Day 9: Coal River to Fort Nelson

222 miles

I have a new favorite flavor of Oreo. Cinnamon roll! That was my dinner last night, a family size pack of cinnamon roll flavored Oreos. They were delightful. I woke up and was pleased with how warm it was. It must’ve been over 40° already. I looked west and saw clear, blue sky, however, overhead and to the east clouds blocks my view of the sun. The first couple hours of the morning I rode along the Liard River on relatively flat roads. The views were not that exciting, but I saw a huge coyote and a couple more Buffalo. At around nine I came to do a stand of mountains which Liard river wound its way through. As I rode east the blue sky followed me from behind, however, it wasn’t catching up. There was a small RV park and the ranger station that comprise the entirety of the Liard River settlement. I stopped for a chicken salad sandwich, chocolate milk, and fluids for my bottles before pressing on across the Liard. As soon as I crossed the river I climbed up the banks and was stopped in my tracks by a herd of buffalo. There were easily 50 buffalo on either side of the road. There were a couple little calves that were prancing around. Their run is more of a jump, almost like they are on a pogo sticks. For such large beasts they move quite lightly on foot. Even the first year calves must’ve weighed 300 pounds already. Because there were calves on both sides of the road and full grown buffalo on either side of the road, I stopped and elected not to thread the needle through the herd. I wasn’t really feeling in the mood to get gored by a buffalo. If there’s one foolproof way to piss off an animal it’s to get between it and its offspring. At this point I had already seen several solitary Buffalo along the road, but this was the first herd that I’d seen. The Buffalo hang out all along the road and are clearly no strangers to cars. There exists a double edge sword because the highway department cut back all the trees on either side of the highway to create a large line of sight so drivers don’t plow into a buffalo. However, in clearing the trees from 30 meters on either side of the road the highway department accidentally created the perfect grazing environment for the buffaloes. It’s a difficult dichotomy, because you need the line of sight, but that comes at the expense of making the road a desirable place for the buffaloes to hang out. Although the buffalo are clearly no strangers to cars, they did not like my bike one bit. Even from a distance they were very wary, and some of the younger ones broke out into a trot up the road. Once a couple of them started running the rest followed suit. They all ran to the left side of the road and started running east, the direction I was headed as well. A huge bull, clearly the alpha of the herd stood right in the middle of the road, and stared me down, while all the other buffalo ran. Once he was between me and the rest of his herd, he also turned his heels and took off in pursuit of the herd. They ran down the road for about a quarter mile before all crossing back over the road to the right side and ducking into a wide game trail in the woods. I gave them plenty of space the entire time, but as it became clear that the Buffalo wanted nothing to do with me and we’re headed for the woods, I was able to ride along side the last few in the herd. They were about 50 feet away, but running parallel to the road with me. It was a pretty cool experience. I feel bad for disturbing their grazing but I had kept my distance the entire time and they had taken off running on their own volition. If they hadn’t decided to move further away from the road, I would’ve had to wait for a car to come by to shield me so I could get past the herd. Immediately after my encounter with the buffaloes, the road turned south, leaving the Liard river behind in favor of a climb up into Muncho Lake Provincia Park. It was a very long, low-grade climb, and on the way up it began to rain. For the rest of the day it would more or less rain the entire time. As the road climbed up to the lake it followed the Trout river. This river is the outflow of Lake Muncho. The water was crystal clear. Like glass. I don’t think I have ever seen water so unblemished by sediment before. Once I crested the climb and had a view of Muncho Lake below me it made sense why the water was so clear. Muncho lake is quite large and entirely fed by streams from the surrounding peaks, many of which are glacier fed. The lake had a magnificent blue tinge. The deep sections were a vibrantly, dark deep, deep blue. The shallows were crystal clear which allowed for a beautiful window into the lake bed which was comprised mostly of a slate white rocks. As the water got deeper the blue intensified and became more vibrant, starting from clear and working all the way to the deep, deep almost ocean like blue in the middle of the lake. Where the water was 10 to 15 feet deep the blue was an almost iridescent turquoisey-topaz color. It almost looked unnatural, as if the lake had been dyed like one of those fountains you see at lousy putt putt places, or the collection pools at copper mines that take on un-naturally vibrant colors. The water was simply unreal and the towering peaks on all sides created an amphitheater of glorious beauty. In a few weeks, when the aspens change color here on a clear fall day, when the sun comes out, the contrast of aquatic blues, to forest greens and yellows, to the browns and reds of the surrounding mountains up to the grays of their higher summits and the pure white of the snowcapped peaks poking into the blue sky above will be quite a spectacular show. Even through the rain and the fog the beauty of Muncho Lake was quite something to behold. Along the shore of the lake, I saw first one, and then another pack of mountain goats. Like the buffalo, these guys were clearly desensitized to humans and let me get quite close to them. There must be some salt or mineral that they like in the rocks right next to the road because they were quite literally gnawing on the rocks. I almost felt bad about how close I was to one of the goats, but he wasn’t more than 3 feet off the side of the road, and he just didn’t move as I pass ed by. From Muncho Lake I had a bit of a climb out of the valley. While working my way up the climb, a solitary Caribou ran up the river bed parallel to me for about half a mile. I don’t know what was up with him, but he seemed incredibly scared of my bike but was too stupid to realize that if he wanted to put distance between himself and me he should’ve run in any other direction other than alongside me. The rain stopped at the base of the climb, so I ended up stopping halfway up to take my rain gear off because I was overheating. I felt great for about 15 minutes and I was drying out surprisingly quickly. But at the top of the pass it immediately began raining again, and I had to dawn my rain gear just minutes after taking it off. I was up at 4000 feet and had a large descent in front of me, but luckily it was still over 40° and I wasn’t too worried about getting hypothermic, just a little disappointed that my view was obscured by the heavy rain. On the descent, the rain came down in buckets and my vision became severely limited. Without my sunglasses on it’s impossible to open my eyes as they are pelted by the rain and with them on and not only is everything darker, but the rain splashes the lenses and beads up. It’s like driving your car without using your windshield wipers, it can be difficult. The road surface was smooth enough so I felt comfortable descending even though I can see literally nothing. I got in the middle of my lane, made sure the blurry white line was on my right and the blurry yellow line stood to my left. I held my line down the middle and hoped for the best. I didn’t need to worry about cars passing since the speed limit was 100 km an hour and I was approaching speeds of 85 km an hour on my bike. There aren’t many cars that would’ve taken the descent in the rain much faster than 85 km an hour anyways and they certainly weren’t going to pass me. One thing that I have found to be quite cool and almost comforting in a weird way is that I recognize about half of the cars that passed me now. I have mentioned before that over half the vehicles on the road on the Alaska highway are camper vans and RVs. Everyone is fleeing south after spending all summer in Alaska. People are retreating to warmer regions of the world to weather the fast approaching winter. I found that a lot of these campers seem to go about 200 miles a day on average. Every camper is a little bit different, whether it be bumper stickers, the car they’re towing behind, the covers they put over their spare wheel, and the general make of the vehicles themselves. These RVs will commonly pass me in the morning, then I will catch up to them by lunch as they usually have some site to see or place to be, then they will pass me again in the afternoon. They almost ubiquitously stop early in the evening because they are taking their leisure to see the sights, so they have no reason to drive after dark, and I make up time on them in the evening. There are about 10 vehicles in particular that I can remember seeing every day for the past week. A couple of nights I have camped in a pull out with an RV or two who mentioned seeing me several hundred miles back and is amazed that I am traveling at the same speed as them. Two days ago I had a guy ask me if there was a motor in my bike because he didn’t think it was possible to ride 200 miles in a day. I don’t mind the RV traffic at all, in fact, I prefer it to almost any other vehicle. People living out of their RV or Van are generally really nice people and more generous towards cyclists than the average driver. Over half of these vehicles have a little cruiser bike strap to the back, and I always think find that vehicles with bikes or roof racks are more understanding of the cyclist’s right to be on the road, for obvious reasons. When I got to the bottom of the descent, I was greeted by an entirely new valley of mountains, and a new cast of peaks. Although it was still raining, some of the peaks emerge from the clouds periodically. It was 45° at 4000 feet at the pass and the tops of the mountains were at almost 10,000 feet. It was well below freezing up there and I could see the snow falling. Although I wasn’t hypothermic, I definitely wasn’t super comfortable either. The views made the rain tolerable though, and I continue to see wildlife throughout the day. There was a little porcupine right on the shoulder of the road. I see a lot of these little guys as roadkill, and this porcupine was so close to the white line that I thought he had fallen victim to a car collision too, until I got right up next to him, and he bristled his spines and ducked into the grass on the side of the road. I love porcupines. They’re such cute little fellas, and I always think it’s so funny how they waddle around and scamper of trees. We don’t have porcupines in Tennessee, and I remember my first time seeing a porcupine after moving to New Hampshire. I was mountain biking in the woods right next to school and saw a little one scamper right up a tree. I had no idea they could climb trees, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Now that I was in a new valley, I was accompanied by a new river. Unlike the trout river, which flowed out of Muncho show lake, this river hadn’t flown through a lake so the sediments had not had time to settle out of the water. This water was full of glacial melt and glacial silt. It was an unearthly almost greenish blue. It was so incredibly beautiful and once again honestly, looked a little fake. It reminded me of when I used to oil paint, when I would paint the sky with all sorts of blue, then wash off my brush in the turpentine. The turpentine would always turn a turquoise blue that almost looked like a solid in a glass cup. I followed the river, and the rain followed me. As I mentioned earlier, to the west the sky was clear, but I was moving east, and so was the system. The system was moving to East at around 8 miles an hour. I averaged over 15 miles an hour today, but I was never going due east. By the time you factored in he twists and turns of the road and my stoppage time, I was moving to east a little faster than 10 miles an hour. If I’d stayed in one spot all day the system would’ve gone over in about three hours. It wasn’t a quick storm, but it was making a very steady march. In the morning I started at the tail end of the band and all day I was working my way through it. Every time I would get close to out running the band, the road would turn south, or I would hit a big climb, and the rain would catch back up to me. Muncho lake was one of the places I was looking forward to seeing the most on this journey, so I was a little disappointed the weather didn’t pan out great. However, the weather I had in Alaska was absolutely perfect the entire time. I got incredibly lucky in Alaska, so I wasn’t as bummed that the weather wasn’t perfect today. You can’t win them all. Anyways, it was still so so beautiful with the rain and fog and clouds. I reached Toad river—not much more than a grass airstrip, and an RV park with a tiny little restaurant. There still wasn’t so reception, and hadn’t been for the previous 200 miles, but they had Wi-Fi on offer for two Canadian dollars. It was a tempting proposition especially when I was already spending $30 on food, so I forked over two dollars so I could check in, look at the weather, and look at my map to see if there was going to be a place to stay for the night. I had not originally been planning on staying in a hotel only three nights after my hotel in Whitehorse, but I’ve had a rough go at the past three days, and I knew the rain was going to continue into the night. Cold rain is one thing if you’re biking the whole time, it’s a totally different game when all of your gear is soaking wet and you’ve gotta put it on again in the morning when it’s nice and chilly out. I would’ve been OK camping for the night, but it would’ve been miserable and definitely would not have been good recovery. It was already 3 o’clock and to my unfortunate realization, the next services much less a warm bed were 120 miles away in Fort Nelson. I knew I could make it, but it would be a long push it into the final hours of the day. Due to all the rain, there wasn’t any wind, so I wasn’t worried about contesting with a headwind. I knew I could make a decent speed to Fort Nelson. But what I didn’t count on where the multiple mountain passes but I had to cross to get to Fort Nelson. Out of toad river, the road began to climb again up to Stone Mountain provincial Park. It was a beautiful climb into yet another new novel cluster of mountains. The road went up and up too well over 4000 feet. The last 700 vertical feet were all gravel as they were doing road work, but I was so motivated by the faint proposition of a warm bed for the night that I lit up the climb. Unfortunately, my power meter has not been working, but my legs felt very strong, better than they have all trip. I ended up taking the KOM on the climb. I’m confident that I averaged around 300 watts for the better part of an hour. I really felt spectacular. Although I couldn’t see the top of the surrounding peaks at the pass, the mountains and valleys I could see were gorgeous. True to the parks name, all of the surrounding peaks were stone caps. Gorgeous mountains of exposed slabs of rock. That would be so fun to hike up. I would love to return to this area in the future. At the top of the pass I reached Summitt Lake. Which you guessed it, was a lake at the summit of the Pass. I guess they’re just into really creative names around here. The rain once again, caught up to me on the ascent and for the first time that day, I felt myself getting cold. On the climb I had seen yet another Caribou, and on the descent I saw two more. These Caribou are really quite stupid. There’s a reason there are signs everywhere warning cars not to hit them. These guys made deer look smart. When I was descending at about 40 miles an hour, there was a caribou just standing in the middle of the road doing absolutely nothing. He just stared at me until I got right up close to him. Then, right before I reached him, he bolted straight down the road. He ran right in front of me at full speed. I could’ve reached out and touched him. He didn’t run off the road or away from me, he just ran right next to me. If I had been a car, this Caribou would have been turned into Caribou steak. I saw several Caribou that had been hit by cars yesterday. It’s really sad, but now that I’ve seen them in action—or lack thereof—it’s understandable to see why they’re hit so often. As excited as I was descending out of the mountains towards Fort Nelson I was glad to leave the climbs behind. But it was also bitter sweet to see the mountains go. Today was my last day in the mountains for a long, long time. I crossed the last of what are known as the northern Rocky Mountains today. This far north the Rockies are still magnificent and I was amazed at their beauty. I’m sad to see them go. I am now in a much flatter region of the world, and will be until I get into Mexico. Through the United States, I will see big mountains in the distance, but I will shy away from biking over them. Now that I am in Fort Nelson, I will beeline due south towards Calgary. From there I will be just a day away from the US border, and I will work my way straight down the middle of the United States staying just to the east of the Rockies, through Billings, Montana, Casper, Wyoming, Denver, Colorado, and Lubbock, Texas. Today in one fell swoop I managed to cross the entire northern Rockies range. It isn’t that wide, only about 100 miles east to west, but it is still cool to have biked through the entire range in one day. Might be sent from Summitt lake bottomed out at around 2000 feet in elevation. I wasn’t really sure what to expect on the east side of the mountain range. I know that at some point before I reach Calgary, I will leave behind The boreal forest, and begin my long journey through the plaines. The east side of the mountains didn’t look that much different than the west side to be honest. I’m still in a thick forest, but it is significantly flatter now. The land looks like it all used to be one large plateau, but great rivers have carved out valleys overtime. The mountains look more like tree covered mesas. Calling them mountains, might even be a mistake. They’re more like large hills. Where as the Rockies are clearly the product of converging tectonic plates—piles of rock thrust up to the sky—these hills look like the results of a long battle with erosion. Tables of rock that stand in stalwart defiance of millennia upon millennia of precipitation and wind. As such, my ride from the mountains into Fort Nelson was largely flat with two steep climbs up the chiseled sides of plateaued hills. As the sun set I was treated to one last rainstorm. Although Fort Nelson was still over two hours away I was determined to get there and even felt it necessary for me to do so I was out of water and low on food. I also knew how important it would be to dry out my gear and have a dry and warm place to sleep. I broke out my headlight and rear red blinking light for the first time this trip and plugged on into the dark. I generally love riding the dark, but time passes much slower. With nothing to look at except for the white line in front of me I found myself religiously checking my cycle computer, counting down every mile to Fort Nelson. There’s no better way to make the time pass slowly than looking at your progress every couple minutes. I eventually made it to Fort Nelson just a few minutes before 11:00. 222 miles in over 14 moving hours on the day. That was a slog to say the least, but I’m glad that I push through and honestly don’t feel that tired. Today was by far the hardest effort of this trip, but my body responded incredibly well and I am happy with how my legs are spinning. I swooped into a gas station right as they were closing to secure some dinner for the night. The best stuff I could scrape together was some ice cream, a half gallon of chocolate milk, A ham sandwich, four microwaveable cheeseburgers (surprisingly tasty, but maybe that’s just because this was the first hamburger I’ve in about five years as I have refrained from eating red meat for environmental reasons, until now because my options for protein are extremely limited), an entire frozen strawberry cheesecake, and Gatorade. I checked into my motel, ate till I felt sick, showered, ate some more, and clocked out for the night. Good tough day :)