The Beautiful Rockies

Jim, John, and Kerry ready to roll.

Sue, in her sheepskin slippers, vamping it up. ;-)

We are blessed to live in one of the most abundant and beautiful places on the planet.  It is never more obvious than when one has the good fortune to ride from Kamloops to Field along the South Thompson River and Shuswap Lake and through the Rocky Mountains to Field, British Columbia on the border with Alberta.  Today was the quintessential riding day with a cloudless sky, warm temperatures, breathtaking scenery, and traffic that moved along quite briskly.

Jim, Kerry, and I left Kamloops riding east along the South Thompson River this morning.  To say thatt his road is one of the best rides in Canada for the scenery alone would be an understatement.  When you are not used to the scenery that continuously appears around each curve it is very difficult to keep your eyes on the road. Our whole day was a series of these moments.  And to add to it we followed the route that the Canadian Pacific Railway carved through this country more than 125 years ago.

This week Salmon Arm is hosting an event for motorcyclists called Sturgis North, and for much of our ride we met solo riders and larger groups heading west presumably to attend.  We were asked several times if we were going to Salmon Arm but we told the people who asked that we were heading east to Ontario and would miss the event.  Over the course of our day I estimate that we saw 200-300 riders heading to Salmon Arm.

An hour's from Kamloops  ride took us to Salmon Arm where we stopped to stretch our legs before moving on the Revelstoke.  The scenery is breathtaking with rushing blue water rivers and peaks that tower over the highway and whose flanks are covered with snow, trees, or that are simply naked and often striated rock.

John at the Craigellachie memorial

Kerry and Jim at Craigellachie

The Trans Canada Highway monument

Between Sicamous and Revelstoke we stopped at Craigellachie, where the last spike of the CPR was driven in November 1885.  This was a monumental undertaking for the time and the memorial there commemorates it.  Further on there is also a monument to the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway in 1962, the modern equivalent of the completion of the CPR. For us it was hard to believe that we rode it to BC only eleven years after it was completed and next year we will be observing a half century since John Diefenbaker, the PM at the time, declared it open.

Jim blasting out of Revelstoke for Kamloops

We rode in to Revelstoke for lunch and stopped at a deli there and had sandwiches while unit trains of potash and coal rumbled by across the main street.  Revelstoke is booming because of the skiing and other recreational opportunities it offers and the road entering town is flanked by two very large bas-relief grizzly bears.  We have not yet seen one in the wild and it doesn't seem likely that we will this trip.  We did however, see a mountain sheep eating beside the highway, apparently unconcerned with the traffic speeding by less than fifteen metres from him.

CPR 5468 in the Revelstoke Railway Museum

Jim left us to go back to Kamloops so we carried on to the Revelstoke Railway museum.  The displays were rather limited but they had a steam locomotive, CPR 5468, a Mikado type in the museum.  These machines were incredible in terms of their size and power, but also for their aesthetics.  Simply put, to many they are beautiful.

The number of coal, grain, and potash trains we saw was surprising.  For someone not used to it, seeing trains every 20-30 minutes is unusual.  The CPR route through Rogers and Kicking Horse passes is truly a main artery of the Canadian economy.

Rocky Mountains near Revelstoke

Rocky Mountains with a CPR freight in the foreground

One of the really great things about riding is one which is probably overloooked by those who don't ride.  There is a tremendous variety of smells as you ride.  They vary from those of fresh cut hay, to the smell of lake water on an early morning, to the unmistakable odor of animal manure, to the smell of spruce from a passing wood chip truck, to the unpleasant smell of burnt break linings from cars and trucks braking down a long hill.  It is a part of the experience that you can appreciate if you pay attention to your surroundings.  When you ride over small streams that tumble down the mountainsides you get a blast of cold air as it follows the course of the stream downhill.

We stopped at the Dairy Queen in Golden to take a break and were treated to a piece of ice cream cake.  Just the thing to two sweaty bike riders!  Outside of Golden the road was under constructiin and that terrible twisty section was being improved.  Farther on, we crossed the new bridge over the Kicking Horse River.  It is a magnificent piece of engineering and architecture.

The mountain behind Joan's house

The last part of ride today took us to Field where we are staying at Kerry's friend Joan Fields.  The house is right above the railway year and I was in heaven watching perhaps a dozen trains arrive and depart with their big road diesel-electric locomotives straining under the effort to overcome the inertia of perhaps 10-12,000 tonnes of potash or coal.  When we arrived Joan had a dinner of vegetables and Stone sheep for us. Yummm!  We could see the ridge behind which lie the famous Burgess Shales that have the world's earliest fossils of complex animal life and directly behind the house a mountain thrusts upwards perhaps 1000 metres.  This place is awe inspiring!

We have ridden about 800 kilometres in the past two days but tomorrow we'll stretch it out a bit when we hit the flatlands east of Banff.  We hope to see a train going through the Spiral Tunnels near Field tomorrow morning and after a brief stop in Calgary, we hope to make it into Saskatchewan, perhaps to Swift Current. Again, today was just an incredible day.  I think seeing the beauty that we saw today is good for the soul.  I know it is good for mine.