Accidental Afro

Short Version:
Bull onions, mining with water, a wrong turn up a long hill, then another down a sweet trail. We set up an ominous early morning meeting.

Long Version:
We stopped at the "World Famous! Bullion Pit!" just outside Likely. Lovely Wife asked for clarification of "bullion" and received a family history lesson instead - my mother's mother's maiden name was Bullions*. The Bullion Pit is a bloody big hole in the ground, dug using water cannons, which were enormous. The engineering involved in getting the requisite quantities of water to the site was pretty extreme, and after an initial burst of productivity the mine failed to come through with enough of the shiny stuff to warrant further capital outlay. The mine fell into disuse, its equipment was sold off by enterprising staff, and little remains today of what was a significant mining exercise except for the bloody big hole in the ground. Which, as we discovered, you can't even see from the signposted touristy site; the bloody big hole in the ground you CAN see is the Bullion Pit's little brother, the Drop Pit, which is less than a quarter of the size of its neighbour and has a far less illustrious history. The modern-day success story from the Bullion Pit is the removal to Likely and subsequent restoration - for use as Town Hall - of the mine's Mess Hall and Kitchen building**.

Just after we left the Bullion Pit non-viewing area we saw a bloody big, bloody shiny-coated black bear charge out of the bushes on the side of the road and run bloody quickly to the other side, where he disappeared into the trees. Soon afterwards we saw an eagle, cruising the thermal currents of the cliffs to the south of Williams Lake.

All of which made us feel very much like it was time we got on our bikes, and ride up a hill.

For longer than we were supposed to.

Turns out that the bloke who said: "At the top of the Fox Climb, head across the road, and ride up the gravel gas pipeline access road until you hit the Hillbilly Deluxe trail," actually meant: "At the top of the Fox Climb, head across the road, and ride up the gas pipeline access road until you reach a sealed road. Turn left onto this road. At the second intersection, turn right. Turn left at the first road and ride to the end of the road, where you will find a map, and the trailhead for the Hillbilly Deluxe and Shuttlebunny trails." We rode a LONG way up the gravel gas pipeline access road, and explored several side trails, before giving up and riding back down to where we'd left the inner Fox Mountain trail network, and back onto the well-signposted Fox loop.

We followed our noses for a while, and then someone decided to take a random side-trail, which brought us - eventually - to the start of the Afro trail. Turned out to have been an inspired choice, because once we got past being slightly worried about how tough going a black/advanced-rated trail was going to be in this place, we found ourselves bombing down an absolutely wonderful trail, with some of the best flowing lines, fun obstacles, and sweet carving cornering that we've struck so far, and if it weren't for yet another broken spoke on my rear wheel, we'd probably have gone back up for another crack at it.

As it was, though, we needed a repair, and the bike shop we'd been frequenting is closed Mondays. Luckily, there's another bike shop in town, so we toddled on in to Barking Spider Mountain Biking, and found a mighty friendly chap who fixed my spoke, and drew us a map of the Westside trail network. And then offered to play ride guide for us, which was an offer we certainly weren't about to turn down.

It wasn't until we were halfway to our chosen camping spot for the night, at Dugan Lake, that we realised that we'd just arranged to meet a bloke whose name we didn't know, really early in the morning, at a graveyard.







* = Apparently other kids called them Bullonions in an attempt to provoke them. Given how many of them were redheads, I suspect they probably got their response, and then some.

** = I reckon this is where the townsfolk will gather for a crisis meeting during the lottery win civil disturbance