Lac La Hache to Clinton

I woke up early form my campsite just North of Lac La Hache Provincial Park. Of course, without a tent waking up early is almost guaranteed for me. I packed up and headed south without breakfast, promising myself something once I got to Lac La Hache. The ride was lovely: Lac La Hache is beautiful, the sun was just coming out from behind the mountains, and the air was cool. This promised to be a good day.

The town itself was 20km or so from my campsite, and I was relieved to see that the last of three diners I saw in town was open when I went by. I locked up my bike, pulled a pair jeans over my bike shorts in an attempt to avoid offending anyone, and walked in the diner still wearing my grungy yellow jacket.

An old man walked up to me almost before I sat down. "Where ya goin'?" he asked, and I struggled to catch the words as they leaked through his missing teeth.

"San Francisco," I replied.

"That's a long way!" he said, impressed. The other three people in the diner watched. He asked a few more questions, and went on his way.

Breakfast was fairly standard diner food: ham, sausage, bacon, hash browns and toast. I enjoyed it immensely. The waitress asked if I wanted anything else. I said, "no," and after waiting for a bit to see if she would bring the bill, I got up to go pay at the cash register. As I got up, she walked by: "I'm buying you breakfast today," she said simply and with a smile.

"Really?" I was honestly surprised and amazed.

"You look like you have a long way to go," she said, and walked off.

Wow! First of all, I feel kind of guilty...I probably look really grungy and broke, but I'm not really (well, I am grungy but I'm not broke!). But on the other hand, I think this is one of those situations where it's best to say thank you and pay it forward.

Grungy me at the summit just before Clinton-1232 meters.



Bike tans...gloves and shorts.

Her generosity is amazing! Many people I talk to about this trip seem to think 'you have too much time on your hands.' It's fun to see someone so honestly supportive of it.

Like my interaction with Chandler, the waitress's support put me in a good mood for several hours, all the way to 100 Mile House--a small town that is conspicuously not 100 miles from any city. (Well, it's 100 hundred miles from Lillooet, which is another small town...it was named in the 1800s when gold prospectors left the Fraser River in Lillooet, and travelled to 100 Mile House by carriage).

I had several errands to run in 100 Mile House, and spent several hours there. I called ahead to a woman in Whistler who offered to help me through warmshowers.org, a cycle tourist network. I told her I'd be arriving in two days. I also went shopping, learned that the campground I was planning to stay at 30 km past the town of Clinton was closed due to flooding (but no matter--the internet showed a provincial park that allowed 'wild camping' literally across the street), and found something to treat my water with (the steri-pen I brought seems to be broken, or at least hypersensitive to battery voltage, and I ran out of iodine).

Eventually, I headed South again, but by this time it was hot. I only went about thirty km before having to stop to fill up my water bottle. I pulled into a roadside stop that had a plywood ice cream cone outside.... It doesn't seem right to go into a business and beg for water, so I figured I could at least buy some ice cream. Nobody was around the counter, so I went back to the bathroom and filled my bottle. When I came back out, the owner was behind the counter talking to a customer. I got in line, and the owner quickly asked in a thick French-Canadian accent, "You want some water?"

"I filled it up in the bathroom," I replied, holding up my bottle.

"You filled it in the bathroom!" He replied, incredulous. "Here, I will run cold water for awhile and then fill it." Eventually his other customer left...or maybe he was just a friend. He was still holding my metal bottle when he handed me a plastic bottle off his shelf. "Here," he said, "It's a gift."

"Thank you!"

"And here's another one. How long will you stop here?"

Well, I was planning on leaving right away. But that seemed like the wrong answer. "Oh, pretty soon," I replied vaguely.

"Like five, ten minutes?" He said, not waiting for a reply, "I'll put it in the freezer for you." He brought my now full bottle over to the freezer then came back. "Let's go sit."

We went and sat at on of the tables in the shack. "Where are you from?" he asked.

"Haines, Alaska."

"That's a beautiful place!"

"What were you doing there?" I ask.

"It was a trip." He went on to tell me about his adventures with bears, and some of the people he met. Inevitably, he asked where I was headed.

"San Fransisco," I said.

"huh," he grunted. "That is bull **** down there."

I agree with him, to some extent, but we'd both rather talk about other things. He continued: "My brother used to ride like that. He quit smoking and started riding his bicycle," he said, inhaling deeply from his own cigarette. "It was terrible. He used to talk about it all the time to me, how he quit smoking and exercised all the time."

"Rubbed it in, eh?" I said...active listening, I think it's called.

"He got lung cancer five years ago."

"Oh..."

"But he's still alive. Nobody lives that long with lung cancer. The doctors say 2-6 months. If you live two years, you're really lucky. But my brother has lived five. Nobody knows how he did it, but we know he did."

He got up from the table and came back a bit later with a popsicle. "You like these?"

"Yeah!"

"They're for the kids," he said. "They're nothing but sugar. Terrible." Then he seemed to remember that he just gave me one. "But good for you," he added. I ate it appreciatively.

"There were a few other bikers here. One was from France, but I never speak French to those people," he continued.

"No?" I ask.

"I hate those Paris guys,"  he said, making a disgusted gesture with his hand.

I left once more customers came in, my spirits again buoyed by someone else's enthusiasm for this trip. I pedaled on with two full liters of ice cold water.

I'd only gone about 20 km when I came across a sign that said "All you can eat barbecue buffet, $9.99." Now that was worth stopping for! The buffet was inside an RV park, and I went inside to check it out. It was as advertised: one generously sized pork steak, plus all the beans, cole slaw, rice and potatoes you could eat. The atmosphere was perfect, too: seating was all outside but covered and in the shade,  music was playing, and the cook/owner used his position of power to make fun of his customers: "What do you recommend?" one patron asked. "The restaurant across the street!" he replied, "What da ya mean? What do I recommend, it's all good!" He seemed to live by the sign hanging over his barbecue: "This is not Burger King. You don't get it your way. You get it my way or you leave." I loved it.

"Where are you camping tonight?" he asked, as I worked through my second plate of food.

"Edge Hills Provincial Park."

"Never heard of it," he retorted.

Yeah, well, it's there, I thought. It's amazing what locals don't know. I realize that every time tourists ask me questions in Haines!

"I was planning on camping at Downey, but I heard it's closed."

"That's right, it's been flooded for weeks. I just saw the sign today, it's still closed."

He walked away...it reminded me of The King and I, when everybody goes through a big effort to convince the King to do something by making him think it's his own idea. It also reminded me of when I was talked out of sailing to Glacier Bay: somebody with more experience laid out his opinion then let me think about it. Well, I didn't really feel like pedaling anymore that night anyway...maybe if it wasn't too expensive to pitch a tent at this RV park...

While I'm working on my fourth plate of food, the guy cake back and asked about my route. I mentioned some back roads on my map that cut a corner in the highway system and reduce the associated distance from 90 km to 40 km. 10 of those 40 km are gravel but I was leaning toward taking my road bike over it anyway...at home, I ride it up and down my gravel driveway all the time anyway.

"Oh no, you don't want to do that," he stated. "You can't ride a bike back there. It's gravel. It's 18 degrees up hill. And you'll kill yourself on the backside."

Sigh. People often mistakenly think things are impossible...that makes it hard to talk about them before hand. On the other hand, he could be right, and I'll have to bicycle 30 km out of my way to find out. A second opinion sure would be helpful, especially since this guy is trying to sell a campsite, (and the provincial park I mentioned is halfway through the shortcut). But that could be hard to come by tonight...

"I can pedal through some gravel..." I said tentatively.

"Not this gravel," he declared assertively, "it's deep. You need a four wheel drive vehicle to get up there."

Well, we're at an impasse. His word against my best guess. Eventually he left, I finish off my fourth and final plate of food, and decided to stay the night.

Outside, I felt the wait of the enormous meal I just ate and the distance I'd been riding. I must have looked pretty exhausted, because a woman came over to see if I was OK. We struck up a conversation: she maintained the gardens in the campground in exchange for a place to stay. I told her I was bicycling to grad school to study energy resource engineering, and she actually hugged me! She'd been traveling around the world for years, and was an active environmentalist...she recently attended a demonstration against the Keystone XL pipeline in DC for instance: "There were 40,000 people there," she said, "but there could have been more."

Eventually, I got my tent set up and went to bed. In one day, I met three people wildly supportive of this trip. What a good feeling!


An afterthought:

The Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour is a collection of outdoor films that is shown in venues around the world every year. I make an effort to see it; I find it fun and inspirational. One amazing Alaskan asked me what film I would make to submit to the festival. "It would be about the people in Haines who live there and hike there just because they love to. They explore the Takshanuks quietly, modestly. They don't care what anyone thinks about their efforts, or how they compare to anyone else. They just hike." 

And then: "But I couldn't really make that film...because they don't live their lives for anybody to watch them."

Is blogging superficial?