Day 3: Hope BC to Manning Park Lodge, 70km

TODAY. WAS. HARD. We fought for every metre of road today and Allison Pass didn't give it up easily. We knew that the climb today was supposed to be the worst of the trip, and WOW. Do we ever hope that's true!

We hit the road by 8am but meandered around Hope for half an hour, delaying the inevitable. The 18km climb out of Hope is steep and brutal, at many points we found ourselves travelling at a whooping 6km an hour! It didn't help that we were carrying what we thought would be an extra three days worth of food, although it turned out to be food for just this one!

Just when we were about ready to throw our bikes off the mountain and walk up, the road levelled out around the Hope Slides and we enjoyed a short reprieve from intense ascending. This allowed us to recover some kilometres but more than anything we think that without this 'break' we wouldn't have mustered the fortitude to keep going.

We started climbing slowly and steeply again around 32km and the rising altitude brought us the characteristically chaotic weather of the mountains with rain on and off, in between sunshine and hail. When slogging through a grueling climb it is very demoralizing to look down at your odometre and see you 'only have 25km left to go' but realize it could take you four hours --and it did.

There are also some other things you don't want to see on such climbs, and that would be bears. At one point a driver coming from the opposing direction stopped to alert us that there were five(!) bears around the road up ahead. We sat and contemplated for a few moments before riding to peek around the bend to gauge the risk level, and there was one right on our side of the road. We had to flag down a car to ride beside us, serving as a shield between us and an enormous bear. By then it had made its way about twenty feet away from the road but was still far too close for comfort. It stared right at us and followed with its gaze as we rode by --we swear we saw it contemplate charging us if not for our amazing escorts who may have saved our lives. Needless to say we did not stop for a photo. Later in the climb we actually saw another bear, this time a grizzly! This one was up on a ledge but still very close to the road so we weren't taking any chances, or pictures!

The middle section of the Allison Pass climb was a marginally milder grade and we began to think it wasn't that bad but by about the 50km mark it veered up relentlessly. Knowing that the summit would be at the 59km point of the ride didn't help much when we had no idea what the road would throw at us next. Aside from the extreme elevation we also met heavy winds, sharp turns, and single narrow lanes with no shoulder next to precarious cliff drops, all while heavy trucks were zooming by threatening to blow us off the road. In that last stretch before the summit we were seriously questioning our ability to reach it despite the 'short' distance. We ended up walking for about three kilometres because my knees were shot and Alex was depleted. I cannot describe how elated we were to see that summit sign, 'Allison Pass 1342 metres', which marked the end of our misery.

We're now comfortably housed at the Manning Park Lodge, which is a few quick kilometres down from the summit. (The campgrounds in the park are closed until June because it is still covered in snow up here.) We had already anticipated we would take one of our extra rest days here so we are staying for two nights to recover and repair our relationship with the bikes ;-).

What a day! Aside from the tortuous ride the route is spectacularly beautiful. We took a lot of pictures due to frequent short breaks on the rough stuff. With the iphone we can only post photos taken on the phone, of which we only do a couple for the blog. We're out of range for the iphone here so we can't post any photos tonight but tomorrow we'll see if we can use the lodge computer to upload photos from the camera.

For now, it is time to start the resting phase. Goodnight!

ps- The blog is still on eastern standard time just because it would be too onerous to change it for every time zone. So while it looks like this was posted on June 1st, in BC it is still May 31st with the three hour time difference.