New Favorite Critter

Short Version:
The road to the sky ends in a mud puddle, we ride to the rescue, then ride some more.

Long Version:
We were in two minds about the Keystone/Standard Basin ride: high sub-alpine back-country expedition rides are great, but the weather in Rossland was pretty grim. We decided to believe that the sun we'd had at Frog Falls meant the Revelstoke cloud was localised and/or low-lying, and that either way the Keystone ride would be in the sun. And we were right.

We drove past the Mica Dam, which is big and looks cool, and then up the eastern side of Kinbasket Lake to the Keystone Forest Service Road. We'd been warned by the Kiwi in the Revelstoke bike shop that the road was impassable from about the 11km mark, but still managed to get the Reaper near-stuck in the big mud-wallow: we got a hundred or so metres into the wet stuff before we started to lose traction, but once we did we thought we were going to be stuck in place for the rest of the weekend. In the end we backed out without too many issues, parked at the roadside and set off on the bikes.

The road was a muddy mess for about 400m. It was sticky, tyre-hugging stuff, and it took far longer to negotiate that section than we'd expected. Once we did, though, it was a quick and breezy 5km haul up the dirt road to the trailhead parking area...
...where we found a bunch of vehicles, only one of which was a high-clearance 4WD. In fact, there was a tiny red VW Golf up there, which made us feel like maybe we should have tried harder to get the Reaper through the bog. Still, no sense investing valuable energies into regretting, so we paused briefly to sign the Forest Service register and avail ourselves of the facilities before heading on up the trail.

The facilities at the trailhead were fairly new-looking, but Lovely Wife was in the outhouse for not-very-long before she hustled out of there, saying: "There's something in there. It's the size of a small cat." I would have been freaking out a bit about that, had I been the one to make that discovery, but by the time I'd registered what she'd said she'd grabbed the high-powered night-ride light and was back inside, directing the super-bright beam down into the vault to see what she could see. I joined her in there and peered down into the hole. I was expecting something truly horrific; most likely a combination of an enormous mound of rotting waste matter and rats as big as terriers. What we saw, though, was vastly different: a near-empty vault containing a really cute and very much bedraggled and worse-for-wear critter, wandering forlornly in circles and scrabbling at the unyielding and unclimbable sides of the cavernous collection chamber. Further study led us to identify the wee beastie as a pine marten, which meant that if we were in NZ we'd have had quite the dilemma: Can we, in good conscience, leave this (very cute!) critter to starve to death in a toilet, despite the fact that rescuing it means native birds and their eggs get chomped by the introduced predator?

Lucky, then, that we're here in western Canada, where the marten is indigenous. It's both predator and prey, and it's a natural and necessary part of the ecosystem. And it's very cute. So we found a long branch and stuck it down into the toilet, allowing the marten to climb out of the vault and make its way, weary and bedraggled, into the woods. It stopped and looked back over its shoulder at us several times, as if trying to figure out why we'd freed it or whether we were either a threat or edible, then it disappeared into what we figure was its den, in a hollow tree-stump. We had a warm glow on, despite the chill wind, and when the critter popped its head out and stared at us for a while before popping back into its hidey-hole we felt pretty good about our wildlife rescue activity. He was certainly not in tip-top health - who knows how long he'd been in there for - but being free to pursue birds and small beasts in the woods has to be better than being incarcerated in a toilet vault, no matter how recently-dug and devoid of solid waste.

Our warm glow was in danger of being eroded by lengthy exposure to chill wind, so we got back on the bikes and started off uphill, along what we'd been warned was a very tough, very steep and technical first 2.5km of trail. It wasn't as bad as we'd expected, which was kind of nice, but it also didn't get any easier after the first section; I found it hard slog the entire 11.3km to the cabin at the end. Nene not so much. In fact, she was loving it. It wasn't that we were climbing the whole way, after all. The downhill sections were there, but they were the kind of downhill that makes you work: nothing flowed; nothing was easy; there was no opportunity to relax while riding. Trying to take in the spectacular views whilst in motion almost proved disastrous for each of us at various points, so we learned not to look until we were stopped at one of the many vantage points along the way. In the end, the views, of snowy mountains, alpine meadows, and high-country lakes were what it was all about - that and the silence. It was incredibly quiet up on the tops, which gave the place a splendid feeling of isolation and of being far from civilization.

All the downhill bits on the way out to the cabin at the end of the trail were uphills on the way back, which kind of sucked. None of the rock garden crossings were any easier when ridden (or walked!) back the other way, and it wasn't until we arrived back at the trailhead, failed to find our marten, and set off down the dirt road at incredible speeds that we got any easy riding. Even then the speeds we were doing made it kind of scary - it took us less than ten minutes to ride down the road that it took forty-five minutes to climb. The mud pit was still a tough slog, even with the gradient on our side, and we were pretty tired by the time we made it back to the van, almost five hours after we set off.

Only ten or so minutes of those hours were spent on the rescue operation, but it loomed largest by far in our dinner-time recap of the highlights of the day. New favorite critter, although for cuddling purposes maybe one with less wees on it might be a good idea.