Thursday, September 28, 2017

Summer in Canada

This summer, I wound up in Canada for awhile. Probably not a surprise, seeing how I'm a Canadian and all. This trip wound up taking a little longer than I'd planned due to a constriction project, and there were some comments as to "I didn't think you were coming back" upon my return. Thankfully I had anticipated being there more than just a week or two and brought some bikes with. Un-thankfully, Lethbridge, Alberta, sucks for riding.



If you want to road ride, it's flat, and often windy. If you want to mountain bike, it's flat. If you want to ride around town, there are no shoulders or bike lanes. When asked what Lethbridge is like, I usually say "like Great Falls, but in Canada." That's not really fair to Great Falls though, which has better bike facilities, trails, and beer.

Anyway, enough home town bashing, for now. If the wind isn't blowing, you can go out and ride a long way on pretty quiet roads, with pretty polite drivers. They're just mostly flat and straight. Still, there are some parks, lakes, and reservoirs that make good out and back rides, plus some big square loops you can do.





That's the milk river ridge reservoir, just south of a town called Raymond. Growing up, we used to hunt ducks and stuff out there. I hadn't been to the area in years and the ride down was pretty nice and worked out to 85 miles. I would have liked to do a loop around the lake and possibly come back another way, but all those roads are gravel. Usually not a big deal, but this had happened a few weeks earlier:




Literally just riding along, on my birthday no less. Took a few pedal strokes crossing a road, and pop went a spoke. Tire was rubbing so I had to call my sister for a ride. A local bike shop got it fairly true after 3 tries, but it was still lumpy. I rode it about 3 times and then it got worse, so I parked it until I could have MBW look at it. They didn't really think it was going to true up very well, and Shimano didn't want to send me a new one, so I guess it's garbage now. And I'm on another damn Mavic rear wheel (although those have proven themselves pretty durable). A replacement wasn't going to be too much money, but I wanted to fix up my CX bike for race season, so no new rear wheel for now. Plus this thing broke after like a dozen rides so why would I want another one anyway? And e-tap should would look cleaner and be less complicated than di2... anyone want to trade?

So yeah, didn't get to road ride as much as I would have liked while up there, but at least I brought a mountain bike too. And thankfully, Lethbridge is not completely flat. The river is in a big valley 300 vertical feet below town. So that's what you get. A 200-300 foot descent and then you climb back up. There are quite a few trails going down into the river bottom, but they could definitely use some improvement. I think most are game trails that became hiking trails that people started riding. It's only one little network of trails near the college that were built with riding in mind, and when I was there a section was washed out by a creek and nearly impassable. No one seemed interested in fixing it, as it was that way the entire month and a half I was there.



One thing I did notice, however, was a bit of new trail construction out in that area. There is definitely a challenge to building trails in the river valley, and that is erosion. Much of the land is in a constant state of downward motion, so it seems that investing a lot of effort into a trail might not be worth it if it's going to slide down the hillside within a few years. But at least a few people are trying. I probably could have asked around to see who is working on that stuff and offered to help.


I think more trail, and more trails that are beginner friendly would go a long way to getting more people on bikes in that town and probably help out the shops. As it is, its seems most people just drive out to the Crowsnest Pass or BC or maybe Montana to go riding.

I could write a whole other post about the bike facilities, or lack thereof in Lethbridge, and I suppose I should do that, some other time. In the meantime here are a few pictures I took up there, and the bbq I built for the grandparents.













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