Bikely map

As soon as I got back out to the highway from the access road down to the campground, and turned in my direction of travel, I encountered a novel sight (and one that I wasn’t expecting for at least another 100km):

you see this sign, unlike pretty much every other such sign I’d passed before, is is missing an important characteristic that I’d become quite used to: it didn’t tell me that I was going east.

Now continuing along, I needed to make a grocery stop and, not being entirely confident in my ability to reach White River by the end of the day felt it necessary to make a stop in Marathon. This was somewhat frustrating in that Marathon is close to lake level, some 4-5km off the highway, while the highway is a good several hundred feet above lake level. Going into Marathon wasn’t too bad, but coming back out, not only was it hot and humid, and I was stuck with a climb, the access road was being repaved, and I got to do the climb on extremely fresh asphalt. By really fresh, what I mean is that that portion of the road had been closed for the laying of the asphalt on the way down, so on the way back up, it was still radiating off the residual heat from having been laid warm, residual moisture from the steam-roller that flattened it out, and was still kind of sticky too. This made for an extraordinarily unpleasant ride back up to the road, though at least the scenery up there was nice:

Continuing along, I passed a few mines, one of which was signed as a gold mine, and situated on a road with a familiar name:

It would seem that I could have gone from BC, through Oz, to Northwestern Ontario, though I suspect that it may have been a longer route than the one that I took.

There was also a last shot of the lake before heading a little farther inland towards White River (on the descent to which, I managed to clock 62.5km/h, the fastest I’ve ridden on the ride so far)

and proceeding away from the lake, I encountered a patch of land that I remembered as having been pretty freshly burnt when I drove past it (on the way to a conference) back in 2002.

Finally I reached White River and after asking around for acceptable places to camp, was told that it was quite all right to just camp in the town’s public park, of which I was compelled to take a few pictures: