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Published: August 28th 2019
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The thing about crossing a time zone yesterday was when we got up it was one hour colder! There was plenty of light but no warmth at all. Just very cold mountain air. We had breakfast and set off down the steep dirt road to the highway. I had 3 layers on and was shivering. Graeme had rugged up too, but Tom and Jeff didn't (no sense no feeling I guess). We rode 21km into Golden just trying to warm up, the cold cut right through.
At Golden we got some supplies and headed for the nearest coffee shop.
The climbing started as soon as we left the town. The locals called it "10 Mile Hill" and it was every bit of 16kms up hill. To balance out the hard work was the continued extraordinary scenery that surrounded us. I began to wonder how long it would be before you started to take this amazing scenery for granted.
Our day was not overly long. After yesterday's long day we had broken the final ride to Banff into two days. 82kms was today's effort and we were stopping at Field. Just before we got there we bumped into Markus
on the road. (There is a picture of his bike below). He was off to Banff were he was going to get some work. He'd lost his wallet and was making money by collecting bottles on the road and cashing them in.
We made very good time and cruised in to Field at around 3pm. I then had to rummage through my emails until I found the booking confirmation for the hotel. I plugged in the address and was surprised to see it wasn't actually in Field but was another 11kms up the road. And when I say "up the road", I mean it was at the top of Kicking Horse Pass (or Kick Arse Pass as we are calling it). It meant another 400meters of climbing when we thought we were done for the day. There is a section of train track here that they had bore tunnels into the mountain and construct loop backs for the train because it was too high to get up otherwise. At one point as a train is exiting one part of the tunnel you can see it's tail still disappearing into the same tunnel. It took us about an extra hour
and some hard work before we were able to finish off the day. We finished our day unexpectedly at the top of the Pass overlooking a gorgeous lake and the trip to Banff is 11kms shorter and gently down hill the whole way. Not such a bad outcome after all. And we're finally in the Rockies.
We're all looking forward to getting to Banff tomorrow and the 3 days rest that come with it. It will give us all a bit of time for the little niggles to heal and we'll be ready to take on the Ice Field Parkway.
Total Elevation Gained Today: 1500+ meters
Distance Covered: 92kms
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