Bikely map

I woke up at around 5am, and decided that since I was going to be a chilly up near this summit, regardless of whether or not I was sleeping, and that since I had over 90km to ride to Nelson, I should just make an early start. I was a little sluggish, but having been a little more lax on bear management (no self respecting bear would wander so far into such a cold area), was still able to hit the road by around 7am.

Fortunately, I was reasonably well-nourished, well-rested, and it had stopped raining and snowing on me, so I was able to slog the last 4km up to the summit with some nice morning, mountaintop scenery like this:

Until I finally cleared the worst part of the grade to look back and see the steep grades warning sign:

It’s not entirely clear in the picture (not even in the large version), but the sign basically announces 11km of 8% and 9% grades (and there was about another 15km of 4%-5% by my estimation before that; back in Ontario a 5% grade usually warrants a steep hill warning sign).

Finally, I got my sign of relief that I could switch from climbing to coasting, at least for a bit

and was subsequently able to coast for pretty much an entire 40km(!) into Castlegar, where I visited a bike shop in which I called ahead to Nelson to sort out my accomodations, used the toilet, and found out that they didn’t have any replacement screws for my right cleat on hand. I was also told that the ride into Nelson, while a climb, was all at river grade, so it was nearly flat (by the BC standards to which I had become accustomed). Since it was still before 10am, and I only had ~45km of ride ahead of me, I started to look forward to the nice relaxing ride to my rest day in Nelson.

On the way, I saw some nice Kootenay scenery, including a couple of hydro dams.

And finally caught a glimpse of Nelson across the lake before rolling in.

I stayed with a nice French-Canadian family who appeared to belong to Nelson’s tiny non-hippy minority, but who lived a good ways up the mountain that Nelson seems to be built on the side of. Regardless, it was a nice visit and rest day (I actually pulled in around 2pm, but did some bike repairs before showing up).