When the bridge is waShed out, turn around.

Today, Monday 8/22 we shipped Mimi’s boxes and some of our gear back home. Mimi landed safely in Boston and has a consult with a hand surgeon tomorrow. We are so sad she is not with us- we miss her good humor! Tara unloaded about 5 pounds of unnecessary stuff but I could not ship my heavy charger or lithium battery light which were the two heaviest items I wanted to unload. Oh well, maybe I will need them! I ditched a down jacket and chair and a few off and ends. We road 32 miles from Fernie to Baynes Lake, camping at an RV park where we feel fairly safe from BEARS. The trails leaving Fernie climbed a lot of switchbacks on smooth single track. Within 2 hours we came to a washed out bridge a deep ravine. We used all our straps, tied in a daisy chain, to lower the bikes. I’ll try to post the video…..including lunch it took us about an hour to get the bikes down and back up the other side. We had unloaded all the bags and we had to carry all the bags separately due to the weight. When we came upon the next washed out bridge we found a detour on fairly nice roads. We weren’t doing that again!!! There is a lot of pipeline work going on and a lot of construction workers and heavy equipment on the road. We also passed an area with lots of tents which we believe was a fire fighting staging camp. Late in the afternoon we made a stop in the elk River to cool off and then we found a gas station and put slushy‘s in our water bottle. (and bought chips and jellybeans but don’t tell my sister Angela that’s what I’m eating ….) The ride from there was partly on pavement with crazy traffic and then we passed an area with beautiful dry grass, looks like a prairie. The weather seems hotter here and the landscape is getting a bit drier. It’s still warm at 9:30 pm, in the 80’s. We had a strong day back on the trail.