High country

This is a place that I love.

It's the corner of the Continental Divide, where Atlantic meets Pacific meets Arctic. "The apex," one might say, the center; the place where life can flow in any direction - a single drop of water, a fractal flake of snow, a moment in time. It's near here, on the Columbia Icefield, in the Canadian Rockies.

Look East. Look West. Look North. That's opportunity. But to start at the beginning, we look up.

This is a place where few venture; a world of rock and ice and little more. Water flows down; we climb. Trees give way to a sterile moonscape of pure beauty.

This is a place where I put on my sleeping-bag coat; turn to face the frigid wind and blasts of cold. I'm a biosphere of warmth, as long as I'm moving. I huddle in my sleeping-bag coat and march strong.

This is a place where I wander; both over the snow and inside my mind. I think about the far-away places the flakes atop these pinnacles may someday reach; the Mackenzie River, the Columbia River, and Hudson Bay.

It reminds me that nothing is permanent and nothing stays the same. It helps me feel more secure with uncertainty; more comfortable. I bundle up my sleeping-bag coat and start down.

This is a place; just a place. The Triple Divide is just an idea, someone's theory, somewhere else. We're just a couple of hikers out for a stroll - somewhere high, somewhere quiet, flowing home.

Today I rode a really nice bike in the snow

Keith and I are registered as partners in this year's Trans Rockies, a mountain bike stage race that takes place in British Columbia and Alberta in August. Keith is a rep for Rocky Mountain bicycles, which means I found a way to become a sponsored racer without actually being a real athlete. Hooray! One of the perks of our team sponsorship is use of a sweet, high-end mountain bike. Today I had the opportunity to try this bike out.

These are our team bikes - Rocky Mountain Element 90s. I'm not nearly enough of a gear geek to rattle off the different parts, but they're full-suspension, 26" aluminum bikes, weigh in at about 25 pounds, and have super bomber wheels, drivetrain, shocks, blah, blah, blah. The bike is worth nearly as much as what I paid for the car I've driven for the past decade (and for what my car is worth today, I'd have to sell 10 of them to buy myself this bicycle.) Needless to say, I was itching to take it out for a ride.

Drivetrain shot! Check out those sweet platform pedals. :-)

We took them on singletrack just outside Banff. Trail conditions were ideal for a ride on a lightweight, full-suspension bike: about 2-3 inches of fluff on top of frozen dirt, with just enough crust and narrow tracks to really make things interesting. We cut through the snow and floated over hidden rocks and roots. We hammered through wind-drifts and powered up steep hills like they weren't even there. This bike is significantly lighter than both my hardtail 29" Karate Monkey and Pugsley, which unloaded weigh in at about 30 and 36 pounds, respectively. Amazing how much a difference those 10 pounds can make. You don't even miss the big wheels because you are hovering above the ground.

Not to mention shifting and braking more smoothly than you ever thought possible because you have spent so much time riding lackadaisically maintained bicycles that have lived in soggy, icy Juneau for far too long.

Of course, snow is snow, and eventually powder will steal little wheels' traction. We did get spun out on a few hills, but for the most part our ride was best of both worlds - all of the fun of singletrack riding in the summer with all of the serenity and scenery of the mountains in winter.

After our singletrack ride, we headed out to Lake Minnewanka for "resistance training." I highly recommend this workout for other "sponsored" athletes like myself. Just put three inches of wind-crusted fluff on top of glare ice and be amazed at how hard you have to work for slow progress on a flat surface.

Keith isn't usually an outdoor cyclist during the winter. It's always fun to introduce snow-biking newbies to the initial shock of how much more difficult and challenging cycling really is during the winter. And it's not the cold factor (although I have to admit conditions for us today were downright tropical - just below freezing with intermittent sun and clouds.) But, no, the biggest challenge is the stuff on the ground: snow and ice and slush. The surface is ever-changing, but the one constant of winter cycling is that there's always something waiting to trip you up. And powering over, through and around these frozen water obstacles is, in my opinion, every bit as fun as rocks, roots and sand. Seriously. Did the groundhog see his shadow today? I hope so, because I'm not nearly ready for winter ... or my vacation ... to end.

Skoki!

On Saturday, Keith and Leslie surprised me with overnight reservations at the Skoki Lodge. Skoki is a National Park backcountry lodge with no running water and no electricity that can only be accessed by skiers and snowshoers. The trail starts at Lake Louise, heads up a canyon, crosses two passes and drops into a narrow valley surrounded by hanging glaciers and spectacular peaks. The lodge itself is a historic building built in the 1930s by the Banff ski club.

Five of us skied in for the night - Stuart and Anna - a couple of Brits now living in Banff - my friends Leslie and Keith, and me. I was nervous about going there as a "second-day skier," but my friends assured me that some guests went in on cross-country skis (crazy people, I tell you) so it was probably doable by me on heavy powder gear. The trail turned out to be a nicely packed, gently inclining snowmobile trail that would have been perfect for Pugsley. Thanks to its national park status, Pugsley wouldn't be allowed on that trail; still, I couldn't help but daydream about all the great "pedal turns" I could be making. But I was stuck on skis, so I made the best of it. :-)

Climbing up Deception Pass. The weather was gray with occasional snow flurries, but it wasn't socked in enough to destroy the view.

The trip into Skoki only involved one downhill run long enough to take off the skins, which I was grateful for. Despite my perception that I'm in decent shape, I was feeling exceptionally tired from the day before. I tried to explain to my friends that skiing downhill was a lot more work for me than skinning uphill, even up steep hills, because once that terrain sloped downward, I had to use so much more muscle power to fight gravity. Stuart said, "You know skis are easier if you use them instead of fighting with them." This is probably true, but when a person has two strips of fiberglass, which they can barely control anyway, that are threatening to carry them off the edge of a cornice into icy oblivion, I don't think the person can be blamed for fighting them with every ounce of energy they have. Pugsley may be a beast to push uphill, but at least he has brakes.

Look at that wedge! That's pure technique right there. But I have to admit, once I got going and no longer had time to mull over my certain doom, I actually had a lot of fun.

First tracks! Awkwardly executed. But, hey, you can't beat the scenery.

In the early afternoon we arrived at the lodge, complete with a roaring wood fire and a large spread of snacks. Even though I had already sustained some fairly mean blisters after two days in the hard boots, I also seem to suffer from something my friends call FOMO disease, which is short for "Fear Of Missing Out." So I went out for an afternoon tour. Leslie and I looked for a route to an alpine lake up a side canyon. We stopped at this lightly dusted, boulder-strewn slope for several minutes, considering the dire consequences of my trying to ski down it. We decided to turn around. Now, if I had my snowshoes, I might just have beautiful pictures of a hanging glacier over a frozen alpine lake. Yes, I know skis are more efficient. But not if your trapped in noviceland. Then you can't go anywhere fun.


Well, I guess you can go to Skoki Lodge, which is a fantastically fun place. It's a bit like a classic 1930s Euro ski experience with a bit of Bush Alaska hunting lodge thrown in. Highly recommended by this Banff tourist.