Bikely map

Chris put in an early start to the day while I was busy noticing that, in spite of the broken spokes not being drive-side, they were still more difficult to lace in than I cared to deal with, without removing the freewheel, so I went back to Big Sky to hire Dan to pull the freewheel, lace the spokes, and true the wheel. He did all this, and cleaned my drivetrain too, and then still refused to charge me for it, so since my handlebar tape was getting into pretty rough shape, I bought some new tape from him (though I didn’t put it on right then). Also, while the back tire was off for the spoke replacement, I swapped it with the front tire, since the back tire was carrying a good deal more weight, and had more wear to show for it.

Although the extra bit of repair got me off to a late start, the winds were more of a crosswind than anything else, so I didn’t feel particularly fatigued until I’d put about 90km under the tires. While riding, I passed a large alkali flat which contained great heaps of what I could only guess to be potash:

On the other side of the road, there looked to be some sort of facility for extracting or processing whatever it was that I saw (or perhaps it did something completely different, and I was seeing some great mass of dried up effluent)

Another point that seemed worth documenting in a photograph was that ever since I started riding alongside the CP line, I’d see big long freight trains going by in either direction every hour or so. Most of these trains contained nothing but bulk grain cars (though in BC there were still a few more pulling bulk mineral cars, and in general, there have also been a lot of double-stacked container trains too).

I also had another one of those “who’s the idiot that told me the prairies are flat” moments

but the day was otherwise uneventful.

I stopped about 115km out of Swift Current, figuring that I was in a good position to make Moose Jaw (~65km) on a reasonable to poor day, or push all the way on to Regina (~150km) if the conditions were really favourable. There was also a nice big clear patch of apparently unclaimed/unassigned flat ground just a little bit off the highway that seemed like an ideal place to set up camp for the night.