Crossing the Great Divide

location: Lethbridge Library
km cycled today: 25 (we've got a ways to go yet)
km cycled total: 1900ish

Amidst torrential downpours and high winds (luckily they were coming from behind us), we made it through the spectacular Crowsnest Pass and into Alberta. Seriously, it didn't stop raining for over 48 hours. I was soaked to the core. There were moments of which I was on the verge of tears (like when I got a flat in the middle of nowhere, and soaked the inside of my bag when I was trying to dig out my patch kit, or when my disk brake slipped out of place and proceeded to grind at such an obnoxious frequency that I contemplated hurled my bike into the flooding fields and mounted a bull instead of trying to deal with it). All the folks we talk to here say "water hasn't been this high since the floods of '95". Newspaper headlines read "Floods Submerge Alberta Towns". But still we pedal forth, determined to make it somewhere, anywhere, at the end of each day come hell or high water. I think the Trans Canada Hwy is under water from Medicine Hat to the Saskatchewan border, so perhaps we'll commandeer a boat and strap our bikes to the deck for that stretch. Or take another route. We made some hilarious videos but this lousy library internet connection is too slow to load them. So I'll have to tell you what happened instead.

Once we crossed the Great Divide, we entered the rolling hills of Alberta. We passed the town of Frank, entering a landscape of giant boulders and rubble, evidence of the devastating rock slide of 1903. It continued to pour as we made our was east, and we became increasingly cooler as we descended from the Pass. Dad decided to make some gloves out of bagel bags, which proved to be moderately successful in keeping his hands dry. My gortex booties failed to keep the water out, and soon my socks were squishy and my toes numb. We watched the water levels rise in the fields around us, shocked as what used to be trickling streams became rivers of brown flowing muck with tree trunks and miscellaneous farm items floating down them at a rapid pace. The windmills were incredible though! So much bigger than I imagined them.

We arrived in Fort Macleod around 8:30pm, and rode against the wind into the nearby rec side. Setting up camp in record time, I speedily stripped out of my wet clothes and changed into my warm pjs, then tucked myself into the tent while Dad went to pay for the site. I spread PB and J on a bagel for dinner (there was no way we were cooking outside in this weather) and commenced to munch inside the confines of my warm but damp sleeping bag. A few minutes later Dad came back to me with the bad news: we were camped in a flood zone. The entire rec site, as well as the neighboring campground was being evacuated because the river had risen 3 feet in little more than three hours, and by 2am we were guaranteed to be under water.

The next nearest campground was 10 miles up the road, which meant we'd be cycling into a north wind and it was getting dark. I was devastated. Putting my cold wet spandex on and tearing down camp was just awful. We braved the rain into Fort Macleod, and looked for a motel and a liquor store. Luckily, we found a nice place (haha, by nice I mean cheap-it had the 'O' of MOTEL burned out and looked ghetto fab, right up our alley), cranked up the heat, used out tent poles as drying lines for our waterlogged belongings and split a 6 pack of beer, a bag of cheezies, and a couple of sticks of pepperoni. Truth be told, it was a riot. We watched old movies on the grainy TV and shared ridiculous stories as we sipped our beer from the comfort of our toasty warm room. But, while sitting in a warm tub and waiting for my toes to regain feeling and colour, I couldn't help but think that all those people who said I was crazy were right...