July
5th - 90km Ride - Glacier Alley and Rainy
Day.
(Rob) Joseph and I just realized the meaning of killer mosquitoes! After again being awoken to the sound of a large animal outside our tent (of which scared me half to death), I looked up and saw that our tent had been discovered by a large battalion of hungry bloodsuckers. Inside our rain fly, but outside our tent buzzed about nearly 500 mosquitoes (given my best guess). This place truly is full of insects. To avoid these beasts we tore down the tent very quickly, stuffed it raggedly in our trailers and rode frantically down the road until they lost us. Then we stripped down naked and got ready for the days ride.
Today
I had two major dilemmas. One was loosing my gloves. I didn’t realize
that they fell out of my pocket until after lunch. Then I had to ride
almost 10 miles back down the road to get them. At least I found them
again. As a result of this, I was much more tired than Joseph was. We
started riding to Steward and I hit the wall. I could hardly pedal downhill.
We only had 40 miles to ride and I couldn’t go 5 miles! It didn’t
help that we had a giant uphill climb. Finally I ate some power bars though
and got a second wind.
The
rest of the ride to Stewart was definitely the prettiest ride I have done
so far. We passed several glaciers all around us. In fact, we rode right
through a giant canyon with tall mountains surrounding each side of the
road. ON top of each mountain was a melting glacier that would send streams
of water falling down the mountain! WOW. I saw more waterfalls in that
ride than I ever have in Hawaii!
The only thing that could have made the ride better would have been no rain. It rained on us for half the ride and we got completely wet and very cold. We decided that we will have to hitchhike out of here. It was almost all downhill and we can’t do that ride in the morning with the condition of our legs. We will also find an actual camping site tonight that is free of bears. We are in Grizzly country. Apparently they walk all throughout town and are seen every day wondering the roads. We don’t want to take the risk in this giant bear funnel.
(Joseph) Today was the most relaxing ride of our journey. It was basically a 40 mile ride down a narrow valley with high mountains on both sides. We periodically passed blue glassiars with waterfalls casscadeing down to the valley floor. These waters would meet up with the expert kayaker’s dream, “Bear River,’ which raged through the valley floor towards Stewart B.C. I think “Lord of the Rings” could of easily been filmed in this area. This ride was a nice treat after our first hecktic morning, We were a woken by hundreds of mosquitoes between our rain fly and the tent screen. Unzipping the tent was like the flood gates opening. For the next 10 minutes we were fighting off donating our blood while packing up.
