{"id":11,"date":"2008-05-12T18:25:53","date_gmt":"2008-05-12T22:25:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/?p=11"},"modified":"2009-06-14T23:56:43","modified_gmt":"2009-06-15T03:56:43","slug":"may-12-paulson-to-nelson-92km","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/?p=11","title":{"rendered":"May 12: Paulson to Nelson (~92km)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bikely map<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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Until I finally cleared the worst part of the grade to look back and see the steep grades warning sign:<\/p>\n

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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).<\/p>\n

Finally, I got my sign of relief that I could switch from climbing to coasting, at least for a bit<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

On the way, I saw some nice Kootenay scenery, including a couple of hydro dams.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
\n<\/a>
\n<\/a>
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

And finally caught a glimpse of Nelson across the lake before rolling in.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bc","category-ridingdays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}