Copyright © 2020 by Ryan Correy
First Edition
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Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 9781771602372 (softcover)
ISBN 9781771602389 (electronic)
Interior design by Colin Parks
Cover photo by Jeff Bartlett, taken along the High Rockies route
We would like to also take this opportunity to acknowledge the traditional territories upon which we live and work. In Calgary, Alberta, we acknowledge the Niitsítapi (Blackfoot) and the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, which includes the Siksika, the Piikuni, the Kainai, the Tsuut’ina and the Stoney Nakoda First Nations, including Chiniki, Bearpaw, and Wesley First Nations. The City of Calgary is also home to Métis Nation of Alberta, Region III. In Victoria, British Columbia, we acknowledge the traditional territories of the Lkwungen (Esquimalt, and Songhees), Malahat, Pacheedaht, Scia’new, T’Sou-ke and WSÁNEĆ (Pauquachin, Tsartlip, Tsawout, Tseycum) peoples.
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We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and of the province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Disclaimer
The actions described in this book may be considered inherently dangerous activities. Individuals undertake these activities at their own risk. The information put forth in this guide has been collected from a variety of sources and is not guaranteed to be completely accurate or reliable. Many conditions and some information may change owing to weather and numerous other factors beyond the control of the authors and publishers. Individuals or groups must determine the risks, use their own judgment, and take full responsibility for their actions. Do not depend on any information found in this book for your own personal safety. Your safety depends on your own good judgment based on your skills, education, and experience.
It is up to the users of this guidebook to acquire the necessary skills for safe experiences and to exercise caution in potentially hazardous areas. The authors and publishers of this guide accept no responsibility for your actions or the results that occur from another’s actions, choices, or judgments. If you have any doubt as to your safety or your ability to attempt anything described in this guidebook, do not attempt it.
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Bikepacking 101
I. INTERMEDIATE ROUTES
1. Front Range
2. High Rockies
3. Beaverfoot
II. ADVANCED ROUTES
4. Devil’s Gap
5. Highwood
6. Castle
7. Top of the World
III. EXPERT ROUTES
8. Flathead Valley
9. Three Point
10. Icefields Parkway in Winter
Appendices
Acknowledgements
FOREWORD
The Emergence of Bikepacking
When I met Ryan Correy at the Alberta Bikes Conference at the Canmore Nordic Centre in September 2016, I immediately knew I had found a kindred spirit — even if he did grow up playing hockey, while baseball was the game of my youth. Ryan and I were same-day presenters at the conference, which centred on bicycle tourism. The title of my morning presentation was “Map It and They Will Come: The Genesis of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route.” Later in the day, Ryan spoke on “The Emergence of Bikepacking in Canada.” Early in his talk, the aspiring guidebook writer held up a copy of my own guidebook — Cycling the Great Divide — and asked me, sitting in the audience, if I would sign it for him.
“Sure will,” I said.
We share a similar passionate mission, Ryan and I: Get people, young and old, out on bicycles and into the backcountry. Camp out, inhale the fresh air, encounter wild animals. Or, as John Muir wrote in Our National Parks, “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.”
A few months later, in February 2017, Ryan interviewed me over the phone for his podcast at bikepack.ca. I was flattered when he wrapped up the session by saying he considers me a mentor.
True, I did research and map the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route back in the mid-1990s. However, I must admit that I am surprised, perhaps more than anyone, at the profound impact the trail has had on the bicycling/outdoor universe.
The road to creating the route was hilly and circuitous, but the theory behind it was simple: let’s pour bicycle touring and mountain biking into an empty blender, turn it on, and see what we come up with. Following is how we arrived at the empty blender point.
The Great Divide was and is a project of the Missoula, Montana–based Adventure Cycling Association. Adventure Cycling began life in 1974 as Bikecentennial, forming when a group of visionary young bicycle tourists decided to throw a two-wheeled, 200th-birthday bash for the American Bicentennial, and invite the world to bicycle across the United States.
My future wife, Nancy, and I, having caught the bicycle-touring bug and ridden from Seattle to northeast Wisconsin the summer of 1974, became involved in the Bikecentennial project, working the western half of the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail during the summer of 1976. During that summer, nearly 5,000 individuals from throughout the U.S. and far beyond pedalled all or portions of the Oregon-to-Virginia TransAm Trail.
The founders had envisioned Bikecentennial simply as a one-time event. However, North America’s growing legion of bicycle enthusiasts wouldn’t let the idea go away. Hundreds more, inspired by articles in the press and tales brought home by those who rode in ’76, wanted their own shot at pedalling across America.
So, Bikecentennial carried on, but after the big summer was over, Nancy and I went on to other things. When she landed her first teaching job in Troy, Montana, in the early ’80s (we were married by this time), I went to work seasonally for the Yaak Ranger District of the Kootenai National Forest. Among my varied duties over those two summers was to survey, via Honda 90 motorcycle, the district’s decommissioned roads — that is, roads closed either by gates or “Kelly humps” — to find and document erosional/watershed problems. For me it was an eye-opener. If this one national forest district had so many hundreds of miles of unused gravel roads, other districts must have them too.
In the spring of 1982 I went back to work for Bikecentennial as the assistant tours coordinator. The timing coincided with the exploding popularity of a new style of bicycle, the mountain bike. Nancy and I took right to the fat-tired bikes, riding not only the trails outside Missoula but also on the dirt and gravel roads in the surrounding Lolo National Forest, which were so like the ones I’d discovered in the Kootenai. It didn’t take long before I was thinking, “Why not pack up and do some multi-day rides on the mountain bikes? Get off the busy highways and into the backcountry.”
One early bikepacking trip — although we weren’t yet calling it that — was a five-dayer from the Tri-Basin Divide in southwest Wyoming to Jackson Hole, by way of the Greys River, Salt River, Wind River and Gros Ventre mountain ranges. The trip was fun, hard, a grand adventure, and another real eye-opener.
Although Bikecentennial was best known for the TransAm Trail and other routes following paved roads, we soon started thinking outside the cement-and-asphalt box. A crystallizing moment happened in 1990, when then-executive-director Gary MacFadden and I were having lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Missoula. Brainstorming for new ideas, one of us said to the other something like, “Let’s map a mountain-bike route along the Continental Divide from Canada to Mexico.”
What a concept! But as intriguing as it sounded, the idea was shelved as the Bikecentennial staff worked on other, more pressing matters. Then, early in 1994, Gary and I were having lunch again, same place. “Mac?” he asked. “Do you remember that long-distance mountain-bike route we discussed a few years back?”
I did, and we agreed the time was right to do it. Why? For one thing, we had just finished adding a decade-long wish list of road routes to the National Bicycle Routes Network. Plus, the concept fit snugly with our new (at the time) name: Adventure Cycling Association.
In the July 1994 Adventure Cyclist magazine, we ran a two-page story, written by me, under the bold headline “Ready for the Longest Mountain Bike Trail in the World?” The piece began: “Imagine mountain biking from Canada to Mexico, through some of the most stunning landscapes on earth, along dirt roads and two-tracks reserved for the occasional fisherman’s rig, Forest Service pickup truck…and Adventure Cycling mountain biker.”
In the story, I explained the origin of our dream of an off-pavement route paralleling the Continental Divide, and why we wanted to make it happen: “Historically, cycling enthusiasts have done one or the other — either loaded up with panniers and camping gear and lit out on the open road or headed into the hills on a mountain bike for a day’s ride on dirt. Very few have toured off-pavement carrying a full complement of gear. We want to change that.”
The Adventure Cycling staff immediately became excited by the possibilities of this cycling route paralleling the Continental Divide. We pictured riding it as a merging of three activities: bicycle touring, mountain biking and backpacking. This time we did call it “bikepacking.” We chose to name the project the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, in part to distinguish it from the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail, a hiking route composed largely of rugged single-track trails. In planning our strategy, we agreed we would try to avoid tough single tracks, knowing that riding most mountain trails while carrying or pulling a heavy load is prohibitively difficult.
The task of researching the Great Divide fell to me in late 1994. “It’s a tough duty, but somebody’s gotta do it” became my mantra for the next four years. Still, it was anything but a one-man show. The project quickly captured the imagination of hundreds; consequently, things jelled and got done fast. Dozens of agency personnel and local cycling enthusiasts jumped in to offer help with field reconnaissance. We received great support, monetary and otherwise, from the likes of Travel Montana, REI, Flanagan Motors in Missoula and the Adventure Cycling membership.
So, I spent the snowless months of the next three years — 1995, 1996 and 1997 — plotting the route, via mountain bike and Jeep Cherokee. (The original route was border-to-border in the U.S.; we added the leg from the international border north to Banff in the early 2000s.) And I had plenty of adventures along the way.
Like the time I learned that Jeeps can’t swim, by swamping the Cherokee in rain-swollen Rock Creek outside Kremmling, Colorado. I mean stuck, dead in the middle of the waist-deep creek. Getting to “shore” was a challenge, and so was getting the Jeep out of the creek.
And like the day in New Mexico, basically in the middle of nowhere, when I drove through an open roadblock gate sporting an unlatched padlock hanging from the locking mechanism. Fifteen miles later I ran into another gate, this one shut and locked. Returning to gate number one, I now found it closed and the padlock clicked shut. I was locked in. I had no cell phone in those days. After about an hour of scratching my head, the solution arrived, strangely, in the form of a very large enforcer-type guy possessing the padlock key. He wore a suit (not often seen in backcountry New Mexico), had a Rocky Balboa build and revealed a bulge in his sport jacket that I figured was a handgun. I know he did not believe I had found the gate unlocked, because it was not supposed to be unlocked. Someone had tampered with it, and he assumed it was me. Unsmilingly, he finally unlocked the gate and set me free. (To this day, I believe I was on public lands. But maybe I misread the map. It’s been known to happen.)
During the two decades since mapping the Great Divide, I’ve been gratified to witness the gradual growth, and finally the boom, in bikepacking. The race following the route, the Tour Divide, has captured a lot of press and attention, drawing a lot of folks into the sport. (Yet, it should be noted that far more people tour the Great Divide than race it.) The emergence of “gravel grinders” — which I prefer to call “gravel fondos” — is another indirect, or maybe even direct, spinoff of the route. Great to see.
By using the Great Divide as a backbone or jumping-off point for new routes in the Canadian Rockies, Ryan is helping to fulfill one of our early hopes: that the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route would become the starting point, literally and figuratively, for new rides, routes and events devised by others.
Good work, man! Thanks for picking up the ball. I look forward to test-riding some of your routes.
— MICHAEL MCCOY, FATHER OF THE GREAT DIVIDE MOUNTAIN BIKE ROUTE
PREFACE
In early 2016, Ryan shared with me his idea of creating a bikepacking guidebook. With his ambitious way in life, it wasn’t long before it had blossomed into an all-encompassing undertaking. From the early stages of meticulously poring over maps, to his countless scouting missions into the Alberta and BC backcountry, Ryan poured himself into this project over the next summer and spring.
Crafting this guidebook was, perhaps, a pinnacle project for Ryan, a culmination of his years of cycling, his love of exploring new places by bike, his passion for sharing his experiences with others, and his desire to grow the bikepacking community in Canada.
For all the adventure and ambition these route descriptions reflect, however, the pages ahead cannot fully capture the enormous effort Ryan devoted to this book. They do not tell of the miles ridden to disappointing dead ends, the exhausting climbs to impassable roads, the perseverance of bushwhacking for entire days along overgrown trails, the nasty weather endured, the time away from work and family, and the many hours in front of a computer screen researching historical facts, collating notes on trail conditions and connecting lines on maps.
It is this dedication that makes this guidebook most special to me. It is time and energy that is infinitely more precious knowing it was Ryan’s last project.
Ryan fell ill while scouting the last route for this book. In the nine months that followed, while grappling with a shocking diagnosis, chemotherapy and rapidly declining health, he dedicated any energy he could spare to editing and fine-tuning this into a book he would be proud of.
Ryan died on April 27, 2018. It is both a great honour and a bittersweet milestone to have Bikepacking in the Canadian Rockies published. I certainly wish Ryan could have seen the finished product. But there is great peace in knowing he spent his last months of health adventuring through the mountains on his bike and living up to his goal in life: to turn his passion into purpose. I hope you experience some of that very passion as you embark on your own adventures and share in Ryan’s dream!
— SARAH HORNBY
INTRODUCTION
33 Years in the Making, a Love Affair with the Canadian Rockies
The Rocky Mountains have always been a quick escape. Where I grew up on the outskirts of Calgary, the eastern range was clearly visible from my bedroom window.
I recall hockey tournaments in Canmore, catching fluffy snowflakes outside the Post Hotel in Lake Louise, rustic wood architecture in Jasper, skiing at Nakiska as part of a yearly junior-high retreat, dragging my feet on family hikes in Kananaskis, the smell of composting forest beds along the Bow River, chasing our rambunctious golden retriever through overgrown poplar and sporadic chinook winds on an otherwise frigid afternoon.
My introduction to cycling in the Canadian Rockies was in high school (at the National Sport School), back in 1999. Our phys ed teacher coordinated a three-day tour for a group of mostly hockey misfits along the infamous Icefields Parkway, running 291 km from Jasper to Banff. Having cycled with my father across most of Canada in the three years prior — “Manhood Training,” as he called it — I found the daily grind of the grand valley tour came second nature.
Fast-forward a decade to the TransRockies (TR7) stage race in 2009. It was my first year of proper mountain biking, and I had committed to grinding it out from Panorama Ski Hill (just west of the Rockies, in the Purcell Mountains) to Fernie, British Columbia. Barry Mah at Specialized Bicycles kindly sponsored my entry. He and a few others were intrigued to see what “that guy” could pull off: the young man who had turned his back on hockey to cycle 14,000 km around North America in 2002, race 25,000 km from Alaska to Argentina in 2005, and become the youngest Canadian to complete the infamous Race Across America in 2008.
Midway through a respectable fourth-place TR7 finish, I befriended then Rocky Mountain Bicycles rep Keith Brodsky and his riding partner, Alaskan reporter Jill Homer. Homer excitedly inquired after one of the stages if I had heard of a new self-supported mountain bike race called the Tour Divide. “It’s right up your alley!” she exclaimed, referring to my ambitious tendencies.
Jill was one of only a handful of women to have completed the epic, still in its infancy.
“Maybe,” I said, somewhat intrigued. But that was where the conversation ended.
The following year, in October 2010, I took on a six-day, 20-hour stationary-cycling world record attempt in what was intended to be a unique community engagement event (a more apt description can be found in my autobiography, A Purpose Ridden). The physical aftershocks, the worst I have ever experienced, still haunt me: three months of crippling nerve pain, insomnia, muscle atrophy, a loss of fat padding in my feet, fatigued adrenal glands and a terrible bout of depression.
I don’t want to die alone
In September 2011 I moved across the country to Ontario to live with an amazing gal I’d met online during my exhausting recovery. “Sarah is perfect… but above all, it’s time for a change,” I told my co-workers in Sylvan Lake (I had been managing a gym in central Alberta for three years). Achieving a balance in life had begun to take priority over single-minded cycling aspirations.
Hobbled jogs along Lake Ontario emerged as a convenient new way to stay fit. Still, on hikes along the Niagara escarpment, I would catch a glimpse of a single-track trail and be taken back to my days of mountain bike racing at the Canmore Nordic Centre, along the North Saskatchewan River at Edmonton and up and down the windy coulees around Lethbridge. The spin attempt had decimated my fast twitch muscle, I admitted. But the ability to go long and slow, that mental muscle, remained an edge.
Talk of the Tour Divide resurfaces
Envisioning the leadup in my mind’s eye, I saw the gate of the Rockies rising steeply from the undeveloped golden grasslands of the Stoney Nakoda Nation. That dramatic scene at the crest of Scott Lake Hill that you see when headed west along the Trans-Canada Highway would take me back to an earlier memory of mountain grandeur: early summer hikes with the family, all that. I saw the bird’s-eye view play over and over. And finally, the obscure Divide was reality.
June 8, 2012 — Sarah and I share a nervous parting kiss outside the Banff YWCA
GPS