126.61 km

Biking time: 6 hours 8 minutes

724.7 km total

Our longest day yet! I may be a bit delirious at this point too because apparently I’m the only one who saw the sign saying this was Donald. Then again, and probably more likely, I’m more observant. A long day, but definitely a good one! Other than the all day headwind, of course, Not long out of Revelstoke and we saw our first bear of the day. This guy didn’t care about anything. He stopped a few cars and just walked around in between them. Once, he put his paws on a pick-up truck and briefly looked in the back window. We weren’t encouraged by this bear’s comfort around people, so we waited until he was back in the woods for a few minutes and made sure we had a good head of steam going and sprinted by where we had last seen him.

Next up was the never ending climb up to Roger’s Pass (1330 metres). We had a nasty little headwind all the way up, making that monstrous climb even more daunting. We made up in reasonable time though, stopped for lunch at the summit and then had a nice 15 – 20km of downhill. It was kind of bright, maybe even a little sunny at Roger’s Pass and I figured that putting on sunglasses for the downhill made sense.

However, I didn’t take the snow sheds into account. I think we passed through 8 and the roads in them are full of gravel, cars hurtling down and trudging up, and darkness. With the addition of sunglasses, I couldn’t see a thing! That was freaky, but actually a lot of fun! What I did see, however, was a big-ass bear on the side of the road as I went past it at about 60 km/h. I was in front, so I yelled out, “Bear!” Then, behind me, I hear “Holy shit!” After that excitement had passed, we went through a few more snow sheds, up a few steep but relatively short hills and into Mountain Time, thus crossing our first time zone of the trip. So, here we are tonight, our last night in BC. Tomorrow, Lake Louise.

Rogers Pass

LOOKING BACK, 10 YEARS LATER: Those snow sheds were nearly the death of me! Sunglasses were not a good move. Lesson learned. Again, the bear doubt. To this day I’ll tell you that they were close enough to reach out and swat me, that’s what it felt like, but really, that’s not likely.