Hey Folks,
Its Tuesday June 12, my Mom's birthday, and I've just got out of the tub. It felt so good to lay down in hot water, and gave me quite a laugh to see what I left behind when I let the water out. Half the growing soil in Allberta spun down the Saskatchewan drain.
Yes folks, I'm in Saskatchewan, Maple Creek Saskatchewan, on the eve of a ride into the Cypress Hills.
Last you heard I was rolling out of Pincher Creek. Let me tell you, I caught the wind, and a lovely west wind it was.
My first day took me to Fort Macleod, a nice little town with a bit of a rough edge to it. Folks are nice there, but I'd be reluctant to leave my stuff sitting around long. The ride from Pincher went well, and fast, but was rather stressful with all the traffic. I'd rolled right into town before I found out the best priced campsite was back the direction I'd come. It took nearly as long to ride the 5K back out to the campground as it did to ride the 60 K from Pincher. The wind that pushed me through the day, stood me up straight when I tried to go the other way.
The next day I got up nice and early, rode back into town, stocked up, and spun to a little town called Coalhurst, just west of Lethbridge.
I should mention here that my knee, which I'd taken to calling "Master of My Universe" (because it was dictating all my activities) continued to give me issues, but seemed less troubled every day. Every chance I got I either iced or heated it. The ice seems to work best, but I have a feeling the heat helps too.
Coalhurst is a bedroom community with about ten police officers to every citizen. I've never seen so many police, except when I worked at the Banff Centre just before the '88 Olympics, when 300 Mounties moved into one of the residences.
The campground was barren, 15 sites crammed into a space about the size of most backyards in BC, and was located about 200 meters from a railway line, and 300 from a grain elevator. This elevator stank bad, and was directly upwind of the campground. I don't know if you know what a grain feeder, feeding grain into rail cars smells like, but you don't want to know, believe me!
Crashed early in Coalhurst and woke up to find a Mountie waiting for me. He didn't even let me get my water from the tap to my stove and he was on me, squealing his wheels in the gravel, and pullng up alongside me while I groggily carried two full pots towards my picnic table.
"I always wanted to ride a bicycle across Canada," said the cop, a boy of about 25, dark skin, and a nervous disposition, "must be a real adventure."
"Yeah," I responded, somewhat amused, and wondering what he really wanted.
"How's the trailer work?" he quizzed, then let out a series of other questions like: "How far do you go in a day? Where'd you start? Are you going all the way? How much weight will the trailer carry? Do you camp all the time? What do you do about the rain?"
The guy quizzed me for a good ten minutes, barely allowing me to answer his questions, and I held both pots, full of water, in my hands the whole time.
"Can't this guy see I'm trying to cook my breakfast, what the hell does he want," I asked myself, avoiding the temptation to say, "Hey man, can't you see I've got two full pots of water in my hands and want to get on with my day."
Suddenly, the cop announced he had to go.
"Take care," he said, "stay dry, wish I could do that." Then off he went, spinning his tires.
Within minutes of the mountie's departure, the adjacent fields began to fill with young blonde-haired, blue-eyed kids in soccer uniforms. Before my porridge was made and my coffee barely cooled, there were thousands of them. Then the campground filled up with SUVs and minivans, full of the parents. By time I rolled out of the place I had to squeeze between the rows upon rows of cars, past the tailgate parties, and out onto the road.
Over the course of days going towards Lethbridge, I'd asked several people, including the cop, if there was a secondary route into the city. I knew the highway route was steep and dangerous in places. I wanted to avoid it if I could, but in the end found myself speeding down the hill into the coulee. Halfway down the coulee was a bicycle route sign. I followed it, and wound up going in circles, with no further directional signs, at the bottom of the coulee, on the west side of the river. I had no choice but to go back out on the highway. Crossing a bridge, where I almost got too friendly with the side of a Winnibego, I spotted a road going off into the coulee, and followed it down to a trailhead. There I parked, and flagged down another cop, a Lethbridge Sheriff!
He explained that I could have gone south on the west side of the coulee, into West Lethbridge, then taken a secondary road through a less steep section of the coulee. He also informed me, if I followed the trail in front of me, I would wind up at Fort Whoop Up!
Back in the mid 19th century Fort Whoop Up was a rather infamous crack house. The crack back then was third rate whiskey, the cash was furs and food, and the Americans were the proprietors. The Canadian government of the time decided it had to do something about all the natives getting drunk on American whiskey. If them Indians were going to drink anything, it was going to be Canadian Club, not Kentucky Bourbon.
Between Louis Riel, who at the time was trying to set up a democratic government in Manitoba, and Fort Whoop Up, the government decided to create the North West Mounted Police, now the RCMP, and sent them west to make sure those Indians were only drinking Canadian made gut-rot. It took them some time to get there, but within a few years of the first constables arriving, Fort Whoop Up was gentified and the trouble making American whisky traders moved on. It was sort of like what is going on down on the Vancouver Eastside right now, where the drug pushers and prostitutes are being pushed further out into the burbs, although in early Canada they were pushed deeper into Indian territory.
Anyway, I rode on into Fort Whoop Up, where the only beverages to be found are two dollar coca colas, dispensed in cans. There's no sign of any natives and the only Mounties are wooden. Its a national historic site, but really its little more than another tourist trap.
However, the ride along the botton of the coulee, through the cottonwoods, below the sand cliffs, was especially beautiful. I took my time, lunching outside the fort, and eventually climbing a paved bicycle path up to the main part of town.
Took my time in town too. Sat outside a coffee shop with a couple locals, and a very friendly dog named Blue. Blue shook my hand about ten times while I busied myself entertaining his mates, a couple Lethbridge lifers. It was fun, almost felt like a part of the town, sitting there, sharing a laugh, telling road stories.
When I finally got going again, I promptly got lost, until I happened onto Secondary Highway 512 quite by mistake. The locals call it the 'Jail Road' because it runs past the local lock up, but for me it was a quiet, flat, straight, and rather lovely direct route halfway to Taber. With a 40 K wind at my back, I barrelled out the 512 to an abandoned town called Readymede, then turned north and got back on Highway 3.
Within a couple hours I was wheeling into Taber, another quiet town, albeit a quiet town with some sort of deep, and sometimes violent psychosis going on. Taber was home to Canada's first high school shooting, Canada's Columbine. There is a stress there, especially among the males. The presence of thousands of traditional Mennonites, with their traditional dress, belies a nasty underbelly. Some of it is young male anger, some of it is older male anger. As I rode through town I alternatively was smiled at by Mennonite girls in long flower-print dresses and kerchiefs, or blasted by farting noises from muffler- challenged pick-up trucks, driven by cowboy-hatted yahoos, who seemed to think gunning it while alongside hippie cyclists is the best time to be had.
I ducked into the local Safeway, then rode out the three K to the Taber Municipal Campground, in a coulee north of town. This is a lovely site, full of cottonwood groves (shedding their cotton until the ground was covered like snow), right on the Old Man River. Unfortunately, half the town was down there, with all their kids, and all their toys, including SUVs, ATVs, RVs, Hummers, motorized scooters, country music cds and vocal chords. They were whooping it up like it was old Fort Whoop Up.
The manager of the place, whom I found hiding in his compound at the back, gave me a break in the price, smiled nervously, then hid, while the camp went a little crazy. Crazy like the kids go in BC, making all kinds of noise, busting up the furniture, breaking bottles in their fires, all to the blaring sounds of really sucky country music!
Fortunately for me, I found a campsite by the river, next to a woman and her daughter, and four of her daughter's friends. I befriended Lee Ann, and her daughter, and wound up sitting up with them talking by the fire, while the Cottonwoods snowed and the sky rained, then cleared, then rained again. At three in the morning, after much warmth and affection, and some good laughs, especially when the local police finally arrived to restore law and order, I crawled into my sleeping bag and was out.
Lee Ann was a delight, a gentle woman of 37, with a rich singing voice and a lifelong desire to sing. She actually has a recording contract with a Nashville label, but has been busy raising children instead. I did what I could to encourage her to get back to her music, and in the morning she thanked me for it.
That day the wind blew me into Bow Island. I'd last visited Bow Island two years ago and had taken shelter in one of their picnic pavillions during a nasty wind and rain storm. This time the weather was spectacularly clear, but very windy. Since I was last there they'd constructed a rather fancy shower facility, wherein one pays one dollar for five minutes of all the lukewarm water one can handle. Lukewarm or cold, I made use of that shower, until I could bare it no more. I shaved above the mirrorless sink, by sense of touch, combed out a couple hundred K of debris from my hair, and went to bed early.
Yesterday I was up at 6 am and gone by 9. The tailwinds set me down in Medicine Hat shortly after noon. I took a site in a trailer park, made dinner, then took a long walk, on the bluffs west of the city, with a rather filthy man from Ymir BC named Murray.
Murray, by his own admission, is a loner drunk. He's out on the prairies for no other reason than to see them. At the trailer park his whole set up was a tarp, a sleeping bag, and a half sack of beer. He was a likeable enough guy, but well into the sauce. During our walk I told him all about my adventure quitting the booze, and hopefully absolutely ruined his drinking career, or at least gave him something to think about.
About dark I crawled into bed.
I was slow to rise this morning. Still, I took my time and, once I'd done all I like to do in the morning, set out, right down the Trans Canada, through the city and out the other side. Again the wind was with me and, though I didn't get out of the city until noon, I was in Walsh, at the Saskatchwan border, by 3:30. Pushing on I decided to make the run for Maple Creek.
At about 7pm I arrived at the Maple Creek turn out, making today my first 100 plus K day on this trip! Yahoo!
The last eight K south from the highway into town was the toughest. There was a wicked crosswind that rocked Wheels, BoB and I to the core. It took nearly an hour to do the jaunt and, at its end, I rewarded myself with dinner out, at the inexpensive by very good Chinese restaurant in town.
Then I splurged for a $30 motel room. The campgrounds around here are charging $20, which I was reluctant to pay, then I saw a big sign offering rooms from $30. I had to take it.
Surprisingly, this is the cheapest digs of this sort I've seen, and the cleanest. The room isn't much bigger than the back quarter of a Greyhound bus, but the tub is a six footer, the water hot, and the pressure dynamite, plus they have a wireless connection, which allows me to talk to all of you. Bonus!
So, here I am all soaked up, with an ice pack on my knee, and all my stuff strewn about. Tomorrow I will do laundry here in town, look around, then take on the 30 K ride up into the Cypress Hills. Thirty K ain't much, but its all uphill and the forcast is for southwest winds, which means I'll be riding headers all day. I'm expecting a tough ride, a real rough ride, but that's partly why I've opted to pamper myself a bit tonight.
Hopefully I'll spend a few days up in the Cypress area, which is actually at the same elevation as Banff. Should come out of there with something to talk about.
Until then, hope you're all well. Write sometime,
Will
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