After a fitful night of sleep, we awoke when the guys in the cabin started making noise, as we were stationed right outside the door.... We arose and put on our slightly less stinky but now very damp clothes and set about making breakfast. Ziven was chatty and so we didn't pack up super fast, but we enjoyed some oatmeal and company before putting on our shoes and praying to Obama for good weather. We wished our Bay Area friends well and nudged them to look for my rain fly on their journey. We also found out that one of them follows Ziven on Ride With GPS which is quite a coincidence. We bid them farewell and set off on some mellow gravel roads. We chatted and climbed for a while and soon entered a logging site with huge construction equipment. Luckily it was not a workday and we could marvel at the scale of the machinery without losing our hearing. At the biggest site we saw a family coming the other direction, clearly out for a morning spin from Fernie and our hopes grew. We barreled down the smooth and relatively empty roads for miles and the family zoomed past. We eventually caught up to the mom when the three of us had to stop for a HUGE logging truck to pass. While waiting, the mom tipped over on account of her clipless pedals (not important, just funny) and we comforted her and chatted for a while while descending. We eventually saw the family packing up at their car by the trailhead and we turned up a small paved road to enter the town from the fancy mansion bike path side.

We passed beautiful houses with gorgeous views and soon popped out by the incredibly inviting kiddie splash pad that enticed our stinky selves. We googled where to go in town and found a bagel shop with coffee and the works. The bagels were quite strange (whole wheat?) but the sandwiches were perfect medicine for my wounded pride and grieving soul (RIP tent rain fly). We sat around for far too long enjoying the WiFi and the views and right when we begrudgingly reminded ourselves this was not our final destination for the day, our friend from Salida pulled up and we bid him good luck on the rest of his journey. We quickly grabbed Canadian cash from a bank, in order to pay for campsites without advance reservations. We restocked at a grocery store and I momentarily panicked at the high high prices before reminding myself of the Canadian dollar exchange rate. We reluctantly said goodbye to the haven of Fernie and promised we would come back and enjoy the town sometime in our future. Our route has us trudging along a highway frontage road for some time. After a while, the route started to become questionable and we ended up at a dead end by a quarry wastewater pond and on some truly awful railroad tracks with huge rocks that hurt the butt and the spine and the arms and the hands and the eyeballs jumping around its socket. We eventually re-emerged on the frontage road and grumbled about having spent an hour making slow progress just to get back on the same frontage road we could have been using the whole time. The day wore on and we made slow but steady progress across a wide valley with lovely views. Mentally we were being challenged by the fact that the town we were heading for was really a district that was thirty or so miles across, so although we were “in” Elkford at 4pm, we wouldn’t get into our campsite until 11pm. We stopped for some grub at a Safeway located next to the “World's Largest Truck,” a green monster of a logging truck and a true behemoth of a road going vehicle. We pushed on and weaved our way through Canadian coal miner suburbs, which looked just like American neighborhoods but with identical company pickup trucks with miner ID numbers and a 10 foot tall traffic flag poking up from the bed. Eventually we noticed our route deviated from the smooth and speedy highway shoulder to a gravel climb. We battled with the knowledge that sunset was not too far off, we were adding 5 miles by doing a harder and slower detour, and we could, most importantly, make it to the one restaurant in town before they closed for chicken nuggets. We finally begrudgingly agreed that we had gone this far without major trail deviations and we shouldn’t start now, so we sadly turned off the main road and headed for the gravel climb. We passed a bus full of miners on their way to work and they motivated us to scoot up the hill. We made decent time and stopped for a snack at the top. I was convinced I heard the snuffling of a bear as we ate our dried apricots in a clearing and made us hurriedly pack up and set off again. We got briefly lost as the rutted 4x4 trail confusingly twisted on itself and we passed a couple out for a sunset drive in their jeep. The sun was half a degree from setting, and we were on the edge of panic as the woods closed in around us before we popped out on an empty road at the top of a hill with Elkford proper sprawling out below us.

The road led to the mines at the top of the mountain and because everyone had already gone home, we were able to scream down a lovely brand new mountain road as the last bits of gold leached from the sky at 10pm. It was exhilarating and we probably hit speeds unacceptable for nighttime riding, but we eventually caught up with the couple in their jeep and headed to our campsite. It was a super huge and packed camp and we registered and paid our funny Canadian money and tried to find a place to pitch our tent in the incredibly busy hike a bike section. A huge group of older southbound riders had taken over the area and we almost tripped over already snoozing folks in bivy sacks as we maneuvered between two trees. Yearning for a shower, we quickly set everything up and took turns with the towel in the very nice camp showers. We met up again in the camp cooking area, a well lit open air building with lots of tables, and ate bars and snacks for dinner before snuggling into our sleeping beds and finally going to bed around midnight. In the middle of the night a deer ran through our campground and, having trained myself to yell whenever there was a sound just in case a bear was up ahead, I yelled “YEWW!” in my sleep, spooking the old biker who was sleeping a few feet away.