I arrived in Nelson on Thursday and spent the day sorting through my gear and hugging and kissing my bike and food that I shipped via UPS a week before. The rest of the team wouldn’t arrive until that evening or the next day so took it easy and slow... pack a little, put up the feet a little, and repeat...
Friday we met up as a team and just spent the day playing with the gear some more (the more you looked at it, the more you re-organized with it)...
and then went down to a local park and did our check-in. In total it took a couple hours to do the gear check, ropes, medical check, nav check, etc. We also took the opportunity to strategize how we would put our bikes in the canoes since we would be paddling with them for one leg. During my bike check, the guy noticed that my back hub was loose and recommended taking it into the shop for a check. I promptly did and they initially though the axle was broken (and didn’t have a replacement) so I was $h!ting bricks but when they took it apart it was a bearing issue and something else so they were able to fix it but there was a tense hour or so when it wasn’t looking good (ETA: bike worked great through out the course. particularly the brakes (which were vitally important).
After a nice pasta dinner out on a patio, we made our way to the ‘opening ceremonies’ at a local church and most importantly get our maps.
Also got a bit of a Cirque du Soleil yoga show from the Yogaslackers... picture doesn't do it justice what they did..
We didn’t waste any time getting back to our room and start plotting the 22 points on the 8 maps. Plotting was a bit confusing as there were grid lines as well as cross-hairs. The cross hairs lined up with the numbers on the edge of the maps so we used them to plot but found out after that we should have used the grid lines.....arghhh! It cost us some time and angst but got it sorted eventually. With the help of a backroads map and Google Maps we plotted our course. We packed it in just past midnight and decided to resume the next morning.
all the maps together...
Saturday was a flurry of activity. Now that we knew the legs and lengths, we could plan our bins a bit better, so finalized them (and finally closed them up) before taking them to Race HQ for transport along with all our other gear... hope we didn’t miss anything!
Pierluc's bin with family photos:
I think around 1pm we were on the buses to Kaslo campground where we would spend the evening (and ‘play’ with our bins yet again...)
Surprisingly had a pretty good night sleep and woke up reasonably fresh. Tore down our tents, packed up our ‘team bin’ (we were permited 5 x 190L bins so we had 4 individual bins and 1 team bin for tents, paddling gear and other bits). Our team bin was a 50gal trash can (which we had to modify slightly with an orange juice bottle to accommodate Phil’s paddles). It worked well during the race and after the race we filled with all of our trash...
I think around 8-ish we were on the buses heading for Meadow Creek Community Centre to meet up with our bikes and start.
We will be biking up near where the snow is...
The first leg was a short-ish bike leg with quite a bit of climb and looking at the map it definitely would be our easiest leg of the week. Linear distance was about 22km with about 5200ft of climb - all rideable... just long steady climbing. The temperature was almost perfect and the views were amazing. About half way up, one of our team mates started to cramp so we had to take desperate measures. He dug his trekking poles out and the rest of us took turns pushing his bike and carrying his pack. It took a lot out of the three of us but we got the team to CP 1... in last place. We took some time at the CP to refill our water bottles, change out of our bike gear, don on trekking poles and climb some more to a pass at the base of Meadow Mountain.
I think one of the funniest sights of the weeks was within 10 minutes after leaving the CP, we hit our first snow patch... and so did the Hummer that was stuck in it. Not sure where he thought he was going because the snow didn’t get any less the higher you went. We offered to push him out but he declined so we kept going. Once up on the pass, we had some pretty spectacular views all around us and knew we were headed in the right direction when we ran into the photographer...
The easy going didn’t last long when we started to bushwhack and head down the side of the mountain.
Phil: “I like to bushwhack and will apologize now.”
Me: “Yeah, so everyone STFU and lets go...
” Essentially we would lose 3500ft in about 2.5 linear kms - which meant some steep sections and some definite slipping and sliding. A couple of cliff sections that we skirted around. I think within an hour of heading down, I slipped, planted my poles, and *snap*... broken pole... crap... down to one... We eventually hit a couple of clear cuts (which is pretty amazing considering how steep the slope was) and followed them down until we hit a lower clear cut that looked like it had a service road on the eastern edge... bingo... the road we were looking for. We jumped on the road and followed it down to Cooper Creek. While making our way down we ran into Adrenaline Rush. Chatted with them briefly until they stopped to talk to family and we made our way down to a log cabin. We stopped here for a bit, grabbed a bit to eat, did some foot maintenance, filled the water bladders before making our way across the ‘creek‘ (more like a river for us Easterners)...
By this time, there were a few teams around us. For the next couple of km, we followed the creek and if memory serves me correctly, there was a trail that was marked with pink surveyors tape. After a couple kms, we crossed the river... sorry... creek.... along with about 5 other teams and found that it came to a bit of a dead end so we all piled back across the river again and found the trail again. I think we crossed the creek a couple times before ending up on the western side and the slope got steeper and steeper until we found ourselves in a pretty nasty area. It was now dark and a number of teams were in the general area. We came across a rock chute and there were rocks flying down the hill quite frequently and thankfully no one got hit. We eventually climbed enough to get around it and headed back down to get across the creek (it appeared that there was a bit more room on the western side of the creek (which there was). We found a place to cross that was slightly above knee high (but the water was COLD!) and stumbled our way across in a human chain holding on to one another as the water was going pretty fast. We stopped on the opposite side and changed socks before we went too much further. The next few hours was ‘put your head down‘ and bushwhack. It was hard going but we were moving. We passed a couple of teams that had decided to hunker down for the night. It was kind of wierd seeing teams sleeping in the woods. Their emergency blankets reflecting our headlamps looked like hundreds of fireflies. One point in the night I got everyone to turn off their headlamps... and look up... millions of stars - it was fantastic. In spots under the trees it was so dark that when I turned off my light, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face... We took a few breaks throughout the evening and closed my eyes ever so briefly.
Once the sun came up, we were in a couple of nasty clear cuts and movement was next to impossible so we chose a different tact to improve movement slightly. We dropped down and followed the river (I think - this bit is a bit blurry) - it was better, but still not great. However, it was nice to finally make it to somewhat of a clearing before the climb out of the valley.
we will be following the rock scree up and to the right...
It did mean, however, one more creek crossing before getting up there...
This one was quite high and very strong but we made it without too much difficulty. By this time we could see a couple of teams up ahead climbing the rock ‘scree‘ and snow. We took a bit of a break on a nice outcrop of rocks before the climbing began.... The ground alternated between boulders/rocks and hard packed snow. the snow was pretty sticky but still had to be careful with your footing. By this time it was starting to rain (and a bit cool) so threw on the jacket just in case.
After a slight drop in elevation, we were ready to tackle one last ascent to CP 2. It looked a bit tricky as we had to navigate some tricky, steep snow sections and cross a stream (yes, it was cold).
The snow climb to the pass was fairly pleasant once we got past the stream and were greeted by three enthusiastic volunteers... A quick chat with them and over the top we went and then straight down. Boot skiing turned into a little bit of butt skiing before it leveled out a bit. We essentially followed a snow trail down along a stream until it turned into a Fire Service Road and dropped even more down to Retallack to where our TA bins were waiting for us. We were in old mining country so it was kind of cool to see a couple of old entrances into some mine shafts on the way down.
Surprisingly, we were no longer in last place, I think we were 18th so passed a lot of teams in the 22+hr trek . At this TA, we decided to grab a warm meal, a nap (I couldn't sleep) and then head out on the bike before dark.... We were now Monday evening - about 36-ish hours in...
more to come...
