{"id":4,"date":"2008-05-04T16:57:08","date_gmt":"2008-05-04T20:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/?p=4"},"modified":"2009-03-19T00:07:52","modified_gmt":"2009-03-19T04:07:52","slug":"may-4-harrison-hot-springs-to-sunshine-valley-64km","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/?p=4","title":{"rendered":"May 4: Harrison Hot Springs to Sunshine Valley (~64km)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Hung around Harrison Hot Spring in the morning with Graydon and Frances, eating leftover pizza and part of a raisin scone for breakfast. Got out to take a look at the scenery before too many of the people showed up, and the place pretty much looked like this:<\/p>\n

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Wandering down towards the beach, I encountered an indication that the water levels were low:<\/p>\n

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And then dropped into the pavillion set up for a sand sculpture competition<\/p>\n

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though with the competition still a while off, most of the entries were still crates of settling sand:<\/p>\n

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I grabbed a few extra provisions at the general store, saddled up, and rode with Graydon and Frances back to Highway 7, where they went West to return home, and I turned East to continue to Halifax. Graydon has some pictures of the departure in his LiveJournal<\/a>, so go and look there.<\/p>\n

Continuing East, I passed some sort of pipeline as it crossed the Fraser Valley:<\/p>\n

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and I took advantage of having the camera out to take a few more pictures of the road ahead (because it was kinda scenic):<\/p>\n

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A short while later, I arrived in Hope, which is apparently the Chainsaw Carving Capital (of ???):<\/p>\n

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and dropped into the library to use the internet a little. There was a sports shop in town where I could probably have properly fixed up my bike, but being Sunday, it was closed, so I grabbed a few final bits of food, topped up my water, and hunkered down for the long, difficult, lonely ride to Princeton.<\/p>\n

Naturally, there being 2 mountain passes between the towns, the ride started with a climb of about 15km (ok, so about 1km of it or so was actually level or descending, but it was a 7% grade which I believed to be steep at the time). While climbing, I discovered taking pictures to be a good way to kill time while stopped and waiting for my pulse to go back down to around 120 so I could resume climbing (drinking water and snacking are also good time sinks, but require some care with the depletion of provisions).<\/p>\n

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Note the large distance that must be travelled (mostly climbing) before coming across so much as a gas station.
\nAfter getting to the Hope Slide lookout, I coasted down into Sunshine Valley (where there’s a residental community — I think mostly cottages still empty at this time of year — with no commercial services, but a community centre that I was able to make camp on the lawn\/playground of).<\/p>\n

On this night, I discovered that cellular coverage along the Crowsnest Highway varies between spotty and non-existent. I was unable make my evening call home, and felt really lonely and kinda homesick. I packed it in, resolving to call home at a park resort that was mapped to exist roughly halfway to Princeton. I also discovered that my planned standard dinner is too large by about half, but finished it off anyhow, since I had nowhere else to put it that would save me making headlines for being simultaneously the first bear sighting of the season, and the first bear casualty.<\/p>\n

Also worth noting is that Hope Slide seemed to mark some sort of transition between nice warm valley air, and cool mountain pass air. It was a cool night, but not too cold to handle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bikely map Hung around Harrison Hot Spring in the morning with Graydon and Frances, eating leftover pizza and part of a raisin scone for breakfast. Got out to take a look at the scenery before too many of the people showed up, and the place pretty much looked like this:<\/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-4","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\/4","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=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rolling.melon.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}