Today was the day I decided I chose the right bike. The book makes it very clear that Manning Park, with Allison Pass in particular, is the most difficult stretch of the trip, going on the say that if you can make it through today, you can make it through anything. After waking up at noon, and being packed and ready to go by two, I now had to make it through in half a day or less. The road started getting steep almost right away, and it stayed that way for the next several hours. Thankfully my beauty of a bike has crazy low gearing, and I was able to just sit back and spin away using my 26/32 granny gear. I wasn't going fast (7-8km/hr), but it wasn't any harder than spinning on flat. It was just a lot slower. I had polished off my supply of tasty goo snacks yesterday, so today was fueled entirely by peanut butter, which I ate out of a jar with a spoon. I think I ate about 300g, along with breakfast, lunch, and ultimately dinner. Long story short peanut butter is amazing and it is looking like it will be a staple calorie source for this trip. Outside of being straight uphill all day, the ride was entirely uneventful except for a few people leaning out windows to holler encouraging things at me, which was great. For reference: yelling/cheering/thumbs up = encouraging, honking your horn = surely I'm about to get hit by a car. Thankfully no one honked today.
After climbing and climbing, I finally saw the "Allison Pass Summit" sign in the distance. Success! After this is was a nice downhill cruise all the way to the Manning Park Lodge, where I decided to stay in the hostel to take advantage of the beds/showers/laundry/kitchen/pool/hot tub/not bears. There were bear signs everywhere, and I felt very good about this decision. Also there was snow on the ground. And bears.
No comments:
Post a Comment