Day 99 – Lake Louise, AB, to Golden, BC

Today started out very cold, minus 5 was the low overnight. There was ice on the bike covers when we woke up. We quickly packed up and made our way to the cooking shelter to make breakfast. We got a fire going for some heat and warmed up a bit. We also said good bye to the Slovenian cyclist who were staying for the day to do some hiking in Lake Louise.

On the way out of town, we made a quick stop at the visitor’s centre to check the weather forecast and left in a very cold and cloudy atmosphere. As we climbed the gentle slope over Kicking Horse Pass, the clouds cleared and we entered BC! Unfortunately, the BC welcome sign had graffiti on it so it wasn’t a very nice picture.

We stopped at the Spiral Tunnel Lookout and were fortunate enough to see a train entering the mountain as the end of it was exiting from another tunnel. These tunnels were a engineering marvel that finally got the train through the Rockies safely. Prior to this, the grade was twice what was allowed and they had huge problems with runaway trains and derailments. Adam was pleased as the engineers had managed to blast through the mountain from both ends and had the tunnels line up within 5cms when they met!

We descended into Field down a spectacular long grade. However, it was mostly shaded and very, very cold! In Field, we stopped at the Visitor’s Centre and got directions to the grocery store, which turned out to be mostly a cafe with a few items but we managed to put something together. We headed back to the visitor’s centre and ate our lunch on their leather couches beside the wood stove that had a roaring fire going. It was a lunch stop to warm a touring cyclist’s heart!

After Field, we headed towards Golden. It was gorgeous with scenic views and a large shoulder until with got to the last 10kms into Golden. Here the shoulder got very narrow and there was a steep rock face on our side of the road with rocks at the base that had fallen off. Fortunately, the road was windy and the speed limit around 50 km/hr. We made it into Golden and missed the BC visitor centre by 20 minutes. We hit up Sobey’s for some food and headed to the municipal campground for the night, where I repeated a variation of my amazing soup from two nights ago.

Click here for today’s photos

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