On Saturday, a plan was hatched to ride “Kananaskis 8”, a route described in one of the trail books. I’d never heard of it. After a few kilometres of riding, I had a fair idea why. Although the trails might have been great in the dry, as it was, it was a corrugated mess of sloppy, muddy horse track. Do not want! So we decided to bail out onto the Prairie View trail, and rode up Barrier Mountain (this was all Chariot and Moosling-free, otherwise the mud would have been even more fun).
Then as none of us had ridden Razor’s Edge before, we thought we’d finish up that way, and then bike along the highway back to the car. It would have worked much better if it wasn’t so hideously windy. In a typically windy area, riding a technical trail along a ridge, on an especially windy day – well it was interesting. The last section of trail we walked, and the wind was catching at my bike and blowing it into the air.
Sunday was a family outing with the Chariot, biking from Canmore out to Skogan Pass (about 45km return, with 1300m of climbing). Instead of continuing out along the old road beyond Three Sisters, we turned towards the highway and followed a rough road that sits near the highway, and is a lot flatter and more sensible riding than the higher option we’d ridden before. There was still the big climb up to the pass, but at least we weren’t already exhausted from hauling the Chariot up and down a steep “road” with fallen trees across it.
There were still a few snow patches higher up, but nothing the Chariot couldn’t be ridden across. And then there were summit baguettes and scroggin, and flying back downhill again (briefly interrupted when we saw a cinnamon-coloured bear cub, and waited until he got off the trail and went back to hang out with his mum).
(Sorry for the slightly dodgy quality photos, I haven’t been taking my good camera out biking, so it’s strictly phone photos)
