Evil

Short Version:
Carcasses, Satan's eyeslits, Dobermann. Mildly lost on a nice ride up a hill and back down again. More lost on a nicer ride up a bigger hill and down the other side. Ghostrider.

Long Version:
Carcasses appeared in neighboring campsites with startling regularity the whole time we were at the Kikomun Creek campground*. They were hung, skinned, and dressed with impressive skill and efficiency, and we decided that guns and/or bows and a big chest freezer are on our shopping list for when we finally settle somewhere. Not so keen if the prey critters really have eyes like those of the goats on the Wildlife Alert! roadsigns though: bad enough that the crazy beasts eat gravel and run around on vertical cliff-faces without having scary satanic eyeslits which promise that some seriously evil deeds are imminent.

Luckily, we saw no goats on the Suzie road, nor on the highways that took us to Fernie. In fact, we were feeling totally unmenaced right up until we ran into the enormous Dobermann at the Fairy Creek trailhead. My first reaction was abject terror, my second was mild amusement - the result of having viewed The Omen** and Up, respectively. We pretty quickly got sick of the barking while we tried to talk to its owner, and we headed on up the hill to the Mad Cow and Swine Flu trails, as recommended by the bloke in the Guide's Hut, where we'd stopped to seek stove-repair capability the other day.

Someone had been up there making trails that weren't marked on our map, and we managed to miss the top section, but we had a lot of fun on the stuff we did ride, to the point where we rode the whole loop twice. We found some derelict log cabins overlooking a valley containing a facility I decided to believe was a secret military base, and rode some swooping downhill on hard-packed dirt with a layer of slippery fallen leaves on top. Not the best thing for traction at high speed, but a heck of a lot of fun, and neither of us came a cropper at any point during the ninety minutes we were out there... except, of course, on the very last, not very large hill, which saw each of us off our bike and on the ground to some extent***.

Ninety minutes had left us feeling underdone, so after a quick stop at the local Happy Meat store we hauled ourselves out to the other side of town and prepared to ride up the most famous of the local trail networks: the Root System. The Dobermann and its keepers appeared just as we watched a grader driver parking his machine before we headed off up the hill, and it wasn't long before we were glad they were there, as the tourist info map we were using to navigate proved hopelessly mislabelled. The bloke was a Kiwi who'd lived a spell in Fernie during his decade in Canada, so we put our trust in his local knowledge and followed them off the dirt road and down a trail, using the barking of the massive beast as our directional indicator at intersections. Turns out seven-year-old local knowledge is good for finding the trail but not so flash at riding the right way once you're on it, and we ended up at the lower trailhead we were supposed to have started at. No worries: we ride back up.

Steep, tricky sections showed us how the trail came to be called Roots, and I managed to break another spoke, this time riding uphill. In granny gear. If I'd needed some indication that there was an issue with the wheel above and beyond me being a fat bastard riding over rocks too fast, that would have been perfect. As it was, we clicked swiftly into a now-familiar sequence: tape the broken spoke to the one alongside and keep riding. The timing was pretty good, in a way: we turned soon after onto the trail called Hyperventilation, and the ire inspired by the spoke break was handily translated into motivation to ride up, and up, and up. Steep pokes, tight switchbacks, and eventual fantastic views out over the town and the mountains to the north and east. Always nice to reach the top of a climb like that one!

Except that we weren't at the top yet. In fact, not even close.

The views out to the south and east from the actual top were pretty awesome, with a big pile of rock called Castle Mountain dominating the vista, and then we were off, down the south-east face at a furious pace. It was steep and wet, with slippery roots and occasional puddles, and we had a blast! Flowing trails like that one are the reason we're doing this, and the combination of technical challenge (lots of near-misses!) and the speed-friendliness (lots of near-misses!) of a clean line had big grins on our faces by the time we reached the bottom. If only we had a teleportation device to get us back up to the top.

It was starting to get dark, so we drove up the road towards the trails we'd just ridden, to a spot we'd passed just before the spoke broke. Views of town and mountains by the light of the full moon, Scrabble with delicious performance-enhancing beer, and then to sleep, to dream of living in Fernie, in the suburb called Ghostrider****.







* = The free, dirtbag Forest Service one, not the ultra-flash Provincial Park one, with the flush toilets and the hot showers. Lovely Wife did ride her bike to the flash one after her run, though, to fill water bladders and have a sneaky shower.

** = Parents, no matter how good your eight-year-old is at sneaking out of bed to watch late-night television, please, for their sake, find a way to stop them watching The Omen. Having said that, it might not be such a bad thing for a small child to be at least wary of enormous, powerful, grumpy dogs.

*** = Of course, the phrase "on the ground" can mean many different things, from a foot and a knee stopping the carnage before it starts, to full-body mud coverage picked up during a five metre slide with both wheels in the air, including inadvertant negotiation of two hairpin corners and a rather large puddle. Can you guess which was whom?

**** = No idea what it's like, but how cool would it be to live in a place called Ghostrider?