Andrew in Yongchuan

School's out (nearly)

2012-01-12T14:14:00.003+08:00

The final exams are done and marked, and all that's left is to figure out if all those numbers next to student's names mean anything. My hunch is that they don't... but I doubt that this will lead to a collapse in quantitative examination of high school students or reform of education. After all, people like numbers. Maybe because you can usually find someone who's number is smaller than yours and feel good about it. I am not a number, I am a free man, I hope.

On Saturday night we will get on the night train from Kunming, the start of what will hopefully be five weeks of exploring around Southern China, Northern Vietnam, a bit of Thailand, and back to China again. We've made a big effort to plan as much of our travelling overland as makes reasonable sense, so I'm happy about that. We will still be squandering the Earth's precious resources by flying over a couple of large stretches... but I'll make sure I feel slightly guilty while I do it. We might even end up going to Hong Kong on the train at the end of our trip and then figure out how to get back to school in time for next semester.

We will update from wherever we are, when we get around to it... and that's a promise.

Next semester I will be somewhat relieved from my task a an English teacher. No, I haven't been fired (surprisingly). I will be teaching "Introduction to Math(s) and Science" which I think will be much more fun for me... though possibly not the students. It's still teaching English language, but talking about fractions and the carbon cycle give me a much warmer feeling than writing the word "poetry" at the top of my lesson plan. I like poetry and reading things, and even writing pointless things myself (an obvious example being this) but really have never got my head around the idea of being taught how to appreciate poetry, let alone marking a writer's poem. It's those numbers again. I'm looking forward to teaching numbers rather than sticking them on poems (or free men for that matter).

So we're off for some adventure and some exploration, no doubt with some misadventure and frustration thrown in. We'll hopefully be hiking, rock-climbing, paddleboarding, and possibly even sleazing around Asia and find Yongchuan a warmer and springlike place when we return. Maybe they'll put some plastic lambs and rabbits in the park to celebrate.

On that note, here is an entirely unrelated HDR photo I took when we were at Tiger Leaping Gorge. I was pleased with the weirdness.

The light at the end of the tunnel

2012-01-08T19:10:00.003+08:00

With only a few more classes to teach and some exams to mark... the end of our first semester of teaching in China is nearly over. It's been a strenuous journey, and appropriately we found ourselves on a strenuous journey of another kind this weekend.

Wexing Lake runs alongside Cucumber Hill, which has been a good spot for previous bike ride and hikes. At one end of the lake there's a campus of the local university, but we have been curious about what could be at the other end. Google Earth showed a dirt road running all the way along the lake shore, then ending strangely in the middle of nowhere. Yesterday we set out on our bikes to find what really happened on the ground.

Unsurprisingly we passed by back-to-back farms and the stares of confused locals and their chickens. However, a surprise waited for us at the end of the rutted and muddy road. A temple and local's fishing spot turned out to be the destination.

Wexing Lake's local Buddha

The temple at the end of the road

Saturday afternoon fishing.

Optimistic that we might be able to complete a loop around the lake, we pushed on (sometimes literally) through the mud and made it to a steep switchback climb. The locals were gathered at a restaurant at the start of the climb and enjoyed watching us winch our way up the slippery hill. The ride was turning out to be pretty tough and the damp, chilly weather was not helping our spirits too much. After some perseverance on the intermittently cobbled and then muddy bog of a road we made it back to the top of the ridge and were lucky to catch the end of the "lunchtime rush" at a little eating place we'd been to before. We were grateful that the owner not only recognized who we were (not hard around here) so we didn't have to fumble through explaining we didn't want any fried intestines to eat, but cooked us some tasty lunch before closing up shop.

Our regular eatery on Cucumber Hill

Back at home we've been getting our preparations done for five weeks of travelling in southern China, Vietnam, and Thailand. We leave on the night-train to Kunming on Saturday night and will getting a much needed break from teaching life. Hopefully we'll be able to post a few updates from the road!

Not Chinese New Year in China

2012-01-04T15:02:00.001+08:00

After a lengthy stretch of lots of work and not much play combined with fairly nasty weather and general lack of joy here in Yongchuan, we received the remedy. The format of this was the classic 3-day weekend enhanced by incinerating a few prehistoric crustacean's remains. The lengths we'll go to for some sunshine and mountains eh?

Tiger Leaping Gorge - New Year 2011/2012 from Andrew Dye on Vimeo.

Christmas day pictures of mist

2011-12-25T11:24:00.000+08:00

I've been slack in putting anything on here lately, but it's Christmas day... so my gift to the internet is a few photos of some of our local activities over the last few weeks.

A muddy run up Tea Mountain in the mist may be cold, but it's one option we have to escape town

The sun appeared, last Sunday (appropriately) so we rode up "Cucumber Hill" and went for a hike. These are some of the locals we met.

We found this nice spot in the forest on Cucumber Hill

...more from Cucumber Hill

On our way home we visited what we thought was a temple just outside of town. It turned out to be a grave yard rather than a temple, and there were these nice old trees.

Yesterday we rode out to Da An, a small town just outside Yonngchuan. We found some nice country roads, ate some noodles, and confused the locals.

Yongchuan's reliable weather. You want mist? We've got it.

I don't know what this place used to be, but we rode past it.

Buddha's Grotto

2011-12-04T15:54:00.001+08:00

Fortunately this isn't where Chinese children go to sit on Buddha's knee at the local shopping mall and receive seasonal presents... though perhaps there's money to be made with such a scheme. The Beishan rock carvings near the town of Dazu are an example of Grotto Art which received UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 1999 and now have the appropriate tour buses, gift shops, and overpriced noodles fitting of their significance. Not wanting to fit the mold of tourists too well we decided to ride to Dazu from Yongchuan for the weekend and camp in a field.

The ride over on Saturday was very pleasant, and we found some bemused noodle-house owners in sleepy Dazu to sell us lunch before heading up the hill to the carvings. We paid our entrance fees, dodged some hawkers, found a nice lady who let us leave our bike panniers under the desk in the guide's office, and off we went. The carvings were really impressive, I thought, and most of the preservation was more sympathetic than we're used to seeing. There we no LED lights or musical tree stumps to be seen anywhere. The main significance of the carvings is Buddhist, which I find a constant struggle to understand with the enormous number of significant figures and names. Aside from the numerous Buddhas of all sizes there were some scenes I hadn't seen in temples before which I really liked.

A happy-looking Ox from a rural scene

Bemused by Buddhas

The wheel of life, but who's driving?

Then there was a grotto showing what happens to you in various "hells". It was amazing... there were cauldrons of skulls being stirred by animal-headed beasts, someone tied upside down to a pole being sawed in half, and this painful looking procedure:

I think I would like to avoid hell if this is what's involved

And of course there was the essential comedy sign:

Perhaps only funny if you're British

Then we had to find a place to sleep for the night. In China just about every square-inch of soil is used for growing something. When the city plants ornamental gardens, the locals squeeze a few vegetables between the flowers. If there's construction going on (which there always is), the mounds of excavated dirt quickly become someone's allotment. This is an excellent thing, but it does make it tricky to find a spot for sketchy camping. On our way up to the carvings we had passed by a small temple and I noticed some steps leading up to the top of the cliff above. I though it would be worth a look. Up above the road was... yes, someone's vegetable patch, but with enough space for our small tent.

Right above that cave, is where we slept

After a good long sleep we clambered back down the slippery steps, just in time to alarm a local farmer enjoying his first cigarette of the day. Unable to explain why we had just slept in the mud next to his cabbages, we probably left him with a very strange impression of "foreigners". Fair enough I suppose...

Things to make and do - Volume 2

2011-11-27T15:24:00.001+08:00

This weekend I wanted to stay at "home" in Yongchuan and get some things done, so I did. It's been a satisfying couple of days. I spent some of yesterday wandering around the old town, getting lost, finding interesting things, buying a nice shirt, confusing the locals by asking the price of welding equipment and grinding wheels, and then finding myself again with the help of the GPS. Getting the street-maps to work on the GPS has been a great thing, maybe almost worth the endless hours of monkeying around that it took me to do it.

Something I finally got around to doing this week was finding a fee internet radio app for my iPod. I have been excited by the thought of using my iPod as a radio since I got the wireless to work in our apartment in another monkeying-around epic. That episode was resolved by installing an older version of the firmware on our router. Why does it happen that the new version of something doesn't work when the old one does? Anyway, I downloaded the TuneIn App which has been working really well. I can listen to my favorite BBC radio stations, CBC, plus hundreds of other stations... all for free... and working just fine here in China. Excellent.

That's me wearing my new shirt. Oh, and my iPod playing BBC Radio in China.

Another long-standing "thing to do" was to get some real High Dynamic Range photo software on my computer and figure out how to make my new camera take bracketed pictures and save the files in RAW format. My old camera could do this with some help from the CHDK software, but I never really got along with it. The new camera, which I am slowly learning to love, can do it all by itself... so I'm giving it another go. I've set one of the custom settings to give me what I need for HDR at the twist of a knob. So far, so good. I too this quick photo on my way home from teh supermarket (where I was buying supplies for today's making project). It's a bit wobbly as I was just resting the camera on a brick with no tripod or whatnot, but I think it shows there is potential for some fun stuff here. I used Luminance for this one, which is a bit of a weird piece of software... but free and has lots of options for playing with the images. I also have Photonaut which I I will have a go with when I have some more photos to play with.

I think there is potential for some fun with this HDR business

And finally, I needed a waterproof case for my camera. The G12 is more lumpy than my old G9 (which is a shame) and it won't fit in my old Pelican case. Pelican cases are not an easy thing to find here, so I came up with my own solution involving a lunchbox and some foam floor tiles. It appears that a Canon G12 is about the same size as a small lunch (perhaps macaroni cheese) as it fits very nicely in a box I found. With a couple of pieces of foam to stop it rattling around I have a pretty decent (and hopefully waterproof) case. What a great bodge, even if I do say so myself.

Pixels for lunch

Also, some exciting news. Our short film about our Yukon River SUP expedition will be shown at the Cumberland Mountain Film Festival on January 12, 2012. If you happen to be in Cumberland on that Thursday night, go and support the Cumberland Trails!

Fun sandwich

2011-11-22T15:13:00.001+08:00

Weekends away are a fun thing, but it's taken us a while to figure out how to make them happen here in China. The complications of living in an out-of-the-way place and relying on public transport in a country where we can't communicate very easily present a new level of complication. However, someone did once said that nothing worth having comes for free. I think it was me.

After school on Friday we burst out and overloaded the school car with adventure-hungry teachers, followed by a taxi (to the displeasure of the drivers) and got to the Yongchuan bus station far too early for the bus to Chengdu. Better than being late (as we were to later find out). We got to the Traffic Inn Hostel in time to make it out for noodles, a pint, and a slightly strange encounter with a chap from Manchester who was partying his way around the world. I already liked Chengdu as it features a river that doesn't smell like poo... a rare commodity in China.

Hao, Mao.

Saturday was spent touristing (is that a word?) around town, visiting temples, eating pizza, and stumbling across a few fine things along the way. We enjoyed some overpriced beer in the "Revolutionary Box Bar", but felt the ambiance was worth it. We met our teacher travelling companions in the evening for a poke around the Jinli shopping area. I failed to buy anything that wasn't edible, but got my ears cleaned and massaged in a traditional Chinese style... which was actually quite pleasant.

Fine goods for sale in Chengdu... apparently

Most important thing to us in Chengdu was to concoct a plan to meet the Chendu Pandas Hash House Harriers (CPH3) for their bi-weekly hash run. On Sunday morning we decided to squeeze in a trip to the Panda Breeding and Research Center, which I really enjoyed... and I don't usually like zoos. The pandas didn't seem in the least bothered by the hoards of tourists and generally lay around luxuriating and eating bamboo. One of them was trying to climb a tree bottom-first, which was either some kind of game, panda exercise routine, or perhaps a result of a confused mind due to captive panda inbreeding.... but he seemed to be enjoying it regardless. The baby pandas crawled around after their human surrogate mother wearing her blue apron and face mask, crowding around here feet to be fed. It's weird how pandas can recognize a giant Smurf as their mother... but I guess all that's important when you're that age is who's got the milk.

The hash run was tremendous. Despite having lived in places where I've seen the flour markings of a hash from time-to-time most of my life, I've never been on one. Unusually, the week we came the run was held quite far out of the city, among some farmer's fields. We ran through the bushes and along the dikes between the muddy ponds and quickly got the hand of yelling instructions and searching for the flour marks. During the post-run reverie we realized that there was very little chance of us using any of our planned ways to get home. All the direct buses were long-gone and our backup plan of getting the train to Chongqing would get us there too late to get the bus to Yongchuan. Some kindly fellow hashers gave us a ride to Chengdu East train station and we ran over to the ticket counter. No space on any trains to Chongqing. Whilst this solved the problem of arriving too late in Chongqing, it did leave us stuck in Chengdu with work the next morning. Some of our trademark note-passing, gesticulating, and three words of Chinese got us night-train tickets to Yongchuan... arriving at 4.30am on Monday. Not really what we intended, but we would at least make it to work for 8am.

Chengdu train station looked like the kind of place the space shuttle might launch from.... all white polished things and bright lights. And fake palm trees. When our train boarding was announced in the space-station, the fancy glass-encased escalator took us down to a rickety looking old train full of nocturnal budget Chinese travelers. We loaded up and got what sleep we could as the train creaked along. Thankfully, we made it back to the apartment at 5am, got a little sleep and made it to school on-time. We'll be back in Chengdu again I have no doubt.

Tea Mountainbiking

2011-11-12T15:20:00.001+08:00

When we left Vancouver back in August, I left behind all three of my mountain bikes. Due to packing in as much mountain biking as possible before we left, all three bikes are now languishing in some state of disrepair at the back of a five-by-ten storage locker and buried under the accumulation of everything else Lina and I own. However, out of sight is not out of mind as far as bikes and my mind go. I have been spending some of my spare moments plotting my faithful bike's return-to-form when I unearth them and the tools to fix them. After thinking, rethinking, forgetting, and re-inventing my plan for fettling all three bikes into their most appropriate format I have ended up just about where I started with a plan to concoct a heavy bike, a light bike, and a bike that is somewhere in-between. Ground-breaking stuff, no? It keeps me amused anyway.

On the subject of bikes, we got out before the rain today to ride the trail we found on Tea Mountain a few weeks ago, and try some more bouncy bamboo slacklining. Both were very successful, though riding a bike with fairly slick tires on damp clay was quite alarming on the steeper parts. The dirt-road climb up to the ridge turns out to be all rideable... and pretty long and strenuous, so that should keep us honest.

Unusual mountain biking

Confused locals

A place we found along the way

Did someone used to live here?

Shoes-on slacklining due to spiky bamboo stumps - tricky

A change is as good as a rest

2011-11-08T21:12:00.000+08:00

In this case, the change required quite a lot of resting to recover from it. Whilst I'm not a natural runner, I have found that running around in the forest and up and down mountains is a great way to keep fitness and I enjoy the simplicity of a sport that doesn't involve an expensive bike or skis, helmets, Gore-Tex, and endless equipment maintenance. My greatest running achievement to date was the 50km Knee Knacker up and over the three North Shore mountains. Not only was this a mental triumph for me, but I was reasonably fast (in my opinion) and didn't get badly damaged by the experience. The point I am getting around to here is that I stepped back from ultra-marathon running into old-fashioned road-marathon running this weekend. I've never run a road race before, because I didn't want to. Living in China means some concessions need to be made and Lina proposed we traveled to Hangzhou to enter the well-regarded International Marathon. I don't mind trying something new, so with a bit of grumbling I agreed to run.

The concept of jumping on a bus and a 'plane after work on Friday and spending a day and a half in a strange city in China, running a marathon and jumping straight back on a 'plane again in time for work on Monday isn't exactly my idea of a good time. I like to have time to let my surroundings soak in and to enjoy the experience. I also think short-haul flying (and any flying at all for that matter) is a bad thing on just about every level. Swallowing my ethics I buckled in for the ride.

Saturday we spent doing some sight-seeing and a bit of impromptu clothes shopping in Hangzhou. We walked around Feilai Park and peeked at various Buddhist statues hidden in caves carved around the mountain. It was an interesting place to visit, though as with many things here in China, some rather unsympathetic "improvement" of the ancient sites with concrete street furniture and paving made the place feel somewhat fake. What was definitely real however was the gatherings of locals singing songs, praying in the caves, or playing cards at outdoor tables. Whilst recreation for the Chinese is not what I have grown used to living in Canada, the Chinese do a great job of social gatherings in what seem (to me) the most unlikely places. I will try to organize a "poker game in a Buddhist cave" night when I return to Vancouver and see how far I get.

A walk in the park.

Mystical trees.

Puff the magic dragon (possibly)

An ancient Buddhist monument to rain.

One of Hangzhou's major attractions is West Lake, which is renowned to be one of the most beautiful lakes in China. When we got a view of the lake from the top of a hill in Feilai Park I was a little underwhelmed. West Lake is certainly nice, but "the most beautiful"? Later that day I had a realization. I think my concept of beauty is the property something has in its natural form. A mountain is beautiful because it is a mountain. However, I think West Lake shows how the nature of beauty can be different in other cultures. Here in China, things described as beautiful usually seem to be heavily adorned with gold paint, red curtains, and possibly flashing lights. My theory is that in China, beauty is something that can be bestowed by man (given enough supplies of gold pain and red fabric), and not an intrinsic property. West Lake's unique beauty, in the Chinese sense, seems to come from the island-temples, the causeways, and the pagodas and other auspicious man-made constructions on the surrounding hills. I feel that as a scientist I need to find two similar ugly objects then spray-paint one of them gold, wrap some red cloth around it, and put a flashing light on top... then get some Chinese and Western volunteers to rate each one's beauty. The results might possibly be fascinating.

West Lake... beautiful or beautified?

Anyway, back to this running business. I ran a marathon. It took three hours fifty-three minutes. It hurt a lot and on the whole was something I would like to never repeat. Unfortunately, we are already entered in the Bejing Great Wall marathon. Oh dear.

Finally, here are some things I saw at the weekend.

Firebags prohibited?

Chinese fries. Yum.

Hello Mr Brown.

Pushing the right buttons

2011-10-30T18:09:00.001+08:00

I'm trying to get the hang of my new camera. The fact my new camera is quite similar to my old one doesn't seem to be helping much, but a few partially successful photos have appeared:

The view from half way up Tea Mountain on Friday night.

Lina slacklining in the Bamboo Forest today.

On my way home from the Bamboo Forest (taken by Lina)

The cause of and answer to all of life's problems

2011-10-27T20:03:00.001+08:00

Do you believe that reality just is, and there's nothing you can do to change it? I used to think that way.

Coup of Tea

2011-10-23T17:15:00.004+08:00

Today we ran up (and down) the back road to Tea Mountain. Not only does this route have the advantages of pigs, chickens, ducks, and confused locals along the way... but it also avoids the tourist-trap gate and entry fee. Success! Having got our feet muddy on the road, we explored the bamboo a little and found some slackline potential. To my amazement, we also found something that mountain bikers reading this will understand.

We'll be back up to this spot again soon no doubt. Other news to report is that my new street map of China is installed on my GPS, and working unbelievably well. Having overcome this epic technological battle I can turn my attention back to trying to get our strange Chinese internet connection to work with my wireless router. The fun just never starts. Sigh.

More photos of misty bamboo can be witnessed here.

Transformers - navigation in disguise

2011-10-21T10:39:00.000+08:00

No, I haven't got a special outfit to wear while I read maps... but that's not a bad I idea now I think of it. Maybe some kind of checkered theme would go well with the grid lines? But, I digress. I also haven't written anything about Hainan, and now the iron is cold I probably won't. Luckily Lina wrote something.

One excellent thing we brought with us to China was our GPS. This device proved very useful on our trip down the Yukon River using the tremendous Ibycus Topo maps. I had high hopes of it helping us find our way around China. Navigating here is particularly challenging because we can't read the road signs and new roads spring up at such a rate, bu the time you turn around to go home, there might be a motorway where that country lane used to be. Having some record of where we went seems very wise. However, nothing worth having is ever easy... and GPS mapping of China is certainly a challenge.

The first problem is that GPS maps in China have a well described problem of being "offset" or "transformed" from the point your GPS unit will tell you you are at. Reasons for this seem to be some kind of government bureaucracy which serves the purpose of allowing more money to be extracted from Garmin, Google, and all the other electronic mapping behemoths that own the pictures of the Earth's surface, the front door of your house, and you walking out of the supermarket with your face blurred out. More adventurous thinkers who write on the internet suggest conspiracy theories, fear of American invasions of China, and protection from intelligent alien parasites as the reason for the GPS offset. I don't know about all that, but I do know that my GPS tells me I am riding my bike in the sea when in fact I am on a road. This can be mildly amusing but makes it impossible to navigate around a town using the GPS. Out in the countryside of Hainan we found we could still get a good idea of where we were, how far to the next town, and that sort of thing, but the GPS screen always showed the offset.

The blue line is our real position, the orange line is where the map tells is the road is. I swear we were riding on the road...

There are various ways that people on the internet have discussed fixing the "offset problem", some more elaborate than others and mostly ineffective on my GPS when I tried them. Given how much effort it had been for me to get a decent street map of China on there in the first place, I was losing interest in losing more of my life reading about gmapsupp files on GPS enthusiasts internet forums. So I forgot about it for a while.

Unfortunately, I can't forget about unfinished business. More internet digging revealed the mysteriously named Venus Series maps. It seems from the description that someone has taken it upon themselves to re-calibrate the Garmin City Navigator maps to that the offset problem is fixed, or at least greatly reduced. After some fairly extensive internet foraging I managed to download the map and now just have to get it to work on my GPS. I expect this to be no mean feat judging by my previous experiences... but how else could I while away those long winter evenings? To be honest, I could think of many ways... but I will persevere.

Time waits for no-man

2011-10-16T22:13:00.000+08:00

I haven't written about our holidays yet, but the relentless pace of life does not pause to wait for me to write about it. This weekend we went on a hurriedly organised trip into Chongqing. The plan was to see some sights that we have failed to see the few times we have passed through town. Despite near (and actual) disasters in the first 12 hours or so of our trip... things worked out well and we got to do a good variety of stuff. Lots of photos can be found here, and a photo-smorgasbord of my favorites is below.

An alternative symbol of yin and yang?

Fish and umbrella.

Yes, really.

The Chongqing museum of flashing lights.

Men at work.

Walking among the Arhats

One disaster worth mentioning was the death of my faithful Cannon G9, which has been abused to the ends of the earth and finally stopped retracting its lens for good. It's been wheezing along and getting stuck for a few months, but this time I completely destroyed it in a last-ditch attempt to get it to work again. I'll see if anyone here will have a go at resurrecting it for me, but I had to concede and buy a new camera on our way out to see Ciqikou old town. China is generally not a good place to buy things that aren't made in China, but luckily Chongqing has a technology market which was a few subway stops before our destination. After some annoying haggling I got the price down by around 45% to about the same I would have paid by walking into Best Buy in Canada. But, at least I have a camera. Unimaginatively I got a Cannon G12. The new apparatus seems to work extremely well in poor light and have a few dinky gadgets (that I don't need), but is otherwise be very similar to my old G9. I did manage to leave the "date stamp" feature on by accident and had to viciously crop my photos from the trip to get rid of it. Who uses that feature anyway? Bah.

Typhoon, cow, pig, chicken, and goose.

2011-10-10T07:41:00.000+08:00

I have things to write about it later, but for now... here is a video and some photos of our holiday on Hainan Island.

Hainan Island 2011 from Andrew Dye on Vimeo.

Strange-taste horsebeans

2011-09-25T15:50:00.000+08:00

Today I am 34 years old. Yesterday I wan't quite 34 years old yet and we spent the day biking and hiking on Tea Mountain.

Tea Mountain ridge

Some of the locals

Among the bamboo

A tourist climbing some stairs

After a disastrous lunch-ordering experience which ended up with us facing two plates of expensive entrails, we returned to Yongchuan motivated to do better. After some practice runs on the way to the restaurant I managed to order XiHongShiChaoJiDan and fried eggplant without a hitch... which was both a tasty meal and an encouragement that we may one day be able to survive in China without having to eat entrails. Speaking of entrails, we today discovered an alley by the river in Yongchuan where Chinese life in it's realest form was in full swing. We walked past tiny storefronts with sleeping lofts built in above each one, tables crammed with people playing cards and mahjong, live poultry ready for the chopping block, the chopping block, and a lady in the early stages of preparing a dog for dinner.

Yohchuan riverfront... the upscale section just before dead dog alley

And finally... here are my latest favorites from our never-ending supply of peculiar English slogans:

My new mug - "You are all evil, I'm the only angel"

Wherever you go, take pirate beer. Sound advice I think.

Yes, this is a real pen.

I have yet to confirm how strange these horsebeans taste

Cucumber Surprise

2011-09-17T17:39:00.000+08:00

Today we went on another exploratory bike ride to find a road I saw on Google Earth. As usual with China, the reality on the ground was a little different to what Google's all-seeing-eye saw from space, but we found our way up onto another ridge outside of town and rode along it... then down the side to find some noodles. Success. Little did we know that we had in fact scaled the mighty Cucumber Mountain. Who knew! Luckily, back in our apartment the Internet has allowed us to learn exactly how lucky we we were. Photos of that business can be seen here:

If your interested in looking at our Yongchuan travels, I've been mapping them right here on this, err, map. It only really works using the satellite picture view, due to some kind of bureaucracy that makes the streets not line up with the GPS when you look at the map view. It all looks lovely if you use the satellite view though.

View Yongchuan.kmz in a larger map

That was the light-relief section of this post, so now it's time for some introspection. I've been thinking about life in China as I know it so far, and here's what I have to say...

Food in China is great. All the principles I have been trying so hard to live by in Canada; eating local food, eating seasonal food, and eating fresh food are the default here. Of course, these things would have been the default everywhere once... but such is progress. The disadvantage of all this local fare is that most of the things you'll eat in a "rural" Chinese city are made from the same ingredients. Right now, we are eating a lot of a kind of spinach-ish thing called "Hollow Heart", green beans, mushrooms, squash, potatoes, tofu, and cabbage. Meat can be a bit of an adventure and pork is definitely the most common. As a recovering vegetarian, pork has been pretty low on my list of things to eat until now, but I have been enjoying some of it here. Beef is also a good choice I have found as due to its higher price you'll get less meat and more vegetables in a beef dish - which suits me fine. Though the ingredients are fairly predictable, we have been shown variety is still possible. The regular haunts of the Maple Leaf School teachers are The Dive, St Paddy's, Baby Noodle, The Clay Pot Place and the street barbecue (names bear no relationship to the actual names of these places, which we can't read). The Dive specializes in classic Chongquing specialities, served in an "informal" setting. It's mostly oily stir-fried things including some of my favorites: kung-pao chicken, eggplant, and fried egg with tomato. Almost everything is pretty spicy. Baby Noodle does a mean noodle soup with optional fried-egg on the side, St Paddy's caters to the local university student population with more classic local dishes, and The Clay Pot Place serves up a tasty pile of rice and vegetables sizzling in a clay pot. Last night we were guided to a new place and had a kind of chicken stew, which contained every imaginable part of the chicken... including a foot proudly placed on top of the vegetables. It's tradition that every Chinese meal should contain rice or noodles... or it would not be considered filling, so once we had cleared most of the vegetables and chicken artifacts from our stew a few plates of noodles were put into the broth to finish it off. You need to pace yourself when eating out in China...

Before arriving in China I had read a few things about Chinese culture. Some were complimentary, saying how welcoming and generous the Chinese people are... some less so, focusing on the smoking, spitting in the street, and the hierarchical system of respect and friendship that is difficult for foreigners to penetrate. My experience has been more the former. Whilst our appearance and everything we do is hilarious and fascinating to the locals, the atmosphere has been very welcoming. Parents bring their small children over to look at us and say "Hello!", shorty followed by "Goodbye!". Whenever we are out in the evening, groups of Chinese drinkers will want us to join them for a drink and to give us cigarettes. Refusing a gift is very impolite in China, so I have learned that accepting the smokes and keeping them behind your ear "for later" is the way to navigate this social minefield. We have only been able to have conversations with a few Chinese people as not many speak English here, and my Mandarin so far only extends as far as ordering rice or noodles. We have met a few Chinese university students who are studying English at the university in the hope of becoming interpreters and this has given us some insights into life in China. It's amazing to most young Chinese that in Canada Lina and I do not live with our parents. What motivated me to leave a job in Canada that required many years of study and effort to get and come to teach English in developing interior of China is also hard to communicate. The luxury of choosing to take a break from more gainful employment is something relatively few Chinese have experienced.

Whilst my overall experience of our current home is positive, Yongchuan seems to be a town where any remnants of its old soul are being rapidly extinguished and replaced with shiny new apartment buildings and extravagant parks. Development here seems to be happening the opposite way to what I am used to seeing in The West. Instead of infrastructure always being one step behind the growing demand... here in Yongchuan a big city is being pre-fabricated, ready for the people to arrive. Where these people are coming from I have no idea, and I hope that whoever did the sums got their numbers right. We are surrounded by cavernous new buildings which are largely empty, meanwhile new construction is in progress all around. It's hard to imagine what Yongchuan will look like five years from now... but the plan is clearly for it to have a lot of people living in it. My concern is that with the focus on building more and more new things, the barely finished projects that are only a few years old are neglected. At what point will the rate of collapse meet the rate of new construction? I have an image of a city where the ever-growing periphery surrounds a crumbling core.

Finally, my life as a teacher. I never imagined myself as a High-School teacher, let alone in China. The experience so far has been quite difficult. The standing in front of the class part has been quite easy; partly due to having gained quite a lot of experience in dealing with other human beings through my various employments, and the fact that the students are generally very respectful of the Canadian teachers. What has proven to be far more difficult is making sense of how formal education works. Despite having been to school myself, once upon a time, I am struggling to understand the logic of teaching and assessment in a school system. The fact that I know very little about the technicalities of my native language is not helping much either. Sometimes I wonder if I am learning more than my students…

Finally, a reward for anyone who labored through all that (or cleverly scrolled down here without reading it). My greatest teaching triumph to-date was playing Poopycat, also boringly known as Telephone Pictionary, with my classes on Friday. I knew from experience that the most talented players of this game are those who have English as a second language, so imagine a whole class of non-native English speakers paying. In the example below, the jump from “superman” to “supermarket” really brought the game alive. The potential here is enormous.

Curved Nasty

2011-09-10T16:42:00.000+08:00

At the conclusion of our first full week teaching in Yongchuan I was ready to escape my shortcomings as a teacher and do something that didn't involve speaking very slowly or wondering how to make my lessons less boring. So we made our second summit attempt on the mighty edifice that is "Tea Mountain" to the north of town. Last weekend we were turned back by the long arm of the law who had closed the road for some reason. As we approached the turn for Tea Mountain, the "road closed" sign was in the ditch and no law enforcement was to be seen, so up we went. After a few minutes we found a sign that we were on the correct route for some renowned tourist sites.

There was also the beginnings of the tea hedges (is that the right word?) that the "mountain" is famous for. With the mist hanging heavy on the hillside we took a sniff along the "Tea fragrance terrace". Fragrant it was... and very nice when we're more used to the more robust smells of the town below.

We continued on up the road towards our objective. Coming the other way we saw four unexpected things... other people riding bikes for fun (!). The Tea Mountain road seems to be the local recreational cycling hot spot. As we reached the ridge line, our greatest challenge awaited us... the Tourist Welcoming Center. It turns out there is a fee to ride the rest of the road along the ridge, though with some help from a very nice English-speaking Tea Mountain visitor, we learned that we could sleep in a farmer's house if we paid our fee and carried on along the ridge through the tea plantations. We decided that this should be our objective for my birthday weekend in a few weeks.

A tourist pointing at a fake concrete rock

Another tourist lurking in some (not fake) tea bushes

Satisfied with our day's research we set off for the descent back into town. Luckily there was some advice on the road conditions ahead...

Sound advice

Lina grappling with a curved nasty

Back at home we headed out for a late lunch armed with our freshly prepared Chinese words for "One bowl of noodles with beef" and "I am a vegetarian, one bowl of noodles". Having successfully managed to order five bottles of beer last night I was feeling ready for a new challenge... plus we were pretty hungry. I'm pleased to say that our meal ordering resulted in minimal frustration with the noodle lady (who laughed at us) and the food we wanted appearing. Success!

GPS geekery of our trip up "Tea Mountain"

If you like it then you should put a stick in it

2011-09-05T22:01:00.000+08:00

I'm three days deep into my teaching career and whilst it's been no plain sailing, I think I will survive. Standing in front of the class has been easy, which I think I have mainly my work with Our Community Bikes customers to thank for. The tough part is figuring out how and what to teach the kids...

Now, in culinary news I think we have some real headlines. We've eaten plenty of great food (mainly derived from pigs) here, but Sunday was a tour-de-force of budget cuisine triumphs. Let me elaborate:

Lunch: Cold noodles with soy sauce, oil, chills, peanuts, some herb-ish green things, and some magic spices. So simple... but so good on a hot day. This feast (with a bowl of alarming-looking cold kidney bean soup, which is actually really good) costs around 4 Yuan per head (that's 62 cents Canadian).

Desert: A frozen blob of peas attached to a stick and covered with frozen yogurt. Trust me on this one... it's the future. Frozen peas on a stick covered with yogurt? Yes. Amazing. Oh, and the price... about 16 cents each.

Dinner: The joy here is really the ambiance. Sitting on a tiny plastic stool on the sidewalk around a low table, listening to a small child singing karaoke through PA system of a mobile-phone vendor. Take your pick out of an amazing selection of vegetables, eggs, fungi, tofu, steamed-buns, and meat if you want. Pile it on a tray and give it to the lady to barbecues it and brings it back tasting amazing (and probably laden with MSG... I but I try not to think about that). A hearty feast for 2 will set you back around $4.50. Oh... and if you want a beer with that, add 80 cents. Unfortunately the beer is awful, so maybe just have a few more interesting mushrooms instead.

There are some photos of our other weekend bicycle and running-related fun here:

Nice bike mister

2011-08-31T17:33:00.000+08:00

We have bikes. A pair of inexpensive Giants which seem to do the job... though finding one big enough for me around here was a challenge. We also made a new friend to ride with who's from Sichuan province so knows the lingo and is keen to show us around. Exciting stuff!

A Giant Pop and Hunter, surveying the glittering delights of Yongchuan from our balcony

Perhaps even more exciting than this, I bought two of the greatest mugs I have ever seen. I'll be taking the left hand one to work and leaving it on my desk. I also bought the worst croissant I have ever eaten as part of my ongoing sampling tour of the world. Don't worry France... China isn't going to be out-competing you in the breakfast delicacy market any time soon.

This Old Town

2011-08-28T17:05:00.000+08:00

Our first weekend in Yongchuan is nearly over and we spent it exploring our new home. Despite the heat we managed to run around the neighborhood and find the big new park and the "riverside" area of bars and restaurants. Later in the evening we went back with the gang of teachers and found the whole place violently illuminated in neon and a big sign letting us know we were in the appropriately named "Happy Drinking Place". Good times...

Today we took the bus into the old town and wandered around the back street markets away from the neon. We're looking forward to having a few useful words of Mandarin mastered so we can buy our vegetables in the crowded alleyways...

Chili tricycle

A fresh duck

The proud owner of the fresh duck

Happy woman living town

2011-08-27T09:30:00.000+08:00

Lina and I have been living in Yongchuan, Chongqing Province, China for 2 whole days now so it’s about time I had something to say about it. The journey here was long but went very smoothly even with our vast amount of cycling and hiking gear in tow. We have Dave to thank for getting us to the airport with very minimal faff and Dave and Ger for giving us a place to live in our last week in Vancouver (for a while). Our last week was a whirlwind of last-minute chores and cramming as much fun as possible into 5 days. The weather co-operated and we were able to get out mountain biking, running, food eating, dog walking, and beer drinking (thanks to Paul and Angie for the great leaving party!) We also volunteered to help flag the course for a 5 Peaks Trail Run at Whistler. It was great to get up into the mountains of BC one more time before we left and I think the runners were in for a treat, the course was fantastic (and of course superbly flagged).

A handstand in BC

Then all too soon, Monday arrived and it was time to leave for our temporary new lives. Lina and I are now both teachers at a High School in the middle of China and residents of Yongchuan, a “small town” of 1 million people about 70 km away from Chongqing; one of the “Three Furnaces” of China. We are attracting a lot of attention as 2 of less than 50 non-Chinese in the town. Old people stare at us in amazement and small children wave as say “Hello!” Though we’ve yet to teach anyone anything, the kids in summer school have been very curious and friendly towards us and I am optimistic that they will be great to have in our classes. My ability to teach them English remains to be explored, but I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it.

Yongchuan was based around coal mining but is undergoing incredible development as a town for education. New schools, universities, and all the accommodation and entertainments that go along with them are appearing at a rate that is hard for me to comprehend. Though we’ve not had much chance to explore yet we have managed to get out for a run and will be buying some bikes soon to help us get around. The local style seems to be to ride with a construction hard-hat (optional) and umbrella, plus as many children and vegetables as possible… whilst smoking. I need to get onto that bandwagon.

A handstand in YC

Yongchuan is hardly an outdoor enthusiasts paradise as it’s currently well over 30 degrees and humid, but we don’t plan on letting that stop us from getting outside. This afternoon I discovered the Olympic Stadium swimming pool has water in it, so we need to figure out if that means we can swim there. I also discovered a park with a sandpit and some giant plastic gnomes. Both this and another park which contains some talking mushrooms and tree-stumps have weird municipal exercise machines concreted into the ground. Then of course there’s the rollerblading to music and municipal line-dancing in Peope’s Square at night. I’m planning on developing some urban running routes which join my favourite Yongchuan oddities as a kind of athletic treasure-hunt. Trust me, it’s the future.

Can you spot the following: construction, a topiary giraffe, and a plastic gnome.

On top of this wealth of fun, there are also some tantalizing hills lurking in the mist just outside town which we will have to explore when we have our pedal-powered wheels. For now though, we are content that we are living in a town that is both “Livable” and “Smooth”, plus a “Happy woman living town”. No more needs to be said.

Yesterday we visited the big city of 30 million people in Chongqing. We didn't have much time to look around, but were treated to an unexpected underground Chinese robo-pirate disco (a lot of flashing lights and robot pirates in a concrete cave) and an exciting dirt-road drive home as the highway was closed. Though it's noisy and busy, I am looking forward to visiting Chongqing again and exploring away from the tourist areas. I've read there are some traditional old wooden buildings attached to the cliffs in one part of town which I would love to see. For now, here are some photos:

What TIGgers do best

2011-08-23T17:28:00.000+08:00

I’m writing this sitting on a Boeing 777, heading for China where Lina and I will spend the next year teaching in a Chongquing Maple Leaf High School. Before my blog is diverted into a series of photographs of confusing signs, strange vegetables, and tales of whatever it is we get up to there I have some unfinished business to write about.

Here’s the story of an Englishman and an Irishman went to learn to build bicycles.

Conor and I spent two weeks together living in a teepee during the cool of the morning and the heat of the afternoon commuting into and (just) out of Ashland Oregon. The purpose of all this was to learn how to weld and more specifically how to build a bike frame. The United Bicycle Institute has been running frame building courses for many years and I have been intending to get on one for around 5 years, but It turned out that 2011 was the year I finally made it. I wanted to do the Tungsten Inert Gas (TIG) welding course rather than bronze-brazing as I had heard it was harder (I like a challenge), and whilst less romantic than the age-old craft of brazing it seemed to me that TIG was a great way to get something built strong and fast. Conor had been thinking something along the same lines, we said “let’s do it”, we paid our money, and the rest is history.
I could tell from the first day that the UBI instructors and out “celebrity guest instructor" Paul Sadoff had a wealth of experience to share both in framebuilding and importantly in teaching frame building. One of the first messages was that anyone expecting to come away from the course with their perfect frame was going to be disappointed. As instructor Gary said… “You’re beginner welders; you don’t deserve to do a great weld yet”. Conor and I both took this to heart and set about designing a couple of functional bikes that we could use every day and would serve as our test mule for welding skills. The next thing we learned was that that there really isn’t a right and a wrong way to design, build or fit a bike. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure… but there are established norms that can help you come up with something that will at least work. Paul has his way of doing things, and UBI uses another… we would use the tried and tested UBI methods to allow our class of 8 novice welders to walk away with a functional frame, news skills to practice, and a head full of new knowledge.

Our first 3 days were spent getting to grips with controlling the power of the welder using the foot pedal and establishing the electric arc between the electrode and the work. On scraps of tube we drew lines in the surface using the molten “puddle” produced from the heat of the arc and got a feel for how much you could stomp on the pedal before you burned a hole through the tube. We would all get used to the sinking feeling inside when you saw the edge of the tube glow bright red and curl away from what was supposed to be a joint. To better control the heat of our weld we learned to use the pulser, a clever feature on the welders which allows you to set a cycle of strong pulses of power and pauses which prevent so much heat building up in the weld area. Once we learned to time the movement of the electrode with the pulses, we could produce a string of weld “beads” along the metal as the puddle moved over the surface. Our last step before actually welding something was to introduce the steel filler rod to the weld puddle, allowing us to actually join things together and fill in all those holes we were burning. Putting all these things together, it was time for some practice.

Test piece number 1 was a T-joint of two tubes joined together at around 60 degrees to give us practice at joining tubes as well as welding on the inside of an acute angle. The thin edges of the cut tube were happy to melt away and we had to learn to control the weld arc carefully to place the heat on the thicker metal. The second test piece took things a step further, joining 3 tubes in a “grulon” triangle… complete with tricky inside corners and thin metal at the miters.

There's a hole in my grulon

With our test pieces done (or at least patched up well enough to pass our instructor’s inspection) it was time to move onto a real test. Paul told us that an under heated weld could look neat on the outside, but if the metal had not been melted right through the joint it would be weak. An overheated weld could look ugly and weaken the metal around the weld area, but this was preferable to a cold weld as a failure in the joint would happen much later in the frame’s life and more likely form a crack that grew slowly and would be spotted early rather than the frame falling apart at a bad weld. So… our task was to weld a simulated frame joint (bottom bracket to seat tube) and then use a long lever to break it. A positive result would be a break in the tube, rather than a separation of the weld, showing us that the weld was stronger than the tube and therefore not a weak point.

Throughout the first few days, we had discussions on frame design, angles, and fit. We were able to take measurements from an adjustable frame fitting jig or our own bikes and bodies and apply them to our full-scale frame drawings. The logic I followed was to draw in my seat and handlebar position and inseam length on the drawing and fit the tubes of the bike around these points plus the head tube and seat tube angles and bottom bracket height I wanted. With a little tweaking to make it look right to Paul’s experienced eyes I was ready to measure angles and lengths from the drawing to select, cut and miter my tubes. Tubing choice was a compromise of weight, strength and ease of welding which fitted with the theme of my frame being a good compromise of all factors, with the hope of coming out with something rideable. We had all learned that our first frame was not the one to try and be too clever or inventive… better to leave that for our 3rd, or 4th… or 5th.

On our fourth day as bike builders we made the first weld on our first frame. The bottom bracket shell to seat tube joint only required one miter made with a hole-saw on the vertical mill, the first of many we would make in the process of building our frames. Making the first weld was a little like jumping into the freezing blue lake Conor and I swam in on our ride the week before… the anticipation was crippling, but once the torch was on there was nothing to do but get on with making the best weld we could. The best weld I could make was not very impressive at this point, but following Paul’s advice I got a lot of heat into it and things looked pretty solid.

The next 4 or 5 days of work followed a cycle of demonstrations of the fixtures we would use to hold the various parts of the frame together while we welded, how to measure, clamp, and miter the tubes, and all-importantly an inspiring display of fast and precise welding from Paul (under the watchful eye of the class). Paul and all the UBI instructors were extremely helpful, entertaining, and attentive through the intense days of cutting, filing, clamping, and welding. My confidence in welding was growing and I really enjoyed how free from flames, smoke, or fumes the process of TIG is. With the weld shielded by the invisible cloud of argon flowing from the torch there and no sparks (except when to do something wrong), and everything is clean and dry throughout the process. The wear and tear on our nerves showed throughout the days and Conor and I were glad to commiserate our mistakes and celebrate our victories over coffee, beer, a swim in the reservoir, or riding our bikes. We were glad for the weekend off and a chance to ride the trails overlooking Ashland and regain our composure for the final week… by the end of which we had to be finished.

The back end of our frames proved to be the real challenge, which explains why UBI leave this until the 2nd week of the course. More drawings allowed me to work out the best shape of chainstay to allow clearance for fenders, the biggest tires possible, and the drivetrain on the opposite side. It was a fine balance to come up with something that allowed all the parts I wanted to work together to fit into a confined space, but with some sage advice from Paul I was able to come up with a configuration that looked like it would work. The most complicated (and frustrating) fixture was used to clamp the chainstays to the rear wheel dropouts and weld them in place… then the frame went back in the big adjustable jig to have the chainstays attached.

My frame now really resembled a bike, and it was even possible to put a rear wheel in place. This served the purpose of checking the alignment of the back end of the frame. Ham-fisted setting up of the fixtures and distortion from the heat of welding left things a bit wonky on my frame, but it was surprisingly easy to manhandle the chainstays straight before fixing them in place with the seatstays. My choice of seatstay tubes was again a compromise of tire and fender clearance, combined with my wish to use old-school cantilever brakes. My combination of road-style straight chainstays and cyclocross-style S-bend seatstays allowed all the things I wanted to fit on the frame to work in theory, so that’s the way Kermit developed (by now most of our frames had gained names). Attaching the seatstays was another awkward procedure involving some trial-and-error mitering to get a perfect (or at least acceptable) fit, and trying to clamp everything still while I tacked the tubes together. At one point I had to get a helper to flex the tubes into position while I made the tack and the stresses in the metal relaxed. The rear triangle was the greatest demonstration of frame building as an art rather than a science. With so many variables and heat distortion working to twist the frame apart as you weld it, having the “feel” or “knack” as us English folks would say seems to be the key to success.
Several of us in the class were able to get our frames all together with 2 days of the course left to go, whilst others hit problems requiring a little re-drawing or modification of the frame design to get things to work. However, despite having something that looked like a bike I was hardly home-free. At some point I had failed to align the rear end of the frame properly and was left with the rear wheel sitting at a strange angle. This was not what I wanted and it was too late for any more manhandling (or “cold-setting” if you want to make it sound proper). Luckily Paul had the suggestion of filing metal away from the dropouts, allowing the wheel to sit straight and then using the welder to build back the metal on the opposite side to the wheel would stay in place. An afternoon of filing and unconventional welding later, my frame was looking much better and I was ready for the finishing touches.
Whilst I appreciate the elegant simplicity of bikes that are not festooned with every bracket, trinket, and contrivance going… this bike needed to be able to carry fenders, a rack, and some water bottles. Working in Our Community Bikes has given be a loathing of poorly thought out attachments for these things that require bending of brackets, plastic clips, or other paraphernalia to get them attached. I want to be able to drill a hole in my fender and bolt it straight on. I think Paul was a little mystified by my keen attention to the placement of fender bridges and attachment holes on the frame, but he humored me as I got the hang of silver-brazing these things all over the place. It’s worth noting at this point that I disliked silver brazing very much. Sure, you get a nice neat joint and it’s much easier than welding… but all that messy flux, the soot and smoke and the big flame of the torch? Yuck. I’m going to weld them on next time if I can learn to weld such tiny things successfully.

With my accessory attachments on and the flux cleaned away, all which was left was a round of reaming, facing, and tapping to clean up the threads and other surfaces of the frame where parts would attach. My first frame, Kermit, was done! Fast forward a couple of weeks, one wedding, several aeroplane journeys, and a return to Vancouver I proudly showed off my creation to anyone who cared… and some who didn’t. I thought Kermit would be languishing unpainted and unridden in storage until summer 2012 when Lina and I will return from China, but Conor had other ideas. I had heard that YESS in nearby Surrey would powder-coat bike frames, and powder-coat was the finish of choice for an environmentally conscious bike builder who wants a durable finish. Conor had contacted YESS and arranged to take our frames over on Friday morning where they would be done in an hour. An hour? Unbelievable. Struggling to accept that it could be this easy I couldn’t wait to see what Conor would bring along to our leaving party that evening. So… on Paul and Angie’s excellent patio Kermit and I were re-united. Kermit is a splendid green and the man at YESS even plugged all the holes to stop powdercoat getting into placed powdercoat shouldn’t be. So Kermit is still unridden, but at least no-longer naked. Kermit’s maiden voyage will hopefully be in August 2012 and l have a year to think up somewhere appropriate to go…

The clock don't stop for no-one

2011-08-13T08:23:00.000+08:00

I can't work out whether that means the clock does stop, or if it makes no sense at all... but that is the situation we found ourselves in today. Conor cut it down to the wire with some last minute frame finishing, whilst I fiddled around fixing a few of my mistakes and we both walked away with frames that we made ourselves. It's pretty amazing.

The UBI course was excellent and we both really enjoyed the company of our classmates and instructors. It's been a fantastic 2 weeks and I hope the first of many frames Conor and I produce on opposite sides of the Atlantic. From travelling and working on my favorite form of transport, Now I'm to start an epic overnight voyage by one of my least favorite as I fly all over North America to get to Ottawa for tomorrow morning. The reason for travelling is a happy one though... I'll be re-united with Lina after a month of being on separate adventures and celebrating Asta and Derek's wedding. Party time!

"Kermit" sunning himself in the parking lot

Our instructor Paul has both great experience and a sense of humor...

Looks like a bike

2011-08-12T12:30:00.000+08:00

Barring some last-minute faff tomorrow, I have made a bike frame. This is exciting stuff... and one day I'll get to ride it. Until I can write something more meaningful, here are some more pictures.

Tee-pee life

2011-08-08T11:38:00.000+08:00

Conor and I have had a weekend away from the welding torch, so did our best to recuperate our strained eyes and nerves by swimming in the pool, holding down comfy chairs in the coffee shop, and of course getting out for a ride (followed by more swimming and chair-sitting). We are both recharged and ready for a second week of hot metal at UBI... we even washed our clothes. Tomorrow we start work on making somewhere for the back wheel to go, which seems like a good feature for a bicycle.

Our luxurious home in Ashland, plus an inventive washing-line

Conor kicking up some dust on "Catwalk"

Me, doing what Conor did.

Frame building photo update

2011-08-06T11:43:00.000+08:00

It's been a week of learning, successes, failures, and the discovery of $1 pints which threatened to derail everything. Fortunately we're still on the straight and narrow and we both have something that has started to resemble a bicycle. Mine has become called "Kermit". It's not easy being (potentially) green.

A monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely...

2011-08-04T12:02:00.000+08:00

...type the complete works of William Shakespeare. So a couple of chaps should be able to throw together some bike frames given enough time with a welder and some tubes. Right?

After 4 days of intense activity at UBI in Ashland, Conor and I have yet to produce a bike frame... but we have a pile of T-joints and triangular things called Grullions. Today things got really exciting, in that we drew plans of our frames-to-be and welded a piece of tube onto a bottom bracket shell, then snapped it off again with a big lever to see if we were actually managing to join things together. So far, so good.

An evolution of T-joints. From left to right: too cold, too hot, and about right (in places)

Can you tell what it is yet?

Choosing how to build our frames has been pretty strenuous on the emotions. We're going to be putting a lot of effort into these over the next 6 days and it would be nice if they fitted, and perhaps even rode well. Conor and I have converged on both making something in the road-bike style, though Conor's will be very much larger than mine. We both want our iron gates to be durable and something we can ride around town, carry some gear on, and generally live day-to-day bicycling life with. We'll see what we end up with. One interesting thing is that once we started drawing and figuring out how our ideas would fit into place, it became obvious for both of us that our mental image of what we wanted wasn't really in touch with the reality of what we wanted to do with it. Luckily one of our instructors in Paul Sadoff of Rock Lobster Bicycles who has many, many years experience of taking people's ideas and turning them into bicycles. Let's hope we can absorb a little of that magic.

Conor's hands, about to conjurer some metal magic

Conor's hands harnessing the force of electricity

Of course there's also our excellent (and unusual) accommodations at the hippie hangout spa just outside of town. What's not to like about a pleasant bike commute to school, living in a Tee-pee, and hanging out on vintage Indian furniture in a giant tent in the evening with transcendental music and spicy tofu flowing freely? Maybe the fact we can also go mountain biking from town when the weather cools down enough and the BMX track that we pass on the way home. It's not a bad life.

Our homework room...

Oregonners

2011-08-01T12:04:00.000+08:00

After a couple of weeks concerted effort, the apartment is looking very empty and all the things I've been putting off fixing for the past 3 years are in working order. This will be a lesson to me to get around to doing these things earlier next time so I can enjoy things like working power sockets for myself...

All of the packing and fixing rush was a build up to me heading south with Conor on a bicycle-infused adventure. Our destination is Ashland Oregon, where we will be attaneding the United Bicycle Institute's course fo bicycle frame TIG welding. To say this has been a long time coming would be about right. I first wrote for the course details 5 years ago and it has taken me this long, but we are on our way. Knowing very well that the journey is often more important than the destination, we left a lttle early and have been enjoying some barely-organized adventures along the way. Our first stop was with Chris and Kathleen in Olympia for a great evening and welcome bed for the night followed by a fantastic ride in the Capitol State Forest with Chris. The fast flowing singletrack there is the perfect contrast to our local trails (and Conor's birthplace as a mountain biker), the North Shore. Swooping through the red dirt and enjoying some long-awaited sunshine I felt like a housebound catepillar emerging from its cocoon as a butterfly... with wheels, or something.

Traffic through Portland sucks at rush-hour, and Friday night in late July is a dumb time to be looking for a campsite in Oregon. Despite these things, we found a place to stay for the night between Eugene and Bend and prepared ourselves for a shuttle-assisted ride down the McKenzie River Trail. This trail was 40km of mostly downhill singletrack, passing through lava fields, past waterfalls, and the bluest lake I have ever seen. The water looked like ice, and wasn't much warmer at about 5 degrees. We jumped in, and quickly jumped out again. Having been very hot we were totally refreshed in about 3 seconds. The rest of the trail was a mix of fast, swooping singletrack with occasional small climbs or a few technical sections. Despite having mostly ridden downhill, 4 hours of riding is still 4 hours of riding, so Conor and I were were ready for some further refreshment at the end of the trail. We jumped in the resevor to cool off and then sat in the sun outside a cafe. I love it when aplan comes together.

An Irishman as tall as a tree... in some trees.

Bizarre lava-rock with asphalt singletrack. Madness.

Waterfalls and forest of greenest green

A lake of bluest blue

Yes... it was really, really blue

...and really cold!

Today we arrived in Ashland and had a poke around the town which will be our home for the next 2 weeks. There's good coffee, a brewpub, bike trails from the town, and we're staying in a TeePee. I think it's going to be fun!

Everything counts (in larger amounts)

2011-07-12T11:16:00.000+08:00

If something's worth doing, it's worth doing until your bottom really hurts. I doubt this is true, but it seems to have been the theme of our trip to Whitehorse. Whether it was driving, mountain biking, or paddling... bottom endurance was tested to the maximum at all times. After 3 days of epic driving, some sleeping in the car, and a million insects squashed on the windshield we reached the oasis of Whitehorse. After an evening run along the river and then last call at a pub in town we walked home in the sunshine at midnight. I love summer in the north.

Back in 2007 Paul and I made the trip up to Whitehorse to ride the 24 Hours of Light in a team of four. Ever since then I've wanted to come back as I'm pretty convinced this is the best mountain bike race ever. Of course doing something that you loved for a second time is a risky business as how can it ever be as good as the first time? I needn't have worried... as 24 Hours of Light 2011 is now the best bike race I have ever done. Probably. Highlights for me were the course ending each lap with a 10-minute downhill filled with perfect corners and tings to jump off. Riding this at 3am as fast as I could with a bunch of friendly locals "whooping it up" behind me was a special moment. Lina and I even got in the local newspaper due to our efforts (and what we were about to do next). Lee Carruthers took some great photos, including this one of me, which I like and here we are winning some fine swag.

We were lucky enough to make some new friends in Whitehorse (via a Vancouver connection) who were excellent to us and helped us recover after the rigors of the race. I really can't thank David and Colleen enough (plus various human friends and also feline friends Sushi and Magic). We'll be visiting back north again...

The main event of our trip was to live out Lina's ambition to be the first to stand-up-paddleboard down the Yukon River from Whitehorse to Dawson. This trip is over 700km long, which really is a long way. Even when you're on a river that's flowing at over 10km/h... it's still a long way. I had my fair share of "I want to go home, or at least get out of this kayak" moments, but Lina's drive to finish the trip kept us going. As the gear-mule I was paddling a portly plastic sea kayak which took the "fun" right out of "functional", but got me down the river safely and kept me warm when the weather turned nasty. I even managed to persuade Lina to take it easy at times, though usually only when she was battling with the wind. On reflection it was an amazing way to visit a beautiful part of the world, to camp on inaccessible islands, and see first nations and the gold-rush history of the river.

Our trip on the river also attracted the attention of the Whitehorse Star's sports editor Jonathan, who was a little short on sleep having covered the 24 hour bike race and then the Yukon River Quest back to back. The summer schedule of fun is unrelenting with 24 hours of daylight to play with. Here's the article about our time on the river. My head will surely explode from all this fame.

We've also put together a video of our trip on the river as it seemed like the sort of thing that needed to be documented somehow. One day I will get some fancy video editing software so I can make a more sophisticated job of things, but for now... the world gets this:

Yukon River SUP Expedition 2011 from Andrew Dye on Vimeo.

Deep Cove Canoe and Kayak

Kialoa SUP Paddles

Mountain Equipment Co-Op

Icebreaker Merino Clothing

What was then and what is now

2011-06-20T23:28:00.000+08:00

Lina spent 2 days this weekend doing very well at the Kalamalka Lake Classic stand-up paddleboard races. So well in fact, that she won all three of them and retained her title as "Queen of Kalamalka". Lots of photos of paddling and winning can be found here.

Whilst Lina was winning, Paul, Angie, and I enjoyed the trails in the Cosen's Bay area of the lake at a more relaxed pace.

Paul about to escape gravity for a fleeting moment

Paul and Angie in a field of green

The wrong end of a deer

Now for what's next. Tomorrow, Lina and I leave for Whitehorse, where we'll race bikes in the 24 Hours of Light, and then Lina will attempt to paddle a very long way down the Yukon River from Whitehorse to Dawson... on a stand-up paddleboard. I will be carrying the beer and potato chips (and a few other things) in a sea kayak. As far as we can tell no-one has done this before (the SUP part, not the beer and potato chips)... which has let to a lot of interest and greatly appreciated support and advice. The following people have helped us out with some great equipment for the trip, which we will try not to lose or break along the way. Thank you!

Deep Cove Canoe and Kayak

Kialoa SUP Paddles

Mountain Equipment Co-Op

Icebreaker Merino Clothing

Wrongle

2011-06-17T01:29:00.000+08:00

Yesterday was my last shift at OCB and Monday will be my last day in "my other job". The times they are a-changin'. My last OCB day was enhanced with a bit of a special/awful/excellent (delete as appropriate) project. Our great friend Gary has discovered triathlon. I pity the fool, but then I did a triathlon once so who am I to judge? An essential part of triathlon seems to be obsessing over equipment and the bug has apparently bitten Gary, with some unusual symptoms. Before the race Gary got some faster tires for his flat-bar commuter bike and while he was in the shop picked up a rusty old drop-bar from the $5 bin. He told me about his plan to cut the hooks off it and jam them into the ends of his flat-bar. Knowing Gary, I had a feeling this wasn't actually a joke and feared for his life. I suggeted a few more-conventional options (aerobars, bar-ends), but Gary is a man who knows his own mind... and the drop bars were happening one way or another.

The race came and went... and then last week Gary asked if I could "take a look at his bike". The drop-bars were on there alright, but what was missing was any way of braking or shifting gears effectively. Something had to be done and I like a challenge, so rode the contraption into OCB and got to work. Unexpectedly, it turned out quite well (relatively speaking). You can hold the hooks of the bars, you can brake, and you can shift (with some dexterous finger-work). Obviously there's no "hoods" position that you can brake from, or even hold, but the bars are set really high which makes riding in the hooks pretty comfortable. I even managed to rig it up so a standard length gear cable is just long enough for the rear... despite the epic proportions loop of housing from the from the shifter to the frame. I learned the following things doing this that perhaps someone in the internet universe might find interesting, as unlikely as that seems.

Thing #1: Old steel drop-bars (from an old 10-speed) have a smaller tube diameter in the hooks than modern drops, so you can slide flat-bar shifters on there with no problem. The bulge also clamped just fine in a standard 25.4mm stem.

Thing #2: These flat-bar STIs with the brake reach adjuster wound all the way in mounted on the hooks quite well, and you can actually brake. Amazing.

Thing #3: Doing this "properly" would have involved buying a set of road STIs, plus changing the disk brake calipers to those Avid ones which work with the short cable pull of road brake levers. That's got to be at least $400 in parts... if I could even find 8-speed road STIs. Doing this the "Gary way" involved buying a couple of pieces of cable housing and some bar tape at a total cost of $28.

Thing #4: I can't wait until Gary races this thing again... I would love to hear the comments.

For the ultra-observant: the bar tape is wrapped backwards for a reason you know.

When will this infernal racing end?

2011-06-15T00:53:00.000+08:00

This weekend, I continued "not being really into racing" by agreeing to do another race. Ridiculous. This time I was half of a 2-man team with Paul, racing for Syndicate Industries in the 2nd Annual Wade's Excellent Adventure on Mt Fromme. The format was a sort of treasure-hunt style, where we were given instructions on which trails to ride, then came back for more instructions until we had done 3 loops. For anyone who this means something to, we rode: Seventh Secret, Crinkum Crankem, Ladies Only, Executioner, Dreamweaver, St Mary's, King of the Shore, Roadside Attraction, and Bobsled... with some Baden Powell and Mountain Highway thrown in to link it all together. Pretty much all of my favorite Fromme trails in just under 3 hours. Phew.

My increasingly wonky Blur 4X held together and we ended up 3rd in the 2 man team category and 5th overall... proof of which is here. Unfortunately we managed to be in the wrong place at the right time, and avoided the award presentations. Oops. Maybe one day I will learn to read the instructions carefully.

The tortoise and the hare

2011-06-08T00:24:00.000+08:00

This weekend I spent most of my time riding to, riding home from, eating post-race burgers at, or racing in the Return of the Ripper. I felt like a visitor is a strange world at the Friday-night prologue, surrounded by tall skinny people skipping up and down the trails on featherweight bikes... pre-race chit-chat about tires, heart rates, and such was floating through the warm (at last!) summer air. It was good to see some familiar faces from last weekend's NIMBY, the always-friendly (and fast) Kim from Steed Cycles, and a surprise visit from Paul who diverted his road ride to wish me luck. Having accidentally pre-ridden the course while I was trying to find the start line I knew I was in for a very short and very fierce ride. Sprinting for 15 minutes is not really my idea of a good time, and I'm certainly not good at it. I arrived at the tricky climbing section of the Richard Juryn trails out of breath and spent the whole thing slipping around and getting on and off my bike. I enjoy the challenge of these kind of climbs, but trying to race up them is a whole different thing... or is it? Maybe that's where I went wrong. Whatever, with the ritual punishment over I rode back in the evening sunshine, through North Van, over the bridge, and home.

Saturday's XC race promised to be more my style. The weather was great, the trails were tough, and it took about 3 hours (for me at least). I had a great ride/hike and enjoyed riding some familiar and some unfamiliar trails. How the elite racers get around the same course as me an hour faster is a complete mystery to me. I should have eaten some more food.... and probably put some special luminous energy powders in my water, but to be as fast as those folks takes something remarkable I think. Feeling a little humbled by the speed of the elite crowd I rode home and got stuck behind a huge group of folks enjoying the sun and riding over the Second Narrows Bridge. After a minute or so uphill, most of the gang stopped to push up to the top and let me past. It's nice to know where I fit into the cyclist spectrum... somewhere between elite XC racer and afternoon bridge-pootler.

Looks like I'm racing, right? Photo from Simon Chester

Last, was the "Super D" race on Sunday. Now that sounds pretty exciting doesn't it? It was. I couldn't face riding all the way from home and back again, plus riding up Mount Seymour... so I resigned myself to driving over to the Shore and "just" riding up the mountain. As luck would have it, some friendly racers picked my up on my climb up the hill so I only rode half way... which to be honest, was a relief. Standing around waiting for my start at the TNT trail, the realization crept in that any ideas I had about doing well in this were misguided. Apparently there aren't too many people (only 13 in my category) who think the idea of barreling down really tough trails, then up some things, and down some more scary things.... probably clipped-in on the same featherweight bike you just rode a monster race on yesterday... is a good idea. I think it's a great idea (except the featherweight bike part), but unfortunately I'm not as fast as folk like Wade Simmons who I was racing against. Heck, I don't even have a Wikipedia entry about me. You know you've made it when you're in Wikipedia. The start went great... I got down all the steep and slippery stuff on TNT on my bike, fell in a refreshing pile of mud, sprinted up the first hill on Dales, down the next, had a nice smooth run down Severed... and then failed to ride Sticks and Stones in any kind of respectable fashion. S&S is a fun, pedal-y trail and I usually really enjoy it, but it just wasn't coming together. Whacking my pedals into every rock and struggling to clip-in I clattered my way to the end. The finish was a gravel-road sprint, which was hard for my non-racer head to get excited about, but that's what racing is all about right... doing something different to what you would normally. The times the fast guys put in on that course on their XC bikes were again, incredible. I wish I could have watched them on their way down.

The overall results in the King of the Shore category (for those who did all 3 races in the same bike) show me two things. Firstly, the tortoise doesn't win if the hare runs all the way to the finish. Secondly, I'm one of only 25 mountain bikers around here (there must be thousands) who thought spending a weekend getting humbled by these races was a good idea, rather than just going for normal, type-one-fun, ride. Sometimes I like being one of those people... whatever that means.

Game plan

2011-06-03T06:32:00.000+08:00

I still claim that I'm "not really into racing", though it's not very convincing when I will have done 4 mountain bike races in 9 days.

Last weekend, I re-visited NIMBY50 which I entered last year. Note "entered", not "rode" there. About 30 minutes before the start of NIMBY 2010 I discovered that my bike was deflated (literally) and no amount of pumping air into the rear shock or tinkering with it was helping. I ran the course on foot... helped people fix their bikes and encouraged the last riders over the line. Then we drank a heroic amount of beer, sat on hay bales, and a good time was had by all.

This year I returned to NIMBY with a different bike (that Blur 4X that I had to hacksaw the back end off of) and a determination to actually ride the course this time. It worked out. The weather was perfect, the course was fantastic, and the bike not only held together but was fun to ride. Careful analysis of the results indicates that if I can keep up the same pace for another 27 years my time of 3h16m:34s might stand a chance of winning the 60-69 years category. A good aim I think.

This weekend I have signed up to race in the time-trial, cross-country, and "Super D" races in the North Shore Bike Fest. Quite why I have done this is a mystery to me... but it probably has something to do with there being a "King of the Shore" category limited to people who ride all three races on the same bike. That's the kind of thing I'm into. I do now realize that it's also the kind of thing that all the best riders in Vancouver are also going to be into. My plan for racing success seems to be fatally flawed. There is some hope though, after all... will all those fast folk still be there in 27 years time I wonder?

Watch out for my domination of the 2038 mountain bike racing scene folks.

Caribou number two

2011-05-20T06:51:00.000+08:00

Any old iron?

The great cycle (can you see what I've done there) of my bicycle ownership continues. My previous pile of vintage scrap-iron had outlived it's usefulness for me, and to adhere to my self-imposed "one in, one out" rule... it had to make way for an even older pile of junk. It was sad to see the Kona go, but I'm sure it will live again under a new rider. With our impending move to China, I need a robust bike that is somewhat inconspicuous and can be used for heavily-loaded touring. The Kona wasn't really ideal in either aspect and my other touring bike is a bit too high-tech for this adventure... so I felt fate was playing a role when the brother of my Devinci Caribou (a Canadian-branded, grey, steel, bike with yellow writing on it) appeared at OCB in the form of a 1982 Nishiki Caribou (a Canadian-branded, grey, steel, bike with yellow writing on it). In 1982 I was probably riding something like this (no that's not me), so I've never owned a bike from these early days of mountain biking. I don't really know what mountain biking consisted of in 1982, but the relaxed ride of the bike and simple components seem to make it perfect for a sturdy touring bike. It was also cheaper than fixing up the Kona.

Add some fancy new tires, my old Brooks seat, some funny Ergon grips, and it's a nice ride. I've been rolling around town on it for the last week or two and just need to give it a try loaded up some time.

Hewn from the finest Mangaloy

Snow to Surf, Vancouver to Yongchuan

2011-05-09T23:38:00.000+08:00

I am going through a bit of a lazy period for writing on here, mostly due to having been doing quite a lot of things in the real world and less on the internet. However, here I am for a few minutes now to synchronize my real-life events with my online persona. If only the was some elegantly designed contraption to make this process possible, and also stylish. Oh, that brings me conveniently to...

Last week I officially joined the hipster-generation and bought myself into Steve Jobs' range of tactile electronic accessories. I bought my first iPod. So far I've enjoyed sending emails, using Skype, and browsing the internet on it... but haven't really used it to listen to music. There's something wrong there. Still, I think it will be a useful thing for travelling and hopefully I won't lose it, break it, or decide that now I need an iPad, iPhone, and a MacBook.

Now, speaking of travelling... it looks like Lina and I will be leaving Vancouver in August and going to live in Yongchuan, China for a year. Lina will be teaching (something) in a Canadian-run high school, and I will be teaching English at the same place. This has meant a lot of running around for me to get my references and other pieces of paper in order. Also, I am enrolled in an on-line Teaching English as a Second Language course. All exciting and rather intimidating stuff.

I'm pleased to report that the weekend before last, Fig Rolls Racing had a fun mountain bike ride in Cumberland, slept in Darcy's yard, and then remained dominant in the Comox Valley Snow to Surf. We came in 11th place overall and 1st in Open Mixed... with a gripping sprint finish (that Lina and I lost) with 2 other canoes. The protagonists in order of appearance were: Paul, Nikki, Angie, Kala, Marc, Johnny, Dave, and Lina and myself... and we all put in some great efforts. When I suggested we all draw straws for the events next time, Dave replied "Why would you do that, when winning is so much fun?" Maybe he has a point... I do like the chocolate medals. Here are Paul's photos.

Paddling our way to the finish

This weekend, Lina went off to do some more paddling on Lake Whatcom on Saturday, while Andy, Alex, and myself went for a birthday-ride on the Shore. It was really, really wet... but I'm enjoying being out on my bike so much lately that I didn't care. I didn't care so much that some rather over-zealous riding got done and on the last trail of the day I punched holes through both my (tubeless) tires by landing on some rocks and left myself carrying the bike around that last few corners. It's been a while since I did that. To conclude Alex's birthday we drank some excellent beer and while some went off disco-dancing the rest of us retired to Andy and Marg's to watch Breaking Away, which I definitely recommend... despite the rather excessive product placement of Cinzano.

A ____ by any other name

2011-04-26T01:42:00.000+08:00

On our Trophy Hut trip, we decided that it was fair to describe any day of ski-touring or mountain biking as "essentially flat" if you start and finish at the same point. This works well with along with popular directions like "mostly downhill (apart from the climb)", "up and down (mostly up)", and "not (that much) further".

This weekend we made a trip to Washington State, stopping off in Everett for a SUP race (Lina's department), before heading down to visit friends in Olympia.

On our ride in the Capitol Forest of Washington State with Chris and Kathleen we explored the concept of optimistic naming a little further. We rode "about 20 miles", which took "around 3 hours"... and all of the climbs were "flowing". It was a great ride, on dry trails, in the sunshine.

The Washington jungle

The rains returned on Sunday, so we stopped for some unconventional riding in Seattle... under the I5 highway bridge at Colonnades Park. It is incredible what has been built under the highway deck. You can ride dry, dusty trails, jumps, and woodwork... in the rain, with the rumble of traffic above you. Strange, but fun. Photos here.

An Orange Bike, exploring the urban jungle

Future Reflections

2011-04-22T04:19:00.000+08:00

I have been quite retarded in getting any words on here about my recent winter activities, however, this has given me plenty of time to ruminate on the fun I've been having in the snow and as any cow will tell you... ruminating is great.

I've been into a few backcountry huts before to ski... some quite luxurious, and some otherwise. Some I sweated for, and hauled myself and all my food and gear in myself... for others I was whisked up in a cloud of spindrift and kerosene exhaust by the unlikely device that a helicopter is. Over the years I've come to realize a few things about holidays. One is that when I go away from home, I like it to be a contrast to home. As I'm lucky enough to live in a prosperous, peaceful country and be gainfully employed, my home is a rather pleasant comfortable and pleasant place to live. It's warm, it's dry, I can walk to the shops and buy food, and I have all-manner of contraptions to minimize the inconvenience of daily chores. Part of the fun of spending a week or two in the backcountry for me is doing away with all those things and entering a life of melting snow to make water, carrying loads of stuff around with you, and wondering if you have enough food for the week. This year I was able to experience both a trip of my own devising to the Trophy Hut, and also life within the dream-holiday of others at Durrand Glacier. It was interesting stuff... plus I got to climb up a lot of hills and slide back down them again.

Paul and I joined a group of folks last year in the Trophy Hut and I was quite taken with the place. It feels remote but could easily be accessed without resorting to incinerating too may pre-historic crustaceans, and the varied and complex terrain around the hut provided lots of potential for exploring. I planned a trip for March... late in the season for more daylight (and spring-break for Lina) and managed to recruit 10 friends to come along. Some ancient crustaceans were sacrificed to fly in our food while we snow-cat and self-propelled to the cabin to maintain the illusion of environmental responsibility without suffering too much. This balance worked out really well and the luxuries it allowed us (food) seemed all the more luxurious. The skiing turned out to be really excellent with deep, stable snow, and sunshine most days. We got to the summit of Trophy mountain and some pretty "ambitious" lines were skied with guidance from JF and Bryce. My organizers anxiety was put to rest when everyone had a good time and we all got home safely. Finding other huts than can be accessed without flying is now high on my list for future holiday plans.

Trophy Winners

Split between February and the first 2 weeks of April, I spent 3 weeks volunteering and skiing at Durrand Glacier Chalet. It's safe to say that I would probably have never been to this place if it had not been for Lina getting the job of High-School Teacher to the owner's family. It was a great opportunity for Lina to teach and live in the mountains, and fortunately I was able to earn my keep there by waking up in the dark every morning and pushing snow around, washing up, serving food, pushing snow from rooftops, throwing firewood, and generally doing what needed to be done. I was lucky to get to ski tour most days, including tagging-along as a helper for the tail-end of the group. Whilst having the responsibility for retrieving lost skis, unearthing fallen skiers, and carrying awkward objects was unexpected, I enjoyed meeting the guests and adding something their trip... even if it was just pulling their skis out of the snow. Durrand Glacier attracts people for far-afield, and I felt lucky to live within a few hours drive of a place that others will travel across the globe to experience.

Other than learning roof-shoveling and ski-retrieval techniques, what I brought away from Durrand was a scale I have not experience before in the backcountry. A single run could involve climbing and descending 1200 vertical meters, through the alpine, sub-alpine, into the forest and to valley-bottom. A topographical journey on skis. I also skied more glaciated terrain than I ever have before, and finally got the hang of skiing the deep snow in wide open spaces. It reminded me of my days of whitewater kayaking, when I moved from paddling steep, technical, low-water-volume creeks and paddled some "big volume" rivers in BC. It was terrifying. Whilst I had paddled things that were "harder" technically... the scale of the big rivers had me floundering. Whilst I have my preferences in all the things I do and it's fun to stick to your strengths, I find it rewarding to expand my horizons and become more comfortable when I am out of my element. Being able to do more things is better. Being the only telemark skier in my group for the whole time at Durrand even made me think I might even try out some Alpine-Touring skis one day. Maybe.

An alarming ski maneuver, with added pole in my backpack - Photo: Michael Fuller

Sea Level

2011-04-18T11:15:00.000+08:00

I am back in Vancouver after 2 weeks living at 1946m (occasionally higher, and occasionally lower). Today I'm enjoying trees, above-freezing temperatures, and bicycles. Eventually, I will get around to writing about all these things, and our trip to the Trophy Hut. But for now, here are the inevitable photos.

April on the North Shore

Trophy Cabin 2011

2011-03-29T00:18:00.000+08:00

A week in the mountains with friends, good times, broken skis, fixed skis, couloirs, craters, sunshine, and snow. I'll write something better than that eventually, but for now here are Tom's photos, Chuck's photos, My photos, and Lina's photos.

Me, just moments before eating snow, losing a ski, and sliding down the hill on my ass.
Still... it was fun while it lasted, and I got my ski back.

Up the Duffey

2011-03-07T13:42:00.000+08:00

This weekend I had an unexpected experience - I got the chance to stay at McEwan`s Farm in Pemberton, which I now know I`ll have to come back to in the summer to sample excellent U-pick strawberries. I met the horses, cows, calves, and cats... and ate part of a 300lbs Elk, and some apple crisp. We visited the Blackbird Bakery in Pemberton, which produced one of the finest croissants my ongoing search has found in North America. Amongst all this wholesome farmyard activity and gluttony.. we went skiing too. Excellent.

Despite an alarming number of my skiing friends choosing to attach their heels to their skis these days, we had a strong tele-turnout this weekend and were rewarded with fine snow. We climbed to Mt Chief Pascal on Saturday in hot sun and worked our way across to the shady spots to find the good snow before the sun cooked it into a crusty feast. After numerous attempts in the past, I think we found the "right way" down this time through cuts in the forest and a fun run back down to the road. Sunday brought some clouds and flurries, but joined by SJ and Alex we got a couple of great long runs in under Mt Cayoosh.

More photos here. Thank you to Jason, his family, and the farmyard animals for a fantastic weekend!

Climbing Mt Chief Pascal on Saturday

Luisa riding the line between light and darkness

Three Colours Bike

2011-03-02T04:29:00.000+08:00

These days I have 3 mountain bikes again. This is a very happy situation for a mountain biker to find themselves in... so much so that I feel I have reached a state of enlightenment in bicycle ownership. I never find myself wishing I had a different kind of bike, and each bike is particularly good at some specific thing which gives it an identity. How many and what kinds of bike someone needs is a perennial topic of discussion, to which I think the only honest answer is: you don't "need" any bikes at all. Ignoring that conclusion... I have 6. I think 5 would be a better number but I always seem to eventually end up with 6. Three mountain bikes, a touring bike, a BMX, and a utilitarian beast of burden.

Whilst moving my mountain bikes around at lunchtime I found they stack quite neatly against each other. I'm sure this is very significant, so I took a photo of it. Now I'd better eat some lunch and get some work done if I'm going to go for a ride later.

From right to left: The Orange Bike, my new bike, and the White Elephant.

Digging for turns

2011-02-21T09:02:00.000+08:00

I just got back from a week up at the Durand Glacier Chalet... where Lina is the teacher at the Durrand Glacier School of Higher Education (class size:1, soon expanding to 2). It's an amazing place up there, and lends itself to some unconventional PE lessons.

The deal was that in return for shifting snow from the heli-pad and walkways, plus doing various other useful chores, I could ski with the guests (as long as the shoveling got done). The first 5 days it snowed... a lot. This meant deep powder for skiing, and strenuous mornings and evening of shoveling. Luckily, I got to drive a snow blower to clear some of it, though there was a lot to be done using these types of things. I still managed to get out skiing 3 of these days, and then the weather gave us a break... meaning a couple more days of little snow-removal and fantastic skiing.

Ski-touring step 1 - go up.

Step 2 - go down again.

Step 3 - appreciate your work.

More photos here.

The bachelor life

2011-01-31T11:43:00.000+08:00

Well, not exactly... I'm still married. Phew.

Lina is off at the Durand Glacier Lodge teaching for a couple of months, which is the kind of job offer you can't turn down. Especially if your husband happens to know some things about one of the student's major subjects and can come up there for a week to tutor biology, ski, and shovel snow.

Nice work if you can get it eh? Yes.

Vancouver has been blanketed in the traditional winter layer of foul clouds and rain for the past few days, and frankly... I've had enough of riding my bike in the rain. Fortunately my teeth have healed up well enough that I can eat real food again, or I might have "totally flipped out and killed the whole town". Then today, like a load of sunlight falling from the sky... the sun came out. So we went skiing.

During the wetness, I have been occupying myself with a project. For a few years, Santa Cruz Bicycles made a strange sort of mountain bike... named for one thing (4-cross racing, like BMX on mountain bikes) but much better at something else. This contraption was the Blur 4X and was essentially the back end of a cross-country racing bike, glued onto the front end of something meant for riding down hills very fast. Like David Bowie's "Earthling", no one got it... so it didn't sell very well. However some people love it, and seeing as I like David Bowie... I though I might as well get one. That's not the real reason, but who cares.

What's important is that I bought one which needed some work... but had potential. An unforeseen part of that potential was the need for me to remove the back end of it off with a hacksaw. Still, that was fun. It's coming together now, and once I have one more part and a few more bearings replaced it should look like a bicycle. I should have done a photo-series of its rebirth, but I forgot... so you'll have to imagine me sawing up one of these and hitting several of these with a hammer, in the hope of ending up with something that looks somewhat like this. My hope is that it's going to be fun to ride up hills and then down them again, which is after all what mountain biking is.

They say Englishmen have bad teeth

2011-01-22T08:29:00.000+08:00

Well, check out these beauties. I've carried them around for most of my life and never used them for anything. Now they're on my desk. So, no more wisdom for me.

No news is good news

2011-01-18T01:49:00.000+08:00

Hello internet... I am still here.

I haven't done anything that has motivated me to write on here lately... but I have been skiing and biking in the rain, rebuilt my old "heavy bike" with an exciting new (to me) frame, have decided to send my old skis on to a new home (if anyone wants to buy them), finally finished the video/photo medley from our honeymoon that I've been ignoring for months, and made a little video of some very sub-extreme ski jumping. So, I've not been totally idle.

2011 begins - so we've just under 2 years left before the apocalypse

2011-01-05T13:06:00.000+08:00

Apparently. So we had best make good use of what's left. A crowd of Vancouverites celebrated impending doom by going skiing around the Duffey Lake area and drinking fermented beverages. I fell asleep before midnight, but I blame that on extreme travel fatigue, rather than the glass of wine I drank... or any pre-apocalyptic effects.

Pemberton New Year 2010 from Andrew Dye on Vimeo.

Trans-Atlantic

2011-01-04T06:42:00.000+08:00

Despite spending most of my life (to date) only a few hours from a wide selection of European cities, I seemed to mostly visit the furthest away and least obvious of them. On our trip to the UK for Christmas, we saw the chance to see somewhere new. Amsterdam seems to be known by UK university students (of which I was one once) only for the easy availability of certain specialist herbs, and the chance to walk along the street looking at ladies advertising the oldest profession in the world. It turns out there's a lot more to this small city than the UK students realize.

We were looked after fantastically by friends Adriaan and Bronwyn who are living in Amsterdam for a while. They gave us a place to sleep, cooked food to eat, and shared their bicycles and knowledge of the city with us. Thank you! Alongside riding funny Dutch bikes around frozen streets, one of the highlights was eating at OT301, an old school (we think) building, which has become a squat for a community who support themselves by running a vegan restaurant. An amazing place.

Cycling, Amsterdam-style

The best bike-parking in the world? Amsterdam central station.

Beer drinking, Amsterdam-style

A duck standing on a frozen canal... Amsterdam-style (?)

To fit in with our theme of awkward travel arrangements, our flight back to the UK was cancelled. To cut a long story short, we managed to get back... and to catch our flight to Vancouver in time for New Year skiing around Cayoosh, but in the meantime we had to entertain ourselves by visiting the tourist hotspots of Schiphol Airport.

Tourist Hotspot #1

Tourist Hotspot #2

Possibly not a tourist hotspot

Back in Canada... tired and jetlagged, we met up with the Vancouver gang to enjoy some of this sort of thing...

My brain may not have been in the same timezone, but it was great anyway (Paul's photo)

Sheffield Wednesday, Southampton Thursday

2010-12-26T03:54:00.000+08:00

We got to Sheffield (via Edinburgh and Manchester). Hooray! We had 2 missed days to make up for, so we started an intense program of mountain biking, beer drinking, curry eating, fish and chips, more mountain biking, and cups of tea. What more could I ask for? Thank you Duncan and Amelia.

Lina's first experience of Sheffield mountain biking, in unusual conditions.

I've never seen Rivelin Valley like this before

Fox Hagg slippery climb

Duncan's jump bike with bald tires treated me well

We bid our farewells and set off for Southampton for a marathon of friend and family visits. The weather held up, and we saw everyone. Last stop was Breamore Church for midnight mass. Happy Christmas everyone!

Snow to city

2010-12-20T08:02:00.000+08:00

Lina and I are on our way to the UK for Christmas... but our route has become a little more complex than we expected. But before I get into that, Paul and I took a pre-work ski up Mt Seymour on Friday and saw a great sunrise.

So, back to the collapsing travel arrangements. We were due to be in Sheffield right about now, but our flight was canceled... and our new flight left us in Newark without a connection. In order to make the best of this sad situation we've spent a day in New York City and will get back on our way to the UK tomorrow (fingers crossed). I've never seen NYC before, and it's been fun. We staying at the quirky, but rather good Pod Hotel. Tomorrow we're going to run around Central Park before we had back to Newark in the hopes of getting on a 'plane. Fingers crossed!

The need for Strong Bread

2010-12-13T12:58:00.000+08:00

It's been a festive weekend. On Saturday, Lina, Paul, Kala, and I went out to play in the snow. Our snow-fun involved a really very strenuous 1200m ascent of Singing Pass, to the Whistler backcountry. Once we got up there, we found ourselves surrounded by lovely snow so took a run on each of Cowboy Ridge, Oboe, and Flute. After all that, our legs had nothing left and we skied back down with the rest of the backcountry skiers and other stragglers through the closed-for-the-day ski resort.

Lina and Kala on the way up Singing Pass

Lina on Cowboy Ridge

Paul on Cowboy Ridge

Paul in Pillow-Hopping Action

Kala in flight too...

And here are a couple of me that I stole from Paul:

A couple of years ago I made some Italian Christmas cake as presents for friends. It was a right pain to make, and it's "firmness" resulted in a hefty dental bill for Paul. I decided not to repeat the experience last year. This year, to my surprise, I received quite a lot of encouragement to make it again. To ease the making process, Kala and Geraldine chipped in with some candied fruit peel... and to ease Paul's dental health I added a bit more sugar syrup to the recipe. So, Lina and I produced Panforte MkII. Here it is, looking tasty:

Panforte, ready for action.

West Coast Panforte - by Margaret Gallagher
Ingredients
1 cup almonds, lightly toast
2/3 cup hazelnuts, lightly toasted
1/3 cup shelled pistachios, lightly toasted
2/3 cup mixed candied citrus peel (orange, lemon, citron)
1/3 cup dried currents
½ cup chopped dried apricots
½ cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup unsifted, unbleached flour
½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably Dutch process)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
½ teaspoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon ground coriander
1 1/2 teaspoons powdered espresso
1/2 cup mild honey
1/2 cup granulated sugar
Confectioners' sugar

Preparation
1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.
2. Cut a round of parchment to fit the bottom of a nine-inch springform pan. Cut a
strip (or two shorter strips) about an inch and a half wide to go around the sides
of the pan. Butter the sides and bottom of the pan. Put strips around sides of the
pan. Place round in the bottom of the pan. Butter the papers on the bottom and
the sides and set aside.
3. Put all the candied fruits in a large metal mixing bowl. Working over the fruit,
sift together flour, cocoa spices and espresso. With your hands, mix the fruits
with the dry ingredients, thoroughly separating and coating the pieces. Add the
nuts and mix again. Set aside.
4. Put the honey and sugar in a medium over moderate heat. Stir with a wooden
spatula until the sugar is dissolved and the mixture comes to a boil. Insert a
candy thermometer in the pan and let the mixture boil without stirring until the
thermometer registers 248 degrees (stiff-ball stage). (This will happen soon after
the mixture comes to a boil.)
5. Working very quickly, pour the hot syrup onto the fruit mixture, stir with a
heavy wooden spatula to mix (you may work up a bit of a sweat!).
IMMEDIATELY transfer the mixture to the prepared pan.
6. Moisten your hands and firmly press the mixture into an even layer. Press very
firmly to make sure there are no air bubbles.
7. Bake for 35 - 40 minutes.
8. Set aside to cool. When the cake is completely cool and firm, remove the sides
of the pan and the paper strip (or strips) on the sides. Turn upside down on a
piece of wax paper and carefully remove pan bottom and parchment paper.
9. Through a fine strainer, generously sprinkle on icing sugar, forming a thick
coating. Carefully turn the cake right side up repeat.
10. Wrap in airtight plastic and store a room temperature. It also freezes well.

6th Annual Comox Mud Ride

2010-12-07T14:16:00.000+08:00

It was more of a snow-ride this year, due to a few "scheduling difficulties"... but it was a good time and the key ingredients of hot chocolate and large quantities of food were present. Oh, and bikes.

Lina keeping her feet dry

Mathilda not keeping her feet dry

Comox Mud Ride 2010 from Andrew Dye on Vimeo.

Monster chair

2010-12-03T05:52:00.000+08:00

The tendonitis in my wrist is improving steadily, but one problem seemed to be that the chair I sit in to work was too low. My desk is unconventionally made from two small sets of drawers (of indeterminate origin) and a nice piece of kitchen counter top that I found in the "scratch and dent" area of Ikea. Luxurious as this sounds, the ergonomics aren't that great. My chair (which I think was previously thrown-out of Paul's employer's office) was a good few inches too low. What I needed was a suspension-lift kit for my chair. If you can do this to a car...

...then I can raise a chair a couple of inches.

Home Hardware sold me some bolts, some big washers... and a found a piece of ABS pipe in the cupboard left over from making Lina's kayak cart. A couple of moments sawing and some fiddling later, I am triumphantly sitting on this:

"Bigfoot" of the office-chair world.

Baker dozen

2010-11-29T14:35:00.000+08:00

Well, it would have been if that meant 8 skiers. But it doesn't. Anyway, here is a video of some snow.

Mt Baker, November 2010 from Andrew Dye on Vimeo.

Then Kala, Paul, and I went to the Callaghan Valley for a bit of explore on Sunday. We explored plenty, found some great snow... and entirely failed to ski any of it. Word of the day was "fruitless", but not pointless.

Meeting other skiers in the giant marshmallow patch

Possibly the only turn performed all day

First Turn

2010-11-22T13:51:00.001+08:00

Brrrr. Winter is here. It was -15 degrees centigrade on the Coquihalla, which was chilly... but we found some good snow!

Zoa Ski Tour, November 2010 from Andrew Dye on Vimeo.

Creaky tendon

2010-11-19T03:26:00.000+08:00

I am lucky... in many ways now I come to mention it. But, my point is that I am lucky to have had a relative lack of injuries over the years. This is great, considering I fall off my bike a lot, I hit trees and rocks... and I ask my body to do things that it finds strenuous. I like to think that my fairly relaxed approach to things helps with that. If it hurts too much... I slow down.

Still, I have finally achieved a genuine "sports injury". Hooray! Oh, that's not so good is it. After out trip to Tofino, I had a bit of pain in my right wrist... so I ignored it. That proved to be a mistake. After a week of typing and fixing bikes I had a big red lump on my forearm, and a horrible "creaking" feeling when I moved my wrist. It has since become a party trick of mine to have friends put their hand on my arm and "creak" it for them. The reactions are usually something along the lines of "You want to put some oil on that".

It's getting better though. I refused a bike ride (imagine that) and ended up running along with the riders instead, taking a few grainy and blurry photos in the dark forest. I was pleased with these of Conor and Suzanne...

I had a relaxing weekend, watching some folk music, eating food, and enjoying the company of visitors Marc and Nikki (plus "live animals" Pippa and Mathilda). Between the rest from fun activities, a less crazy week of typing, and the inti-inflammatories the doctor prescribed me... I'm on the mend. Paul and I might go hunting for snow at the weekend... the winter is upon us.

Wetcoast

2010-11-10T09:52:00.000+08:00

We went to Tofino for the weekend to surf with Jas, Suzanne, and Julia. We found some waves, some rain, a rainbow, a great cup of tea (thanks to Ucluelet local Jessie for that), and a great way to wash the dust off my under-used whitewater kayak gear.

Tofino, November 2010 from Andrew Dye on Vimeo.

Stop. Hallow's time.

2010-10-27T14:16:00.000+08:00

In stark contract to my last couple of posts, I have no pictures... moving or stationary to share. I've been able to get out quite a bit on bikes lately, including a couple of rides in Squamish and Whistler which happened as a by-product of buying a new (to me) bike. Exciting stuff. I have a strict "One in, one out" rule on bikes, being the sort of person who would have about 7 bikes if left unrestrained. I don't think anyone needs that many bikes, so I limit myself to 5... if you don't count my pub-bike. Or the one in my mum's garage... hmm... Oh dear.

Anyway, the point is I have retired my old cyclocross bike and will sell off the parts I can't use. A sad day, but we move on and I will have a new mountain bike, which is far more fun than a cyclocross bike anyway. Besides, I only have 2 mountain bikes already. Oh dear.

To balance things out, I did something which involved no bicycles at all on Sunday. I ran in the Hallow's Eve trail race on the North Shore. The results are here, so you can play a for of textual "Where's Waldo" if you are inclined. It was quite fun, and there was lots of mud, and free cake afterwards... so that's good.

Halloween is nearly here, and I haven't got a stitch to wear. I'm sure I'll wing it somehow. Besides, I fixed 3 bikes tonight and will probably fix many more tomorrow at OCB... maybe I can just cover my hands with grease and go as bicycle repair man.

Starring in my own Western

2010-10-15T06:22:00.000+08:00

Our (now traditional) Winthrop Thanksgiving at Chris' place was full of all the usual cowboy mountain biking goodness, and I made a video! I'm liking this video thing, but maybe I will forget how to write. Paul has some pictures here, including this one... which I like a lot. I took a couple of non-moving pictures, which are here. Ten minutes of moving pictures, all involving bicycles, wait for you below...

Winthrop 2010 from Andrew Dye on Vimeo.

Thank-you Winthrop

2010-10-06T23:28:00.000+08:00

Last year we spent Thanksgiving in Winthrop with Chris and Kathleen. This weekend we'll be doing the same. Last year Megan made this great little video of the weekend... which I saw for the first time last night. What will happen this year?

Untitled from Megan Rose on Vimeo.

Magic numbers

2010-10-04T15:23:00.000+08:00

This weekend has been great for biking. On Saturday I rode on one mountain, with six people, for six hours, on seven trails. Good times. I have no idea how many numbers were involved, but today Suzanne, Paul, and I rode our last day in Whistler bike park for the season... and I had a new toy to play with to create six-and-a-half minutes of self-indulgence.

Tirdytree

2010-09-26T15:58:00.000+08:00

Today was my birthday. In my honor (or probably not), a new trail was opened on Fromme. So, we went and rode it... and some other trails... in the sun no less. Then we had people come to our place with great food and I made cake and beet soup, good times.

Andy (not me) and Luisa with North Shore concentration on their faces

A birthday boy on 7th Secret, featuring Andy's dramatic contribution

Bike, Hike, and Home.

2010-09-21T03:48:00.000+08:00

We're back in rainy Vancouver... though rainy Vancouver is quite a bit warmer than exotic Wells BC where we spent the past week or so. Our finale was racing in the Wells 7 Summits Bike and Hike. The race was a challenging, often confusing, and generally adventurous trip around Barkerville and Wells surrounding 7 peaks. There was plenty of vague route finding, spectacular views, a few punishing climbs... and lots of general fun in the hills. To my dismay I found I was doing quite well at the half way point, which meant I couldn't justify slacking off. With some moral support from my fellow racers I rode my rather small borrowed bike across the line in 3rd place, to win a piece of cake and a cup of tea (of my choice). You can't argue with that.

Meanwhile, Lina had suffered from the tricky course following and climbed an extra mountain. Whilst this had the benefit of getting to ride some extra bike trails, it didn't help her out in getting across the finish line. Luckily Lina also got the benefit of the fine volunteers and other racers and found her way across the line, having completed most of the course (though one wrong mountain). Over 6 hours after I finished the last racers crossed the line... in the dark, around 13 hours after the start. Epic.

I have just uploaded a whole heap of photos here.

The start line in Barkerville at 7.30am. Brrrrr!

Lina at the finish line

The honeymoon is over... but there are 700 photos to sift through.

Like all the things you can't explain...

2010-09-18T08:07:00.000+08:00

Another update from the road. We made it from Quesnel to Wells, made it down the dirt road to Bowron Lakes... then got in a canoe and paddled it through rain, sun, hail, mist, rain, sun, repeat, for 6 days. We were definitely the only people on the circuit with bike panniers for dry-bags, and possibly the only people without a propane barbecue, sun parasol, lawn chair, and kitchen sink. This did make the portages easier though. Tomorrow we ride and run in the Wells 7 Summits race, before we head home to Vancouver on Monday. The honeymoon is almost over. Here are a few photos of the things we saw on Bowron Lakes...

Portage... you get to do lots of this

Lina in her bannana suit

Some tourists on the Bowron Lakes

There was sunshine... sometimes

Bowron style yoga

Mrs Moose and calf

Lina watching Mrs Moose

Mrs Moose, standing rampant (ish) in Swan Lake

Luxury wetness

2010-09-07T13:30:00.000+08:00

We're in Quesnel. Our day off yesterday in Williams Lake was great... we looked around town, went for a hike around and decided that we have to make a long-weekend trip back out here with mountain bikes to ride the trails... and then watched a movie. This was all punctuated with lots of eating, and a little bit of watching the provincial barrel-racing championships (where you race horses, not barrels) which happened to be going on in the campsite (the stampede grounds）where we stayed.

The ride from Williams Lake to here was really, really wet. We ot rained on all day. In contrast... our ride into Williams Lake a few days earlier featured some of the best riding we've had so far, including a real mountainous switchbacked descent down to the Frazer River and over this bridge:

Can you find Lina in this picture?

Today, we experienced the foulest riding of the trip. The day was saved by a healthy dose of "second breakfast" and tonight we're enjoying the luxuries of the Travelodge (pool, sauna, dry clothes). We just picked up some excellent tips on stuff to do around here while playing pool and drinking beer in the pub too... so a pretty good day after all.

Soon we'll be back into the wilderness on the Bowron Lakes, so it's time to enjoy the luxuries of cleanliness and dryness (and the pub) while we can.

It's going a little something like this...

2010-09-05T09:56:00.000+08:00

We're on the road... and just arrived in Williams Lake. There are a lot of horses here. Over the past week or so I've been keeping notes and taking photographs (of course). So, here's what I have to say...

The North Coast Trail

First Day – Shuartie Bay to Cape Subtil. We were dropped off by the Cape Scott Water Taxi, in the rain. The boat ride over from Port Hardy had been fantastic in itself, we had porpoises surfing our wake on the way over... it was amazing to look down into the water and see the animals speeding ahead of us. I managed to get a few photographs of splashes where a porpoise had just been. A couple getting picked up by the boat gave their verdict of the trail: “wet”. Crossing the slippery rocks and trying to fill out our BC Parks registration and re-fold the map in the rain was a little frustrating, as was walking off in the wrong direction for the first 10 minutes. Once we had got on track, passed the family group who came in with us for an eight day trip, and got ourselves dressed for the warm and wet conditions (gaiters, board-shorts, and rain jacket) we started making good progress. The mud was deep... real boot-losing mud. There were some treacherous wooden steps clinging to the mud in places which gave us a break from hopping around mud holes, and boardwalks over the sections of marsh-land with weird stunted forest growing in it. Later we were told that there in a surprising amount of old-growth forest on the Island (I thought the whole place had been logged). Because of the poor soil in some places, the trees are small but hundreds of years old and aren't of any interest for logging. We met two girls who were on the last stretch of their hike, heading in the opposite direction, and who had done the route in 4 and a half days (our plan too), so we at least knew what we wanted to do was possible.

We passed by a potential camping spot of the day (probably where we should have stopped) and made our first cable-car crossing. After hauling the car back from the other side of the river and hauling ourselves and our pack back again we had both tired arms and legs. But... we carried on. Once on the coast we were hopping between tiny beaches, clambering up steep muddy slopes and lowering ourselves from trees down the other side. There was a water source marked on the map, but where was it? We crossed a dry creek. Oh dear. Fortunately we found the water source in the next and I added another 10kg to my pack, which is just what I wanted at that point. At last we reached Cape Subtil, and despite being on the end of a 10 hour day of hiking through deep mud we took in the fantastic deserted beach, and even found that there was a food cache and outhouse where we expected nothing. We set up camp, ate dinner, and started a reluctant campfire to end a long day.

Second Day – Cape Subtil to Shuttleworth Bight. We were determined to have a less fearsome day of hiking, and just needed to make it to the next campsite on the trail. It happened that this was for me the best portion of the trail too. Almost all day we were hopping across tiny beach, then back into the forest, climbing over logs... onto the rocks, looking in rock-pools, and back into the forest again. Our easy day still took around 6 hours, but that felt like nothing compared to Day 1. The campsite was hidden away in the trees so we set ourselves up a clothes drying and cooking area on the beach before we retired into the forest fr the night. We kept a look-out for whales swimming by, but they must have all been hiding. We did get a great sunset with the silhouette of a fishing boat... one of the only signs of other people we had seen since the first morning.

Third Day – Shuttleworth Bight to Nissen Bight. Whilst nothing compared to our first day, this was another long one. Very long beaches... some of which were a strange spongy (and smelly) mixture of dead seaweed mixed up with pebbles. The beach markers for the trail were all old buoys, broken free from their anchors and hug in the trees to mark the entry and ext to the beaches. Most of the other human detritus washed up on the beaches was fishing related too... which somehow seemed more appealing that the usual beach junk. Of course there were logs too. When I first came to BC I was amazed by the size and number of logs on the beaches, but now I couldn't imagine it without them. I love finding logs with old holes bored in them, and rusty staples and chains attached. I got to take some photographs of rusty metal, which is a beautiful thing (to me at least).

Fourth Day – Nissen Bight to Eric Lake. Whilst we had officially ended the North Coast Trail at Nissen Bight, complete with it's fishing-net volleyball court, hammock, and hanging chair (among other driftwood and fishing-debris furniture), we had a few more things to see. Eric Lake had a Ewok Village style camping arrangement of tent pads connected with wooden boardwalks. We had a quick dip in the lake but both quickly got too cold to brave swimming. We were tantalisingly close to Cape Scott at this point and could have made it out there if we had made another long day... but decided against it. We will come back with kayaks for that one! Our last morning of hiking was spent heading out to San Josef Bay, which is a beautiful beach. Small rocky islands stand on the end of sand bars, and at low tide we were able to walk out to them. The beach apparently gets good surf in the winter...

We were picked up by the shuttle van for the trip back to Port Hardy. Apparently only about 600 people will have hiked the North Coast Trail this year, but that number has grown dramatically in the few years since the trail was built. Along with the Juan de Fuca and West Coast Trail the North Coast is a punishing, but beautiful journey. Barely making over 1km per hour on our first day was hard, but you have to measure this trail in hours, not distance.

Back in the Saddle Again.

Phase... err, three? of our trip began by rolling off the ferry on a damp morning in Bella Coola. By not checking the ferry schedule we had a nice surprise visit to Bella Bella, en route... followed by a good sleep on the floor of the ferry. The day before had been punctuated by eating, and running over to whichever side of the boat whales were swimming past at the time. Not a bad way to pass 20 hours.

We rolled into Bella Coola at a rather early hour of the morning, but did a bit of “sighseeing”, hen headed for the cafe for a giant breakfast. It turned out we would need this later on. Bella Coola was a moist, but pretty mountain town, with steep mountains all around. Arriving by bike made us an instant conversation piece in the cafe (as it does everywhere else) and we got plenty of advice. The most useful piece turned out to be “get out of the valley before dark”... due to bears. There are an unusual number of salmon in the rivers this season and we'd seen then jumping by the ferry dock at Bella Bella. After another chance meeting on the road with a bear-tour operator on our way up the Bella Coola valley, we decided to tackle “The Hill” - 60km of unpaved road with a fierce 5000ft climb. We'd been told there was a good spot to camp half way up if we needed it, and we'd be out of the way of the bears.

The Hill was a monster. Heavily loaded bikes didn't help, but we plugged away at it and were at the camping spot far earlier than expected... so we filled up our bottles with glacier water and made a charge for Anahim Lake, and the start of the paved road. The plateau at the top of the climb was beautiful, with snow-capped peaks of the Rainbow Range all around and lakes by the road side. We maybe saw a handful of cars all day. I got the first (and so far only) flat tire of the trip, which led to a bit of strategic duct-taping the next morning to repair my slashed tire. If we were going to do much more of this, we would need beefer treads, but the paved road was so close... and we made it.

We arrived in Anahim Lake to find... not much. We did fine the best gas-station in the world though, who sold us chocolate milk, homebrewed beer, and a cinnamon bun. Plus they gave us directions to Escott Bay Campsite, a frustrating 7km of unpaved road away... but so worth it. We camped by the lake, and were able to cook and eat in an indoor shelter, compete with indoor fire-pit (exempt from the fire ban). Very content, we got a good night's sleep after a 150km and over 11 hours of travelling. Anahim Lake's only cafe (Donna's Place) doesn't open until 11am, but Donna was very friendly and sold us coffee and cakes at 9am. This is a happy situation for bike tourists.

Day two was a lot easier than Day one, riding on mostly a gentle downward slope for 116km to Graham's Inn at Tatla Lake. We loaded our stomachs with nachos, beer, and fries... we rolled the last 15km to the lakeside campsite. Another beautiful night of camping, and some dubious dried food later, we were still feeling good and 1 day ahead of schedule.

Our third day brought us about another 100km closer to Williams lake, through some of the areas of Highway 20 hit by recent forest fires. It was sad to see the devastated forest, with smoke still blowing across the road in places. We know from people we have met along he way that it has been much worse than this lately and e are lucky to be passing through now, and not two weeks ago.

Tomorrow we should arrive in Williams Lake, and are planning a day off (with our hard-earned spare day) before we tackle the West Fraser Road up to Quesnel... avoiding Highway 97. Then it's on to Wells and ditching the bikes for a canoe!

The North Coast Trail

2010-08-31T07:38:00.000+08:00

We're back in Port Hardy... but not for long. Tomorrow we head out on the ferry to Bella Coola. The North Coast Trail was great... beach camping most nights, crazy steep and muddy trails, getting rained on, the sun coming out, and hardly seeing another soul out there. A typically rugged west coast time. Here are a few photos:


Lina in the rain... straight off the boat

Crossing Skinner Creek... low tide!

A zombie on the North Coast Trail

Heading for Cape Subtil

Shuttleworth Bight laundry

Shuttleworth Bight locals

Nissen Bight kitchen

Lina (not) making friends with the birds

Nissen Bight beach furniture

En Route

2010-08-26T04:11:00.000+08:00

We left Egmont around 12.00pm on Sunday, saying our goodbyes and leaving our wedding guests behind to go off mountain biking, or just head home. Our plan was to head for Comox, wth Marc and Nikki providing the support vehicle (they were going that way home anyway). It was a real achallenge to stay awake on the 2 ferries after such an incredible, but frantic time both leading up to and on the weekend itself. Everything had turned out great... even if a few things weren't quite what we planned, and a few other things had never got planned at all.

Marc and Nikki's house has always felt like a sanctuary to me... and it was the same on tis evening. We ate leftovers and chatted for few hours until none of us could stay awake any longer. Ths was one of the best night's sleep I've had in a long time... on the wonky futon with Pippa the dog providing alarm-clock services in the way only she can.

We had a few last minute things to take care of in Comox... like finding some bike shoes for Lina (not the only thing we forgot to pack in the hectic lead up to the wedding). Luckily for us, Hefe at the wonderful Simon's Cycles came through with a used pari of shoes which fit Lina pretty well. Yet another piece of good luck in an amazingly lucky streak. Equipped with shoes and toothpaste we rode out from Comox with Nikki providing a bicycle escort as far as Merville... then e were off on our adventure. We decided to head on to Sayward, and we knew there was good food to be hd at the Cable House and the weather as still perfect. We even got a surprise roadside visit from Joan who spotted us on the highay as she was driving back to Comox. We had a few cake stops along the way and made itto Sayward before the rain.

Day 2 saw us heading for "Wossvegas" (Woss) for lunch and then past Nimpkinish Lake, which was tantalizingly close and watery, but we failed to find a way down to swim. Bah. Instead we rolled to Port MacNeill and had another great night's sleep. I think it's going to take me this whole trip to catch up!

Today we arrived in Port Hardy. I have purchased Port Hardy's finest sleeping bag (yes, I know forgetting that for a camping trip is an elementary error. Lina and I have been sharing the past 2 nights... which wasn't a romantic honeymoon plan of mine). Now we're fed and about to head to the water taxi office to pick up our supply package for the hike on the North Coast Trail starting tomorrow. Exciting stuff!

Planning that route, we're gonna take real soon.

2010-08-20T02:12:00.000+08:00

Lina and I are off on an adventure. Firstly the emotional adventure of getting married on Saturday... and then the kind of adventure we are more used to. Biking from Egmont to Port Hardy, hiking the North Coast Trail... ferry to Bella Coola... biking to Wells... and canoeing the Bowron Lakes Circuit. We'll be back around the 21st September. Wish us luck!

View Larger Map

Stag?

2010-08-18T00:41:00.000+08:00

This weekend something happened that I never expected. I had a Stag Party. In Whistler. The traditional veil of secrecy has been drawn over what went on, but it was appropriately ridiculous, whilst remaining classy...

There was plenty of this kind of thing

Some of this...

...and plenty of other fun. Paul made a beautiful story of it all here.

A local adventure (with a side of stand-up / sit-down paddle boarding)

2010-08-10T00:05:00.000+08:00

A few weeks ago we had planned a paddle up Indian Arm with a group of friends but for one reason and another, it never happened. This weekend brought us some much-needed rain and led to a lack of enthusiasm for doing... anything. We biked into town (got a bit wet), met some friends for coffee, biked home (got soaked)... then decided to go paddling anyway. Lina's vessel of choice was unorthodox - the Starboard racing paddle-board she's been borrowing lately. I borrowed our friend Gary's Necky Looksha IV, which turned out to be one of the most fun sea kayaks I've paddled.

Heading out into the mist

The paddle out was fast. Following wind and waves were fun for me in the kayak... but when it got choppy Lina needed to explore "sit-down paddle-boarding" on the unstable board using our paddle float as a seat. I think we might have just re-invented the canoe. Whatever it was, it worked well. We cruised into Granite Falls only 2 1/2 hours after leaving Deep Cove and set up our tent and tarp to keep ourselves dry. Practice for our honeymoon BC-bicycle-hike-canoe adventure perhaps? Only 2 weeks to go until we will be married and living out of bike panniers (one of those two things will be temporary). The rain held off most of the evening and we went and had a look at the falls themselves. The water was low, despite the rain, so we could climb up and get a good look.

The camp site seems to have been something else at one time with remnants of an old dock, a lighthouse, bits of asphalt, and logging(?) machinery here and there. I need to read some history.

Me, wearing my lighthouse costume.

The morning was beautifully calm, but didn't stay that way for long. Our journey home via the rather flash Wigwam Inn (unfortunately member's only according to the signs) took us into the wind and the tide. The journey home took about twice as long as the way there, but we didn't have to resort to towing the paddle-board at least. Was Lina the first SUPer to get to Granite Falls and back? Who knows... but it was a great way to spend a wet weekend.

Looking back up Indian Arm from Granite Falls

Calm Morning

Homeward bound

...the whip of thunder and the wind's dark moan ...open up the heavens, make it rain!

2010-08-03T22:55:00.000+08:00

To celebrate my new Canadian-ness we went up to Pemberton for the weekend. Life in Canada (in the summer at least) for me is all about riding bikes in the forest, and swimming in lakes. Pemberton is a good place to make both of these things happen.

On Saturday Paul, Angie, Kala, Meaghan, Lina, and I ride Resurrection, a trail that I first rode with Jacek a couple of years ago. A truly evil hot logging-road climb led to a a dust-bowl descent. As Kala said "It's like riding downhill on the beach".

Paul and Kala on Ressurection

Overhead shot of Lina and Paul from my tree-stump perch

There was a lot of post-ride eating, some swimming in the river... and digging of emergency water-drainage channels around Paul's tent as we were treated to a spectacular thunderstorm and torrential rain. Luckily the rain's enthusiasm didn't last.

On Sunday I had a date with the NIMBY50 course (part of it) as I didn't get to ride it last time we were here. Despite somehow hacking my knee open (riding uphill), we made it to the paraglider launch and launched ourselves in the direction of Overnight Sensation. Dust replaced May's mud and we had a great run.

Lina on Overnight Sensation

The gang thinned-out on Sunday night and Kala, Lina and I were left to ride Kill Me Thrill Me on our way home through Whistler. We all had tired legs, but that trail had plenty to wake you up.

Kala on the KMTM slabs

Paul took this one of me... which I like a lot

Canajun

2010-07-30T06:44:00.000+08:00

Today I became a Canadian citizen. I am very proud to be part of the country I have chosen to live in and it's just starting to sink in now what a big thing this is. It was a great feeling to hear all the accents and see different faces in the room... people from all over the world being welcomed into one nation. It's been nearly 7 years of paperwork and waiting (mostly waiting) to get to this point, but now it really feels like it's been worth it.

The hair-police will be glad to hear that I had a haircut just after the ceremony and no-longer look like a member of the Bee Gees.

Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you

2010-07-26T09:28:00.000+08:00

Between trying to do a good day's work, getting to grips with the fact I will be married in less than a month... and the surprise that I will become Canadian next week there has been plenty of other stuff going on lately. I estimate that around 50% of the food I have eaten since the summer came to Vancouver has been from a barbecue. In fact, I'm making myself late for another barbecue by writing this. There has of course also been food-unrelated fun. But first, here's something which was no fun at all.

I got my first "real" day at Whistler bike park the week before last. By real, I mean that I was wearing all my body armor and riding my "big" bike. Things were all going very well, until our first run on Dirt Merchant. I got to about the point that Cedric Gracia is riding right about here, taking the line up on the left to jump across the gap to the landing. I am no stranger to falling off my bike, and as the ground approached my reaction was along the lines of "Oh, I seem to have made a mess of this... but why?". The inevitable sliding, rolling, and bashing on rocks followed, and when I unraveled myself from my heap in the ditch I was pleased to find that my body seemed to move in all the usual directions, and no new ones. Suzanne (riding behind me) arrived and pointed out to me that my bike was not quite right.

Something is wrong here

I had, for the first time in 17 years of mountain biking... snapped a handlebar. This explained my sudden visit to the ground on the landing of the jump, which was nice to know. I replace my bars every year or so to prevent this kind of thing happening. Oh well. I made my way back down the mountain with my detachable handlebar on "Easy Does It", past a bear (yes, really) and arrived in one piece at the base of the mountain. As what had happened sunk in I realised how glad I was that I was wearing a full-face helmet and armor, and how this could have ended up much worse of me. All in all, I have come to the conclusion that this was my lucky day (of sorts).

With my missing skin gradually growing back, there has been some fun to have this weekend. Lina and I ran the Hanes Valley Rout from Lynn Valley to Cypress last night, which turned out to be great, after a bit of a rough start for me. I haven't run since Knee Knacker and didn't seem to want to either... luckily that changed. Getting home was a bit complex and ended up with us sitting at the bus-stop at 9pm on a Saturday night... drinking beer disguised in a paper bag. Now there's a classy date.

Creek crossing near Norvan Falls

Lina in the boulder-field

Still snow up there!

Today Lina was working over at Deep Cove, out on the water... so I headed to Port Moody with a king-sized group of the usual suspects for a ride. The sun was shining, and I was grateful for every moment we spent in the shade. The trails were fast and dusty and general good times (and a lot of faffing around) was had. These days I am enjoying my fashionably-wide-and-low handlebars. I may be rather late to the party with this trend, but it reminds me of when we all got "really wide" bars about 10 years ago... that were still about an inch narrower than what I have now. What with those and my remote-adjustable seatpost I am almost a dedicated follower of fashion... just a bit slow in getting on the bandwagon. The bandwagon sounds like a fun place to be.

Two kinds of old ironmongery

Forest faff

Why would anyone want to do that?

2010-07-12T04:19:00.000+08:00

"The Knee Knackering North Shore Trail Run is a challenging 30-mile foot race along the Baden-Powell Centennial Trail from Horseshoe Bay to Deep Cove... climbing 8,000 feet and descending another 8,300 feet in the process. Running Wild magazine has recognized the race as one of 25 toughest races in North America".

That sounds very impressive doesn't it? From the "second easiest glaciated peak in the world" last weekend to "one of the 25 toughest races in North America". I must be improving. I first heard about Knee Knacker 5 years ago when a ski-touring friend ran it. Having never run more than 10km (on the flat) at the time it sounded ridiculous. For a start, 50km is a long way... and look at the elevation profile. Outrageous. Five years later I have done some running (though not all that much really) and inspired by the ultra-marathon antics of Lina and Jacek, plus my survival of the Frosty Mountain 50km last year, I thought I should enter the lottery for Knee Knacker. Only around half the applicants get a spot anyway, so I would be fine. Then I got an email saying I was one of the 200 who got in. Uh-oh.

Race-day started with a 4am phone-call from Jacek to inform me that "he was on his way into town to get something he left at work". What could this be... his running shoes perhaps? or perhaps his lucky socks... Fortunately Jacek made it to my place and we drove over to Deep Cove in time to catch the last shuttle bus to Horseshoe Bay. Jacek had lost his heart rate monitor transmitter... so would have to rely on natural restraint to slow him down. He needs to be slowed down if you ask me.

It was really warm at 6am on the start line and I hoped we wouldn't get cooked out on the course. Then we were off. I shared a good bit of the first half of the race with this man, who I first came across in the race briefing on Friday night when he introduced himself to the crowd looking for a ride to the start line. He was quite a character... running along with his GoPro camera held above his head., commentating as he went. I think I'm going to have to get one of those cameras. The clamber up and scrabble down Black Mountain and Cypress was really great... big views and an entertaining descent. I felt just fine at the half-way mark where Lina had come out on her road bike to cheer. It turned out the nice man at Lynn Valley Bikes had helped her fix her broken chain on the way, despite the shop being closed. Thank you!

Cleveland Dam... half way.

I saw Lina again in Lynn Valley... three-quarters of the way though. By now I was pretty tired, but my knee didn't hurt, which was my main concern after the struggle I had with that in Frosty. Luckily there was a motivational banner along the way to encourage me.

Back in familiar mountain bike territory on Seymour and up the last big climb I was ready to get to the finish. The handfuls of sugary snacks and funny-tasting electrolyte drink had kept me going, but there's only so much of that stuff you can take. The boiled potatoes at the aid stations were fantastic... real food! I knew the last kilometer or so of trail would be hard as it's all up-and-down with steps and roots, but I enjoyed being back on trail after a short road section. Running on the road really isn't my thing. Then, after 6 1/2 hours it was all over.

Deep Cove at last!

Is my expression relief or just gormless? I'm not sure.

Knee Knacker was an amazing course, and now I can look over at the North Shore and think "I ran all the way across that". Well, I walked up most of the hills... but that is acceptable ultra-marathon technique apparently. Here are the results, look for me in 32nd place, and Jacek 30 places ahead of me!

Here are some more great photos taken by the volunteers:

Hollyburn aid station

Jumping up a mighty 6" off the ground wasn't so easy by this stage!

It almost looks like I'm smiling

All good in the Hood

2010-07-06T00:17:00.000+08:00

This weekend I got to see a new place. One way or another I had heard about Hood River from a few people and how good it was for wind, water, and mountains. We had been looking for a fun place to go for the Canada Day long weekend, but one way or another all our plans hadn't worked out. So... I voted to go to Hood River, ride bikes, and maybe climb Mt Hood. The day after the decision was made (last Tuesday night) a very unlikely thing happened... even by Lina's standards. Lina won the Deep Cove Tuesday night SUP race (this is not the unusual bit), and then got lent a damaged board to take to Hood River where they happen to have a Thursday night SUP race, and the board needed to go anyway to be repaired. One thing I learned on Tuesday night: stand-up paddle boards are really big and are difficult to get into small apartments. However, Lina had a race to enter and a board to race on... 600km from home.

Early to Thursday we drove south to sit in the US border line-up for 2 hours. I was glad to see that finally a system has been invented to try and reduce the massive amount of idling engines at the border. The new system of moving forward in groups doesn't really work just yet... but it is a step in the right direction and I managed to keep the engine off for longer than usual. We got through and cruised down I5 to Portland. We rolled into Hood River in time to buy a bike trail map and for Lina to register for the SUP race. This paddle was to be a little harder than in sheltered Deep Cove as Hood River has plenty of wind and of course, current. There was a good group out on the water who powered off toward the toll bridge over the Columbia.

After around an hour the leading guy came past... looking surprisingly relaxed but moving very fast. Apparently he's a pro kayaker, which might explain that. There was some fierce competition going on in the group of guys behind the leader... then Lina appeared. Due to a bizarre coincidence of Lina wearing the same colour shorts and having similar hair to one of the local girls... everyone thought she was someone else. Lina rounded the last buoy and made it in to the finish line as the first girl, surprising everyone (except me) and reclaiming her true identity.

Coming into the last corner

We were not the only Canadians in the Tucker Park camp group by the Hood River that night. The place was full of BC licence plates and there was even a little impromptu Canada Day fireworks display...

On Friday we drive out to Post Canyon, to ride some of the local trails. We started off on a nice, flowing XC loop, then rode up to the top of the canyon to find a longer downhill run. Things got a little complicated here as some trails were closed. My curiosity paid off and after riding down a few promising trails, only to find they weren't so promising after all we found the top of 8-Track. This was a fantastic fast descent with lots of corners and little obstacles. The red clay-ish dirt packs down into a really great trail surface and makes you bike look like it's been to Mars. What else do you need?

Climbing on the Seven Streams loop

Looking for a way back down

A fun way to get back to your car at Post Canyon

We stuck to the dense area of trails in Post Canyon, but still managed at least 3 hours of continuous riding. There is a lot more there to explore one day...

After a day of the near-instant gratification of mountain biking we went for something a little harder-earned on Saturday. Climbing Mt Hood seemed like a great idea until we left the sunshine of Hood River and hit the rain and cloud of the Timberline Lodge parking lot. It was 5 degrees and we could barely see the road. As we were there anyway, we filled out our climber's registration and went to sleep in the back of the car with the alarm set of 3am. I didn't think we would be going anywhere the next morning. At around midnight, the parking lot started stirring. We heard several groups get up and go, but I was very grateful for another couple of hours sleep. Our time came tough and we staggered out in the cold and dark... following the trail up the moraine to the side of the ski lifts. I was relieved to see the moon and stars in a clear sky and the headlamps of the other climbers on the glacier above us. Maybe it would be clear!

3am and ready to go

In the shadow of the peak on our ascent

Things went well and we moved fast... passing a couple of other groups on the glacier and meeting one earlybird on his way back down. He gave us a few tips on the route and said it was perfect up there. I was glad to be in the shadow as the sun rose, the air was warming up, but the snow stayed solid and it was quick and easy climbing. Considering this is one of the most popular peaks around (apparently the second easiest glaciated peak in the world), it wasn't too busy and we only got a bit of ice kicked down on us. Helmets were a good plan! We made our way up to the summit ridge, peeked over the cornice toward Hood River, spared a thought for our friend Bob who loved the mountains, and turned around. It was only around 7.30am, but the sun was coming up and we wanted to be down before things warmed up too much... plus I was ready for breakfast.

A tourist on Mt Hood

Lina on the descent, with lunar-landscape

The express route back to the car

We spent the rest of the day eating, faffing, and watching kiteboarders on the Columbia River. A quick swim in the (freezing) Hood River and a celebration beer put us to sleep by 9pm.

We had a lunch-date in Portland on Sunday and it was time to go home, so we got up early (not as early as Saturday though) and went for a quick ride on the 8-Mile Loop (which was 5 miles long) at Surveyor's Ridge. For a short ride, the was fantastic. Fast and dusty trails, great views, alpine meadows... it will be great to come back and do some of the big rides in that area one day.

Lina climbing to 8-Mile Lookout

Lookout!

The descent from 8-Mile lookout

It was great to see Hood River and I am inspired to get back there for some long rides... and to get on the water! A few more photos are here.

Sun Country

2010-06-21T22:19:00.000+08:00

We've been having a bit of trouble with summer here in Vancouver. Like an old lawnmower, it was dragged out of the garage at the first sign of spring and dusted off. After a few attempts it got going... choked, and died. We've cleaned the plugs and pulled all the grass out of the air filter, but it just won't keep running. I don't think I can stretch that analogy any further... but you get the idea.

So, we traded in Vancouver for a place with better weather this weekend. Like an electric lawnmower (I knew I could get some more out of the lawnmower thing), the Okanagan seems to just work. The weather forecast was so bad for this weekend some of the cafes closed "due to weather" before the weather even arrived... but undeterred, the sun shone, the air was hot, the lake was cold, and the trails were flowing.

First order of the day was for Lina to race in a sport that is poised to take over the world (possibly). Stand-up Paddleboard racing looks to the casual observer (me) like a cross between a mass miracle of water-walking and rush hour in Venice. I have had a go myself and it is fun, though I think I would ideally like some waves under my board. Kalamalka Lake and the Kalavida Surf Shop in Vernon hosted the inaugural Kalamalka Classic SUP race meeting. Saturday's race was a quick dash around and through the Oyama ismuth with a portage. Kala and I took care of some bike-maintenance while Lina managed to come back from a fairly terrible start to win the race!

Want to know what a SUP race looks like? Now you know.

...and this is how you win a SUP race.

With pushing back the frontiers of sport taken care of... we went off to eat a pizza and go for a ride on the Kal Lake Park trails, thanks to our trail map from Sun Country Cycle in Vernon. We followed the suggested XC loop on the map and were treated to sunshine, meadows, and even dust on the trails. Oh Vancouver summer... where art thou?

Lina on "Acrophobia"

In the evening we headed back to Oyama and Gatzke's Farm Market, for a great dinner, some cider, a game of boules (bocce in Canadian), and to see Lina collect her prize paddle. We also got a huge haul of stickers and a pink trucker-hat. Winner.

Too early on Sunday morning we headed back to Oyama (again) for Lina to start her "real" race all the way to Vernon. That's a really long way... I think 20km. We met up with Irish friend Conor and "the Savages", missed Lina's race start... but saw the 3 girls paddle off for Vernon, followed shortly by the guys. Kala, Conor, and I got a great ride back at Kal Lake Park with some nasty hot climbing, some great views, and some ripping descents. We even got to cool off in the lake half way around.

An Irishman in the Okanagan

Kala on the Lookout Trail

All re-united on the beach in Vernon, we found that Lina had got her second victory of the weekend and could still move her arms... so we celebrated with lunch in the pub before heading back to moist Vancouver.

Ultra-concentrated Joy

2010-06-15T02:35:00.000+08:00

Now available in bottles.

This weekend I went to Winthrop... a place I have had some great rides the past few years. This time I was with Alex, Malcolm, Vince, Chuck, Ned, and Tom... who I've (mostly) not ridden with before. Same place, but a different time of year and different people. There were certainly more green plants that I am used to seeing in September/October, and it was about 35 degrees warmer than the last time I was biking there.

After a later arrival and necessary sitting around and drinking beer, some sleep, and then an extravagant breakfast... we set out on Saturday to do one side of the Starvation Mountain loop. Would that make it the Starvation Mountain arc? There was some fun creek-crossing to be done and we pedaled up until we hit the snow. En-route I managed what is becoming my signature crash... getting jettisoned off my bike down a precipitous slope while I am riding uphill. This time an overhanging branch caught in my pack, and refused to let go. The tension fired me off the back of my bike and down the hill. I escaped mostly unscathed, but how I ended up down there took some explaining.

Vince running the gauntlet of "bike shoes on the log over icy water"

We were looking forward to riding back down this

Tom demonstrating correct snow-crossing technique

When we reached the end of the singletrack we turned around and rode back down. The descent started muddy and slippery, with deep snow patches to plough through.... then fast and dusty through the burned forest, and finally back on the exposed trail cut into the loose valley side. Fun! The evening progressed from swimming in the lake and making friends with a local dog, cooking too much, eating too much... and finally trying to build a hot air balloon powered by beef fat. The beef-balloon was a sadly a failure, but version 2 will happen one day.

On Sunday we rode the Buck-Mountain loop which had far more cow and wildflowers than I am used to seeing. The place felt alive and looking at the snowy peaks in the distance reminded me of some of our ski touring trip this winter. For now, I am happy to see some sunshine and warm temperatures. Hopefully after the shaky start, summer is here to stay.

Ned's video evidence

Putting things together

2010-06-11T04:06:00.000+08:00

Last weekend I at last got out on a trail maintenance day... in the sunshine no less. It's been ages since I did one of these, and I've missed the satisfaction of hauling rocks around and digging in the mud. This time I went along to the Knee Knacker trail day on Baden Powell. There is even photographic evidence of my bucket handling skills. I'll get to run along our new section of trail when I do the race in July. Maybe we shouldn't have put so many steps in it...

On Sunday we headed out to Port Moody to Leo and Karen's yard-warming party and for a ride. We rode up to the superbly-named "Decapitator", then all the way back down the mountain to the waiting barbecue. The trails out there make me think the North Shore must have been like that when the trails were new, before all the rock-paving was done. It was good to ride some different stuff and to give the new fork on The Orange Bike a trial run. The departure of my old Santa Cruz (post-NIMBY50) and the renovation of The Orange Bike is now finished and it's feeling very sprightly indeed with it's new handlebar, tires, fork, and various bearings. I also bowed to current mountain bike fashions and fitted a Gravity Dropper seatpost that I can remotely activate to spring up and whack me in the groin. Sounds great. Now I just need to finish making my cyclocross/road bike back into something I can ride and I will have an apartment full of working bikes... until I break one again.

Here it is, a picture of my bicycle on the internet.

Not In My Back Yard

2010-06-01T05:59:00.000+08:00

The past couple of weeks have been eventful. There was some great weather, and some great rides on the North Shore. I managed to put a stick though my hand on one ride, then the rains came and I managed a spectacular crash on one of our evening rides. As a t-shirt I saw at the weekend said... "Confidence: the feeling you get before you fully understand the situation". I limped home after the ride, and that weekend we headed up to Pemberton to ride more. My damaged wrist and ribs were not at all happy and I crawled my way back down the climb were due to race in the NIMBY50 the next week. Perhaps in sympathy for my creaking body, the fork on my favorite bike wheezed its way back to the camp. How long has my fork been that bad? I don't know... but my wrist was not enjoying it.

After one frantic week of work, my Canadian citizenship test, and trying to figure out a working bike to ride in the NIMBY, Friday was upon us. I had got the new bearings for my Iron Horse and fixed that up... but a 43 pound bike didn't seem the right tool for a long cross-country race. The orange bike was still sick (though I bit the bullet and ordered a new fork) so... I dusted off "old faithful", a 10-year-old Santa Cruz I bought for $800 to do BC Bike Race and Trans-Rockies on 2 years ago. That would be fine. As we got ourselves ready in the pouring rain at the NIMBY start line, things were not fine. The rear shock released any air I put in over a few bounces, leaving the bike sad a droopy. It was too late to rush around and borrow a bike... so I came up with a new plan. I found the volunteers and asked if I could sweep the course by running it (yes, on foot). They thought I was crazy, but agreed that I could be useful.

I waved Ned, Tom, Megan, and Lina off on the start line, then short-cut the first few km of the course to start my run at Happy Trail with Nathalie the 2-wheeled sweeper.

A damp start in Pemberton

They're off...

The race course was fantastic... even on foot. The volunteer crew made me very welcome and I loved being part of the race, despite my lack of wheels. I managed to make myself useful by fixing a chain (thanks for the beer whoever you were!), and encouraging the tail-enders. One racer made the choice to pull out after the first (massive) climb and descent, so I ran to to catch the next rider. With some encouragement we made it to the finish in time for the barbecue and beer. I've no idea how far I ran, but I was on my feet for about 5 hours in total. I was pretty happy with that.

The party after the race was perfect. Hay-bales, beer, a fire, music. Awesome. Tom, Ned, visitor Holly, Meagan, Lina, and I managed to do a good job of drinking beer and ended up closing down the party and sleeping in the forest. It would have been the perfect bike race, if I had raced a bike. I will be back next year!

Things to make and do

2010-05-09T23:50:00.000+08:00

Discussing our weekend activities in the pub last night we came to the conclusion that this must be the first weekend of spring in Vancouver. The sun is shining, people are cleaning, gardening, and enjoying the slower pace of life that seems to come with longer daylight hours and warm weather. I've done my bit for the spring nesting efforts too.

But first... after work on Friday night I made my first step along the road to running in the Knee Knacker in July. I started off as usual running along the trail by the water to Burnaby. It was a perfect evening, sunny and not too warm, so I thought I'd do a loop on a few trails in Confederation Park... up to Hastings St, then go back home. I got to Hastings and I could see Burnaby Mountain. There's a really nice trail that goes up there, so up I went. The result of all this was me arriving home 2½ hours later, quite hungry... but feeling optimistic about running. If I can get out for runs like that every couple of weeks I should survive. Maybe.

My legs weren't exactly fresh on Saturday morning, but good enough to propel me around to buy a new bathroom door. We decided our closet-sized bathroom wasn't improved by being painted beige, so about 6 months ago we bought two shades of lime-green paint. Last week the paint finally made it out of the hole behind the washing machine and onto the walls. We cleaned up all the old shelves and other bathroom paraphernalia and bought a new shower curtain... and are very pleased with the results. The last problem was the door. A full-size door made actually getting in and out of the tiny place quite challenging, and it was beige... so out it went. I bought a folding door and after a few hours of experimentation I got it to open and close. Finishing this project means we can move to phase two of the war on beige, which will also be beige's last stand. Will a rusty-red colour conquer the kitchen wall? I think so.

Home improvement

Thanks to Marc for this!

Full of confidence from my door-attachment success, I tackled another task that I bought the parts for about 6 months ago. A kayak cart. These things are great, you strap it under your boat and they allow you to wheel it around like a wheelbarrow. You can wheel it onto the ferry, wheel it to your car, wheel it around Canadian Superstore and load up for your expedition if you want... except you'll probably get thrown out. I had found a really fantastic pair of wheels, complete with rainbow tires and just needed to to the chopping, drilling, and gluing of the ABS drain pipe to get the thing rolling. I went for the simplest design I could come up with and am pretty pleased with it. Hopefully it works.

Roll, roll, roll your boat

It doesn't end there. Oh no. I went up to Commercial Drive to check out the Stone Soup Festival which it turns out is named after a myth that I'm sure I was taught in school. It was a good place for a hungry person to be. I came back home, full of food, and ready to tackle my own bit of urban farming. Our balcony isn't spacious enough for raising chickens, keeping bees, sowing oats... or any of that, but after some experiments last year I know I can grow tomatoes and a few herbs.

I love the smell of tomato plants in the morning

After all that excitement I was ready to relax by riding my bike down Fromme as fast as possible with Krista. We'd not been biking together for ages and it was great to catch up... and had a great run down damp, grippy trails in the cool forest. Today I'm off to Squamish with Paul and Angie for an XC ride in the sunshine. Spring is here. It's great.

Row, row, row, your boat

2010-05-04T02:34:00.000+08:00

Over the last week I had the pleasure of being out on the water quite a bit, in some wildly different conditions. Last week's Tuesday Night Race was really quite epic (or as epic as one hour can be in a kayak). Lina and I were paddling Ben's double surf-ski for the first time this year, a boat which always presents the possibility of falling out. I cheerfully ignored the weather forecast and we loaded up the twitchy boat and headed out. Waiting for the starting horn we were entertained by intermittent torrential rain, rainbows, and dramatic shafts of sunlight streaming through the clouds... pretty, but not so warm. Finally we were off and straight into a raging hailstorm. To our left was a spectacular rainbow and marble-sized hailstones were ricocheting off my paddle, stinging my ears, and exploding on the water all around us. The weather eased up as we rounded the island the was the turning point in our course and hung on (keeping the boat the right way up) all the way to the finish line. Success! Photos of that are here, and there was a video that I'm looking forward to seeing when it appears here.

This weekend we went over to Saltspring Island for the sea kayak "guide exchange" put on by SKGABC. I'm not a sea kayak guide, but Lina is... and I winged it. There was an eclectic group of fun people, who were pleased to see us turn up on our bikes and provide us with some paddling gear to get on the water to Samsun Narrows on Saturday. It was the maiden voyage (appropriate as it involved a ferry) for our new touring bikes. Mine is a mysterious Devinci of Our Community Bikes origins... and Lina has a spangly new Brodie Elan. Both bikes need a few things worked out... before we need them for a ambitious/foolish/fun trip we have planned later this year. To say we "have it planned" is a bit of an exaggeration, but it's coming along. More on that later.

Lina on the way out

The guide exchange was fantastically well organised, with food, a place to gather in the evening, demo boats, skills clinics, and classes. I am filling in the gaps between what I know from sailing, whitewater kayaking, and paddling surfskis... and will hopefully become a competent sea kayaker. I got a lot out of the weekend and it was great to catch up with our friend Jas who is off on a big solo adventure up the West Coast in his kayak this summer. Inspiring stuff!

Our lunch spot

A colourful bunch

Chocolate Success

2010-04-28T01:55:00.000+08:00

This weekend we (Fig Rolls Racing) won the Comox Valley Snow to Surf Relay. I've never won a race before... but I think I like it, as long as I get to eat the medal. Chocolate medals get my vote of approval.

Paul somehow managed to not only race, but also be everywhere on the race course and take some great photos. Here.

Johnny took a picture of us on our way to the beer garden... and I wrote a thing on the Fig Rolls Blog. Congratulations Fig Rolls!

Forma de Ocho

2010-04-20T06:39:00.000+08:00

Lina and I just got back from our "Plan G" trip to Baja, California Sur, Mexico. Lina was going to go on a yoga course... which was cancelled, so we were going to go to use the flight coupon to go to Central America, then we were going to Hawaii... and some other places. I don't remember. We didn't end up doing any of those things. What we did was rent some kayaks for 6 days from Sergio at Mar y Aventuras in La Paz. We were very pleased to find out that we could go unguided, and get all kinds of help with fuel, advice, rides in trucks, maps, and tolerance of my horrific Spanish from Sergio.

Our destination was Isla Espiritu Santu, and we had a plan to make the 4-mile crossing from the Baja peninsula and get around the east side of both islands whilst the weather was calm so we could shelter in the bays of the west side when the forecast winds came in. We were making the crossing with nearly 50 liters of water and all our food for 6 days on board, which thankfully was swallowed up easily by the big expedition boats. I love how much weight you can carry in a kayak without it really slowing you down much. It was a good feeling to be fully self-sufficient... as long as the water didn't leak. The wave heights of over 2 meters in the forecast had me a little apprehensive, but it was a calm morning and we set off without a hitch. The east side of the island was steep and rocky with very few spots to land, so we pushed on to La Partida, the sandy spit between Espiritu Santu and Isla La Partida to the north. We were all alone with an empty fishing camp giving a bit of a tropical ghost town air to the place.

As the sun went down the calm weather gave way to some very persistent wind. We had the tent tied down to a kayak and managed to get some sleep despite the flapping tent and crashing waves. I did have to get up at 3am to fix the blown-in front of the tent as I hadn't expected the wind to shift 180 degrees. In the morning we found sand had got into the priming pump on my stove, meaning that didn't work... and the wind blowing in our ears added to the frustration. Was this a taste of things to come? We packed up and hid behind a shed full of lawn furniture (yes, really) while I fixed the stove. With that done we were ready to brave the ocean. We abandoned our plan of heading around the east side of Isla Partida and stayed on the sheltered west side, hoping to get out to the sea lion rookery. We learned our first lesson about the weather we were to get... by lunchtime the wind was still and it was beautiful for paddling. We paddled out to the rookery, through the stone arch... and then finished the day by carrying on around La Partida and all the way to the first cove back on Isla Espritu Santu. The "Figure 8" route was born.

After a strenuous couple of days we could afford to make leisurely progress down the west coast of Espiritu Santu, stopping at deserted beach after deserted beach... swimming in the warm water and really feeling like we were on holiday. The (numerous) pictures tell it all.

The islands were unbelievably dry, with weird desert plants and hardly any living things to be found... except gekos, who love the camera. We were alone on the beach every night and only saw one other group of kayakers to talk to, we really felt that we were out there on our own.

Our last moment of nerves was the night before we crossed back to Telacote beach. Those clouds looked funny. It's windier than last night... right? Should we leave early, like we were advised... or wait for the calm afternoons we have been getting? We climbed to the top of the hill above the beach and phoned Sergio to cancel the boat shuttle back to safety... it would be more fun just to paddle it. Right? As a good omen we saw our first fellow-mammals on the island. Rabbits. Apparently they eat the water-holding underground "potato" part of the desert plants.

The morning came (accompanied by a lot of mosquitos) and we packed up and were gone in record time. I kept my eyes fixed on the cliffs on the other side of the channel... were we getting pushed to the right? Were we half way across yet? No monster-waves appeared and we made it across quickly and safely, in time for a second breakfast of fish tacos and beer on the beach. While we waited for the truck to come and get us we set up the slackline in an empty beach-bar and almost instantly made some new Mexican friends.

Back in La Paz, we cleaned ourselves... and needed to find a way a way to spend our last 3 days. Would we get the bus somewhere? The options seemed to be getting dropped off on the highway in the middle of nowhere, or in a tourist resort. We decided to stump up the cash and rent a car. Our plan was to find the El Chorro national park (with hot springs), which we were helpfully told was "impossible without a guide". Not deterred, we made a few notes from the internet (where everything you read is of course true) and set off. With a little help we found the springs and hiked up the canyon to find a nice pool. It was scenic, but the water was definitely "frio", more than "calliente".

Then on our way back we spotted someone.. who turned out to be a local cattle rancher out for his afternoon dip in the hot springs... complete with fish that nibbled your toes. Success!

We had some dirt-road misadventure on our way back north, but spent the afternoon stand-up paddle boarding at La Ventata, thanks to Captain Kirk (no, not the one you're thinking of). Then it was back to La Paz, return the car, pack our gear and get our last meal at the fantastic (and inexpensive) Super Burrito. We managed to wander through an astronomy festival somewhere in between and narrowly miss a school dance recital, but that's another story...