Advertisement
Day 33. Friday.
Another fabulous day of riding. There are'nt a lot of options when it comes to roads in this area so I retraced my path to Golden, BC but this time I stayed on highway 1 and went to Glacier National Park. I stopped at several road side attractions that I skipped yesterday. There is a spot called the Spiral Tunnels where in the 1920's they dug and blasted two spiral tunnels in the mountains for the railroad because it was too steep for the trains to climb out of the valley. Pretty ingenious.
The road to Golden is a nice one. Several kilometers of it are literally cut into the rock and there are huge screens draped over the rock surface to catch any falling debris. There are also several avalanche areas where you are not allowed to stop.
Continuing on toward Glacier National Park I encountered something new. In four or five places there are what I'll call tunnels but they are more like a giant carport if you know what that is. Basically they built a roof over the road to allow sock and snow to slide off the mountain and over the road instead of
onto it. They are semi open on the valley side so you do get a bit of light in but when your eyes are adjusted to bright sun and you are wearing sunglasses it get real dark real fast. In all but one you can see light at the end of the tunnel (pun intended) so you just aim for it.
Before you reached Rogers Pass you pass into the Pacific time zone so I've been in them all now. Not ALL but Atlantic to Pacific. There is a store and very busy gas station at Rogers Pass being the only gas stop in Glacier Park. I had some road food, you know, chips, pop and a chocolate bar before heading back. As much as I don't like to retrace my route here you don't have much choice unless you want to travel hundreds or thousands of kilometers out of your way to find another road. What I want to say is it does'nt matter because you get to see the mountains from the opposite direction so there are sights you never even knew were there.
I'm not exact on the distance because I topped up the gas three times
but it was about 350Km and seven hours again. I wonder what the interior will bring?
Advertisement
Tot: 0.1s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 8; qc: 42; dbt: 0.0714s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
