to look at after riding through the Alaska Range and Rockies for the last couple weeks.

The sky seems so big now. It stretches all around me, somehow, appearing to fill up more of the world than should be possible. I feel like I’m on top of the mountain at all times looking down on the rest of the world. Past Dawson Creek I finally turned off Highway 2 and took a shorter route that I found, cutting straight across some of the most open farmland I have ever seen. This road allowed me to bypass the town of Grand Prairie but more importantly, it represented an escape from the incessant trucking traffic. On this quiet road the land completely flattened out as the sunset. For the first time this trip I think I really realized how incredibly large my task at hand is. Somewhere along this road I hit 2000 miles on the trip. That’s a pretty cool milestone but it seems so insignificant. I feel like I’ve been on the road for much longer than 11 days and I’ve enjoyed almost every minute of my time spent out here, but it still feels like it’s been a month opposed to 11 days. Now that I’m settling into a rhythm and I’m entering into a land that lacks the excitement and dynamic beauty of my previous 2000 miles. I think my journey is going to become much more challenging. To be honest this trip so far has been so much easier than I thought it would be. I’ve had my struggles with the headwind and I had a cold night(s) with the rain but on the whole, it’s been really “easy”. My body doesn’t really feel stressed at all and mentally I’ve been so excited for every single day. That all kind of feels like it’s starting to change today. In theory the riding will get easier physically, but mentally I’m entering into a whole new phase. I’ve said it before but I’ll reiterate it right now, my physical fitness is not my limiting factor. Sleep deprivation is absolutely by limiting factor, but mental strain is a close second. My legs will have no trouble carrying me to Ushuaia, but will they buckle under under the immense mental strain that cycling all day every day by myself, will have? I have a lot to look forward to down the road, absolutely. I am really excited to get into Mexico, it’s kind of a black box for me. I’ve never really spent time there and know very little about what to expect. I’m also excited to get back into the United States but I know that the next 800 miles until the border are going to be a slow grind and once I get into Wyoming, and the excitement of being in the United States wears off, I’ll be back in the same relatively boring flatlands that I am now in. None of this is to take away from the beauty of the sky where I am right now. I’ve never really spent extended periods of time on the plains. I’ve driven across the US several times, and have been through Kansas, Nebraska, Omaha, all the flat states that I typically associate with being boring. But I’ve never actually stopped to spend time in them. I’ve never been out in these large fields at night. It’s a unique opportunity to really taken a new form of beauty. It makes the world feel so much larger which makes my trip feel that much more daunting, but it also provides context to what I’m doing and in a way it makes it that much cooler. These boring parts also will make the exciting parts of my journey to come that much more special. The sun seemed to take its time sinking below the horizon today. I was once again for the second night in a row, treated to a beautiful sunset, and was once again struck by how quickly the temperature dropped. I pedaled on as the sky turned from blue to pink to orange to light blue to dark blue, and eventually to black. There was light cloud cover on the horizon, but above me the sky that at first seemed so black slowly lit up with millions of twinkling stars. There are towns around here, but the light pollution is still negligible. Just as the blue sky seemed so large during the day, the night sky seemed equally as large and the Milky Way wavered across the sky, larger than I had ever seen it before.

I had my first issues with morale this afternoon, but as is typical for me, the setting sun in a few after hours after dark brought my mood back to a good place. The next two days I need to push hard so I can get to Calgary on the evening of the 12th. Now that I am on these open stretches of land, I will truly live and die by the wind. You’re probably already tired of me yapping about the wind every day if you read this blog consistently. It’s undeniable that I’ve had bad luck with the headwinds and today was no exception. Although not awful, I had a consistent 5-10 mile an hour headwind today which is completely manageable, but still can wear heavy after so many miles of constant struggle against this omnipresent force. Hoping and needing a big day tomorrow.