Ride Day 1, The Nelson Town Trails
Posted by Charles Fri, 01 Aug 2008 04:50:00 GMT
One the scale of people you know that really like to drive, Sean would rise to the top. He really, really likes to drive, and he’s excellent at it. He and I did a very fast road trip two years ago, a mad dash to central Oregon and back in four days, with three epic rides sandwiched in between. When he called a couple weeks ago to tell me Nelson was only 19 hours away by car, I knew what he was thinking, and what he was capable of. We put together a couple of roof racks and outfitted his Prius to carry our two bikes as well as the three bikes that belonged to Patrick, Rob, and Jim, who we were to meet in downtown Nelson on Thursday.
The two of us rolled out of Passion at 7:30 Wednesday morning, after checking and double checking the roof rack, our pack lists, and the content of our travel mugs. At some later point, the topic of directions came up, and I was introduced to Sean’s small surly Australian friend, the Garmin Personal Navigator. We programmed Spokane, Washington into the little device, it spat out a 16 hour drive time estimate, and began to correct us every time we attempted to add time to that figure.
A hundred or so miles into the trip, we stopped to recheck the things that mattered, and found our coffee cups empty, and the roof rack an inch or so further back from the windshield than where we had left it. Tightening the rack and getting good coffee seemed easy enough, so we pressed on, but did check both again in another hundred miles. This time we found the roof rack had moved back more than the coffee level dropped. A quick calculation factoring the length of the roof, miles completed, and remaining miles to go told us we needed to make a change, and it wasn’t to the coffee. We ran lengths of clothesline from the hood hinges up to the roof rack, then back under the hood, and marked both the windshield and rope so we could monitor progress in flight, and hit the road once again. We didn’t need to field check the roof rack until we were well into Oregon, and when we did we found no rearward progress. Press on again.
We hit the road one last time, and rolled into, and quickly through, Spokane to stop at the Howard Johnson’s just outside of town, just an hour from the Canadian border we found after reprogramming the GPS for Nelson. Fortunately, our Australian friend had prior knowledge of the Great White North, because we didn’t have more than a small, blurry printout for a map. The HoJo’s had everything we needed, free wireless, big comfortable beds, a self serve waffle maker, and my favorite thing about the Greater Northwest, three coffee shacks within three blocks. We were back on the road by 9:00 the following morning, passing on Brews Brothers in favor of Coffecopia. We were prepared at the border for the gatekeeper that morning, fully apprised of the velocity differences between the African and European swallows and were able to breeze through, and roll into Nelson around noon. By 1:00 we had met the proprietor of the Baldface Lodge, who introduced us to a local trailbuilder, who sold us a map, who then drew in his trail, and by 2:00 we were at the chip truck, ordering Thai chicken and falafel wraps, dressed for a ride and pointed toward the hills above town.
My initiation to Canadian riding was the Svoboda trail network, including the Svoboda Road climb, the Log Jam descent, to Svoboda Traverse, Long Svoboda, and then a final detour onto the new local goodness that was unnamed to us. We were able to get back into town by 4:30 for check in, met our three travel partners, and with the rest of the guests of Baldface, we began the hour long shuttle up a dirt road to the Lodge.
The Baldface Lodge offers an all inclusive mountain bike vacation starting 4000 feet about Kootenay Lake in Nelson, BC. The Lodge would be our home for the next three nights, and our days would be spent on guided tours down the mountain and around the Nelson town trails, with shuttles bringing us back up as many times as necessary.
