The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Beautiful

waypoints

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cyclists’ kitchen

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open road gallery 39

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anniversary issue:

Ten Years on the Great Divide Route Plus: Riding A doomed trail in Nepal touring bikes that aren’t

7/8:2008contents July/August 2008 · Volume 35 Number 7 · www.adventurecycling.org

ADVENTURE

CYCLIST is published nine times each year by the Adventure Cycling Association, a nonprofit service organization for recreational bicyclists. Individual membership costs $35 yearly to U.S. addresses and includes a subscription to Adventure Cyclist, a copy of The Cyclists’ Yellow Pages, and discounts on Adventure Cycling maps. The entire contents of Adventure Cyclist are copyrighted by Adventure Cyclist and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from Adventure Cyclist. All rights reserved.

Our Cover

Aaron Teasdale

A golden doubletrack leads through the Canadian Rockies along the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. Photo

by Aaron Teasdale. (left) Harold Teasdale and Ron Gorayeb dodge cow parsnip during a Great Divide sidetrip in Alberta’s Peter Lougheed Park.

10 18 22

The good, the bad, the ugly, & the beautiful by Aaron Teasdale

How to Reach Us

A minimalist, an epicurean, and their two companions explore the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route and its many tantalizing side trips in the Canadian Rockies.

To join, change your address, or ask questions about your membership call: (800) 755-2453 or (406) 721-1776

A great decade on the great divide by Michael McCoy

email us at: memberships@adventurecycling.org

A look back by the creator of the Great Divide Route at the challenges that laid on the road, and the places where he did the same.

Visit us online at: www.adventurecycling.org Fax us at: (406) 721-8754

last ride on the annapurna by Nathan Ward A search for hope and adventure on Nepal’s most famed trekking route.

d e pa r t m e n t s

COLUMNS

07 COMPANIONS WANTED 08 WAYPOINTS 34 MARKETPLACE/CLASSIFIEDs 39 OPEN ROAD GALLERY

30 The cyclists’ kitchen / Nancy Clark Eating well at home and on the road

32 CYCLESENSE / John Schubert

Touring bikes that aren’t. Or are they?

LETTERS

04 LETTER from the editor 05 LETTERS from our readers 06 LETTER from the director adventure cyclist

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The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Beautiful A Week’s Ramble on Canada’s Great Divide Story and photos by Aaron Teasdale

The path beneath our tires forked and, as always, I longed to take the path less traveled. The problem was we knew nothing about this overgrown trail that peeled off into the wilderness, except our Great Divide Mountain Bike Route map’s description of it as an alternate route to Spray Lake Reservoir. Potentially very marshy. As someone constitutionally incapable of sticking to predetermined routes, I’m easily seduced by such things as “alternate routes,” especially when, like this one, they circumvent busy and supernaturally dusty dirt roads. A passing pair of mountain bikers — one with a gashed shin, the other with what looked like a freshly broken nose — knew nothing of the trail either, but enthusiastically offered, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Wrong question (answer: broken things, grizzly bears). The right and tantalizing question was, “What’s the best that could happen?” How good and remote and interesting could it be? That’s the question that fuels my forays into the unknown. That’s the eternal question that lures me into the hinterlands, to glory and disaster, to a trip’s best and worst moments, again and again.

This trip would prove no exception.

It was our first day on the Canadian Great Divide Route. Our group of four had pedaled out from the tourist-choked streets of Banff, Alberta that morning and I still clung to a goal of reaching an increasingly distantseeming campsite that night. But, never being one to let the artifice of a schedule interfere with a quality adventure, in the end there was little suspense — I was powerless to resist the alternate route.

Bidding farewell to my father and our friends Ron and Steve, who didn’t share my enthusiasm for unknown and “potentially very marshy” byways, I followed the overgrown trail down to Goat Creek, forded its knee-high current, and was promptly alone in the wilderness. Pedaling a dry, rolling doubletrack littered with wolf and moose scat along the base of the Goat Range, the green forest corridor delivered on every bit of its alternate-route promise. This is why I bike tour — gliding silently through wild country never fails as an invigorating reminder of the raw beauty of life and our insignificance in its vast, timeless theater.

“C’mon, Dad, the alternate route is the

Waterside cruising. It doesn’t get any better than the riding along Alberta’s Spray Lake Reservoir.

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best!” I said to my father as we met by chance near the Goat Pond dam at the alternate route’s midpoint. “It’ll be great.”

But that’s the thing about rambles into the unknown — they’re unknown. Like a blind date, anything can happen. That’s part of the excitement. But blind dates can go horribly wrong (see: The Crying Game).

With Dad at my side, the lovely grassy path promptly turned into a much-less-lovely grassy bog. Pushing through marshes and portaging our bikes across deep, fast-flowing brooks, the route had become a microcosm of the potential and pitfalls of wilderness detours. I’d gone from having sunny, Thoreau-like epiphanies to dragging my father through a swamp in only a few short miles. That’s the thing with these explorations — they’re never boring.

Our plan for the week ahead was to enjoy a relaxed spin along the northern stretch of the world’s longest mountain-bike route, riding 160-ish miles from Banff, Alberta south to the coal-mining town of Sparwood, British Columbia, primarily through mountain valleys, with one crossing of the Continental Divide at the trip’s midpoint. Sure, we could

Tower of Power. There’s no missing the coal mines in British Columbia’s Elk Valley.

not only made us feel gratifyingly rugged, but helped put things in perspective. As we sat on the lakeshore watching the last sunlight kiss the eastern summits, Dad said, “It’s a pretty good day when the worst thing that happens is the stove not working.” We all agreed that this was true. I decided not to mention our battle with the marsh, which was already feeling less disastrous and more heroic with each passing hour.

Dad and I have been taking backcountry trips every summer since I was 10 years old.

For many of those years, Ron, my father’s best friend and a died-in-the-wool New Yorker, has joined us and provided both intentional and unintentional comic relief. Steve was a newer friend of my father’s. A 65-year-old cycling maniac, he and my father were geezer-athlete kindred spirits who did things like ski across

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ride farther in a week, but I’ve never been interested in simply riding a bike quickly through a place — I want to tromp up its mountainsides, loll on its riverbanks, and explore its hidden folds and creases.

We made a fire with driftwood that evening near our campsite on the pebbly shore of Banff National Park’s Spray Lake, short of my goal, but — with a sprawling cerulean pool in front of us, peaks on all sides, and the lakeshore to ourselves — it was so overwhelmingly beautiful that I couldn’t have cared less. The fire was not only lovely and a great place to dry my and Dad’s soggy shoes, but necessary for dinner — we’d discovered shortly after arriving that our camp stove was completely nonfunctional. (Note to self: check campstoves before weeklong trips.)

Cooking Boy Scout–style over an open flame

Finland together for fun.

It quickly became apparent the next morning that Steve and I existed on opposite ends of the gear-packing spectrum. My priority is ultralight; Steve’s is ultra-posh.

I eschew panniers and trailers (too heavy), and consider a second pair of socks indulgent. Steve stuffed his trailer with a camp chair, a full-sized pillow, several books, and, shockingly, four bags of wine. Fortunately, he proved more than up to the task of carrying the extra weight, and it didn’t take us long to see the beauty of having evening wine at camp.

Our second day’s ride was the finest of the trip and one of the best, most scenic rides of my touring career. Here the Great Divide Route follows a deteriorating dirt road, now gated and closed to cars, that wraps around the west side of the mountain-ringed Spray Lake reservoir. Soon evolving into perfect touring singletrack, the route ducks into moist forest where wooden bridges delivered us across crystal-clear creeks, side explorations led to hidden waterfalls, and one offroute ramble (like I said: constitutionally incapable) brought me a glimpse of a mountain lion disappearing into the woods.

As we climbed up and away from the reservoir on a wildflower-lined doubletrack in the evening’s golden light, we discussed where to camp. “We camp where we camp,” Dad said. “We’ve got no agenda — we’re on vacation.” The downside of this otherwise appealingly carefree philosophy was revealed when we overshot the reservoir’s campsites, savagely bonked in search of a decent place to pitch our tents, and finally gave up, sleeping ingloriously off the side of a dirt road.

Unfortunately there are no alternate

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Gated at both ends. This jail for cyclists was named the most scenic in the U.S. by Incarceration Journal.

routes — yet — for the dusty and heavily travelled Smith-Dorrien Road that links Banff National Park to Peter Lougheed Provincial Park. (Good news: a local trails organization is working on a trail extension from Lougheed that would offer an enticing alternative.) The mountain scenery is head-spinningly great enough that it’s easy to forget you’re on a crappy road — until another air-conditioned car of tourists blasts by and sends a sun-blotting, nostril-clogging, eyeball-coating dust cloud into you.

Fortunately, once we reached Lougheed Park a paved off-road bike path led us on a deliciously serpentine route through the woods to the Belton General Store, a typical tourist shop where we hoped to find a camp 14

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stove of some kind. Cooking over fires was slow and took away our drive to have lovely things like morning tea. What we found at the Belton Store challenged our deeply held moral principles and nearly caused a fracture in the group. It was a Coleman stove. A large, heavy stove with a full-size burner that screwed onto the top of a football-sized propane canister. I showed it to my father, who had been making an effort to join me in ultralighthood.

“No way,” he said instantly. “I can’t buy that.”

At this point, Steve walked up, saw the stove, and said, “Well, yes, we’re getting that. I’ll carry it. That’s a nice stove.”

Dad resisted and there was a silent pause

adventurecycling.org

as everyone looked at me. I had to admit it would make cooking easier. Plus, Steve was willing to carry it. Besides our self-respect, what did we have to lose? Dad, defeated, shook his head in Coleman-induced dismay and muttered, “After all that work to get lighter.”

As we apportioned one of Steve’s wine bags that night at our hike-in campsite on the shore of Kananaskis Lake (a stunning return to campsite glory after our unimpressive digs of the previous evening), Ron saw the towering Coleman camp stove for the first time.

“Wow, look at that!” he said. “Now that’s a stove! Better than that wussy stove you brought, Aaron.”

Admittedly, the stove did rock. We

whipped up a gourmet (by our remarkably low standards) freeze-dried dinner in no time, savored our cup of wine, jumped naked into the lake to rinse off the day’s copious dust, and watched the sunset paint the cirrus-streaked sky blazing rose before tucking into our down cocoons and nylon shelters for the night. I was hopeful for the next day, as the route promised to deliver us from the tourist’s wilderness of Alberta national parks to what I hoped would be the more remote wilderness of British Columbia’s Elk Valley.

The next day, the fourth of the trip, delivered a climb up what our map alltoo-accurately described as “a virtual wall” over the 6,443-foot Elk Pass and across the Continental Divide. (“What’s this?” Ron said. “No one said anything about a virtual wall.”) The route here follows a powerline corridor which had been recently buzzed of all trees — as a certified nature geek who relishes escaping the hum of modern society, I did not celebrate this. But powerlines or no, by coming over Elk Pass we’d left the RVs behind and now stood on the brink of another world.

The head of Elk Valley is over 40 miles of dirt road from the nearest town, and for the first time since the little-traveled shores of Spray Lake, it felt as if we were someplace remote and out of easy reach. This was good. Even better was that the head of the valley harbors Elk Lakes Provincial Park, a hidden gem of the Canadian park system.

Camping there, on the shores of Elk Lake, proved the finest single decision of our trip.

A magnificent sprawl of high mountains draped with glaciers that feed pure mirrorsurfaced lakes, it’s wilderness at its most awe inspiring.

Since staying there forever wasn’t a practicable option, we decided on two nights and spent our layover day hiking to the foot of a giant glacier-melt waterfall, Petain Falls.

As we finished off Steve’s wine around the campfire that night, Dad said, “The problem with places like this is that you want every place you go to be as nice.”

I agreed there weren’t many places as nice as this. “I’m just looking for places that are unspoiled,” I said. “Places that still have some wildness in them.” Minutes later, as if on cue, a bull moose lumbered through a small meadow and bedded down not 100 yards from our campsite.

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The next morning we loaded up the bikes and headed down the Elk Valley Road. Bordered on both sides by mountains vaulting 5,000 feet from the valley floor, the Elk Valley is both rugged wilderness and, thanks to huge coal deposits and a thick blanket of timber, home to a host of miners and loggers. As we gradually pedaled down the valley, passing a pickup truck now and again, smoke began clouding the air. We would later learn a forest fire was flaming out of control in the mountains to our west. A ranger in Lougheed had told us that Alberta was closing the mountains on their side of the Continental Divide, the mountains to our east, to all human entry because of fire danger. Fortunately for us, British Columbia had banned only campfires.

A long day of riding — with more powerlines, buzzing helicopters of unknown origin, fresh logging clearcuts, ever-thickening smoke, and temperatures in the high 80s (which always saps my will to live) — had me fuming over these industrialized wildlands and left all of us desperate for a decent campsite. After several “recreation sites” turned out to be trash-strewn and shoddy,

Nuts & Bolts: Great Divide Canada When to go

Resources

mid-June through September

Mount Engadine Lodge

is your prime window.

(www.mountengadine.com, 403-678-4080) is a cyclist-

Getting there

friendly backcountry ref-

We drove, left a van in

uge near the foot of Spray

Sparwood, and Kootenay

Lakes Reservoir.

Taxi (www.kootenaytaxi. com, 250-423-4409)

Gear

shuttled us to Banff. If fly-

A review of gear for the

ing to Calgary, check the

Great Divide can be found

Great Divide pages at www.

at: www.adventurecycling.

adventurecycling.org for

org/gearforgdr.

other shuttle options.

we pushed on, everyone tired and worn out, to what the trusty map described as a “nice meadow.” When we reached it we found a very nice meadow indeed — inhabited by a beat-up camper truck that seemed to be functioning as a kind of giant speaker for pounding 70s rock. Three dirty-faced children played on a rope swing and marveled over our bicycles, but the mysterious —

and now surely deaf — inhabitants of the shadowy camper did not emerge from their rocking lair. I was crestfallen. As a certified campsite snob, this was my worst-case scenario. Surveying the land around us, I realized why the mountain across the river looked funny — the entire top of it had been flattened. It was a coal mine, a mountaindecapitating coal mine. We may have been

Self-Guided x Guided Groups x Custom Tours in

IRELAND x ENGLAND x ITALY 16

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W W W x I R O N D O N K E Y x C O M

in the same valley, but we were a world away from Elk Lakes Park.

Battling despair, I walked to the far end of the meadow where I found a campsite just out of Aerosmith range. A decrepit picnic table slumped into tall grass and a yellow road grader sat parked about 50 feet away, but there were good tent sites that overlooked the river. It would do. As evening cooled the smoky air, and we washed up in the river and cooked over the towering stove, our outlook improved. We took in the aspen-ringed meadow, the mountains beyond, and the curves of the river below.

A kingfisher flew by and swallows darted across the surface of the water, gulping insects and singing swallow songs. The coal mine became interesting, the rocker children played on a rope swing, and I began to realize that maybe it doesn’t all have to be pristine. And maybe that’s what makes bike

July 30–August 3, 2008

travel enlightening — you experience it all: the beautiful and the scarred, the tragic and the inspired. And there we were, sitting on the ground and taking it all in, four more people in this wild toss of mountains, rivers, mines, and 70s rock.

We slept well that night to the sounds of the river — until 6 a.m. when someone revved up the road grader outside our tents.

My bitterness over this subsided, however, as soon as I emerged to the sight of a blue, smokeless sky. After a fine instant-oatmeal breakfast, we jumped on the bikes for the last full day of the trip, the Elk River Road delivering us into the prefab-suburb-ploppedin-the-wilderness mining company town of Elkford, where the route led us out of the valley bottom and into the eastern foothills.

Our wheels rolled past bits of coal on the roadside, as a steep road — paved smooth for the mining trucks — climbed the valley’s

January 17–21, 2009

side and led us under the concrete silos and smokestacks of a coal-washing station. It was jarring there, surrounded by forest and mountain, and we didn’t linger.

Soon after, the route turned onto a dirt road where we met a man in a well-used Ford Bronco. His tanned face radiated enthusiasm and, after almost hopping through the roof of his truck telling us about all the great camping in the area, he asked us the last thing I expected: “Have you gone up the road to see the mine yet?”

When I answered no, that we weren’t interested in seeing the mountain-devouring ecological disaster zone (shortened, politely, to “no”), he said, with no letdown in enthusiasm, “You should go up there! It’s something to see.”

It was a surprising collision of worldviews. He had nothing but pride in some-

February 21–25, 2009

continued on page 38

April 19–25, 2009

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continued from page 17

thing I saw as a calamitous blight. Surely it helped that his entire community was on the mine’s payroll, but he clearly loved the outdoors as much as I did and our split on the mine was a good reminder that we all view the landscape through a personal lens. It was only later that I would learn that coal mined in the Elk Valley is metallurgical coal used in the production of steel — meaning we couldn’t get too bent out of shape about the mine’s imposition on the wilderness when our bicycles might not exist without it.

There was certainly no denying the beauty of the valley we pedaled that afternoon.

It was a glorious cruise — our best day of riding since Spray Lake — as a downwardtrending, wildflower-lined road undulated along the side of Fording River, finally crossing it and bringing us to our last great tangential temptation. A little-used track veered off the main road into thick forest. Our map showed it as Line Road, and it appeared to hew close to the river and reconnect with the main route farther on. The entrance may

that could live on in our memories long after the trip had ended. It was no small order, this last night’s campsite, and we had already rejected the Bronco guy’s recommended sites as too hemmed in and well used.

Then the overgrown road emerged from the woods to the edge of a high, grassy bench, studded with cinnamon-barked ponderosas and overlooking the twisting river 100 feet below and the mountain front beyond. The concrete silos of another coal mine in the distant valley bottom even seemed ironically appropriate. Another “side-cut” had paid off.

We’d found our site.

After pitching tents on the edge of the precipice, we found that the evening had another adventure in store as we watched, horror-stricken, while our stove’s megacanister of fuel slowly and steadily sputtered out. Given its tremendous size, we’d naively assumed, like loggers and hunters of centuries past, that it could never run out. Now we were stuck with uncooked and highly anticipated tortillas, sausage, instant beans, and taco seasoning we’d hauled up from the

Longing for heads. Three helmets watch forlornly as their vulnerable owners enjoy wine at camp.

have been overgrown, the guy in the Bronco may have looked blankly at the map when I’d shown it to him, but, as we all knew by now, to resist it was futile. We pushed in.

The air cooled in the shadowy forest, ripe thimbleberries lined the trail, and we pedaled and pushed into the unknown. Being the last night of our trip, we were on a special quest for the right campsite, a grand campsite, a site with views over mountain vistas 38

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grocery store in Elkford. We let the tragic consequences sink in for a minute before the debate began: to build a fire or not?

Sure, campfires were banned and the grass, twigs, and trees around us were dangerously dry. And, yes, the entire mountain range a few short miles to the east was closed to all human entry because of fire danger.

And we had to admit that we’d been riding through the smoke of an obviously large

adventurecycling.org

forest fire just the previous day. But neither Dad nor I have ever been what you would call big “rule people.” In the end, after I implored the group for several minutes, common sense prevailed. We started a fire.

Extremely carefully, of course. In an area cleared of vegetation with rock retaining walls for safety. And our dinner was saved.

It was the best dinner of the trip, too, munched with gusto on the lip of the bench while herons floated over the river below. As we took in the landscape and the mountain faces reflecting the sunset’s glow, it occurred to me that the beauty of these journeys is simply being out in the open vastness of the world, the expanse a sharp contrast, even an antidote, to the walled-in, climate-controlled nature of our regular lives. We drank deeply of the mountains that evening as we relaxed on the bench, soaking in the elixir of the wilderness with the extra relish and hint of melancholy that flavors the final night of every bicycle adventure.

As we packed our bags at camp the next morning, I said, “Well, guys, should we just say ‘to heck with it’ and keep riding the route all the way to Mexico?”

“Gosh, wouldn’t that be fun?” Dad said.

“It sure would,” said Steve.

“Only if I can take a bath first,” added Ron. Over 2,500 miles of Great Divide Route lay to our south, beckoning, with their countless opportunities for exploration, heartbreak, and inspiration — half a continent laid bare. But they would have to wait; our ride was coming to an end. (No alternate route we’d yet found could deliver us from our workaday world back in the land of electricity and walls.) As we pushed off for the final time of the trip, a hawk cried out from its treetop perch and flew along with us, as if saying goodbye, while roadside moose prints turned to horse prints turned to sidewalk as we followed backroads into Sparwood and our van. Then, all that was left was the easy highway drive back to Missoula. There were just a couple side roads I wanted to check out along the way...

When not occupied as deputy editor of this magazine, Aaron Teasdale can be found (with great difficulty) exploring remote places with family and friends.