We’ve been putting some more hills in the legs before the next part of our journey across the continental divide of this endless country.
Hopefully the forest hill repeats in Pacific Spirit Park, spin classes and today’s climb up Cypress Mountain will prepare us for the leg from Cranbrook, BC to Banff, which lies on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, in Alberta.
Cypress is a favoured training ride for Vancouver’s road cyclists, and they were out in number today in spite of the mist, mizzle and relative chill near the top. That chill becomes finger-numbing cold on the speedy descent back down the 13 or so kilometres from the 900m ski resort base to the bottom.
The logistics have taken shape for next week’s ride, which might be the last for the summer, since it takes us to our goal for the year. We’re looking forward to linking up with our cheerful roadie Liz again, picking her up in Nelson on the way through to our base at Fernie. In spite of the distance from Vancouver to Cranbrook (850km by road, well over 1,200 on our wiggly trail), and our weariness with driving Highway 3 after all the bike legs we’ve done in the province’s interior since last summer, we’ve decided on driving to our start point again. This is, in part, because we have been told the drive back from Banff via Revelstoke is so spectacular. We hope the weather and wildfires play fair and that we can get to enjoy it.
We’ll spend much of the five days of cycling above 1700m and we face our longest day on the mountain bikes yet – well over 100km. Although we’ve both ridden a gran fondo (160km) and Gill has done the BC Ride to Conquer Cancer from Vancouver to Seattle, both those feats (and the training for them) were completed on road bikes. On a gravel, often single-track trail, more than 100km on a mountain bike will be an all-day sentence. With a couple of other days longer than 80km and a fair amount of climbing we have a bit of work ahead of us.
We’ll finally cross the provincial boundary on Day 4 and we’re excited too that Liz will join us to ride on Saturday.
#thegreattrail
#transcanadatrail
Trans Canada Epic 