Bicycle Alaska 2008: Instalment 5

BICYCLE ALASKA, 2008

by

John Berry



Instalment 5: Dawson Creek, BC to Saskatoon, SK.

Hello All: As several people pointed out, the last message, from Battleford, SK, was empty. This was because I goofed and had no time to correct the goof. Here is the continuation of my trip from Dawson Creek to Saskatoon. I will bring you up to date on theSaskatoon-Winnipeg leg later. John
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This instalment of my blog has been cursed - I am in Winnipeg now at my friend Stan Korowski's house, and we just had a power outage that destroyed an hour's work. The section below with short lines is the part that I failed to finish in Battleford ten days ago. The final part of the message brings the story up to date from the time I left BC.

Well, I am totally incompetent today, and can only blame exhaustion. The last episode was sent from Dawson Creek, BC, on completion of the Alaska Highway. This instalment gets me to Battleford, Saskatchewan, a very historic town in the heart of the Canadian Prairie. Relative to my adventures in Alaska, the Yukon, and B.C., this has been an uneventful section, marked more by strenuous exertion against headwinds and encounters with giant trucks than by tough hills, bears and bugs. Leaving Dawson Creek I got caught in yet another heavy shower on very muddy roads at Pouce Coupe (the Cut-down Flea??), resulting in a garishly filthy appearance for the rest of the day. However, I did try to take a photograph of the beautiful, rolling Peace River country and its patchwork of bright yellow Canola and green hay and wheat, with a really dramatic sky above it. Just south of here was a little Memorial Park and campground for the Sudeten Pioneers, but it contained no explanation of the who's and why's of their migration. After this park the last 10 miles of road in BC were truly dangerous: the riding shoulder was useless as it was covered with gravel, so one had to ride on the narrow, 2-lane road itself. This was populated by a constant stream of heavy oilfield equipment on 30-wheeler trucks, and large RV's. At the Alberta border I met two young men taking a break on their way up from Pittsburgh, PA, to Anchorage. They had been battling headwinds across most of the continent.

On leaving them I noticed that the number of "floaters" blurring my vision seemed larger than usual, and some seemed suspiciously organized, reminding me of the pattern that appeared when my retinas tore. On reaching the little Alberta town of Hythe, drenched in yet another rainstorm, I enquired about seeing a doctor. It turned out that there was a "Surgery" of sorts (i.e. the doctor was in from 8.00-10.00 pm) down the road in Beaverlodge. However, unlike the good old days, I would have to pay an Emergency Room fee of $369 to see him, and then his fee: all would have to be in cash or credit card, and no insurance could be filed. I therefore evaluated the new floaters and decided that the risk that they were related to a retinal tear was small enough that a doctor's visit could wait until I got to the next big town, Grande Prairie (population 39,000 and growing rapidly). So I spent the night in the nice campground at Beaverlodge, and in the morning rode the 30 miles in to Grande Prairie, where I spent too long in their excellent museum before going to the eye doctor's. This was unlike anything I had ever seen before - huge, with about 8 doctors and a very large opticians' area.

The doctor agreed with me that there was no new retinal tear, but did tell me that new floaters could result from vibration or shaking of the head. So it was significant that I noticed them after riding the roughest ten miles of highway on the whole trip – 10 miles marked by having to repeatedly cross and re-cross the rumble strip. I walked out of the doctor's office into bright sunshine with my eyes dilated and the usual plastic excuse for emergency sunglasses. After having a meal at A&W, as in the root beer, but there is a very extensive chain of restaurants with this name in Canada, I set off eastwards on a quiet highway. However, a thunderstorm appeared to my right and gradually closed in on me, until I was forced by it, and the lack of accomodations for many more miles, to stop at Bezanson, where I ate dinner at the local diner and rigged a camp-site in the local baseball dugout.

The next morning I tried to adjust my very badly out-of-whack front derailleur. All of a sudden there was a loud report, and the thing went slack – an internal spring had broken. I decided to hitch a lift into Valleyview, the next town, where people said there was a bike shop, Robb's Sports. A trucker, Willie, offered to take me in. He was hauling two trailers of molten sulfur in a typical western Canada 30-wheeler. We strapped the bike to one side of his truck, and off we went. Willie was very talkative, and was a Mennonite from the community at High Level, off to the north. He had been married at 18 to a 17-year-old girl, and they had 4 kids. He had a 7th grade education, and the family spoke Plattdeutsch at home, as did the rest of the community. I had seen such a family in the doctor's office the previous day, only that family had had 8 children. Willie was 27, his father 49, and his grandfather 70. Willie regarded the modern Mennonites as being too concerned with material possessions, but admitted that he was as much enmeshed in the material world as anyone. In Valleyview he dropped me off, but Robb had no suitable parts, so we just removed the broken gear shift and I set off again.Fortunately, there were very few steep hills between Valleyview and Edmonton, so I did fine without it. However, this road, Alberta 43, the continuation of the Alaska Highway, was very busy with 30-wheeler trucks. I estimated that about three-quarters of these were related to the oil industry - rigs, tanks, tankers, etc. There were also a fairly large number of heavily loaded logging trucks near Whitecourt. The noise and sudden gusts of wind were offset by the high quality of the Alberta roads and their riding shoulders.

The night of July 17th I spent at a campground in Meyerthorpe, planning to have breakfast the next day in San Gado, a small town 10 miles away. San Gado turned out to be off the highway and I could see no restaurant from the road, so I kept going. There was a little town marked every 10 miles on the map, and I was getting close to Edmonton, so I felt sure I would soon have a good breakfast. However, the next town, Cherhill, had no restaurant, and neither did the next, and by the time I found a restaurant attached to the Esso station at Gunn, I had gone 40 miles and was beginning to weaken. While I was eating in Gunn a storm that I had been trying to outrun broke upon us, and I was stuck there for two and a half hours. During that time I watched one of the few near-violent confrontations that I have seen in Canada. A lady who owned a restaurant in downtown Gunn, which, as is typical in western Canada, is a kilometer off the main road, came to stridently complain that the owners of the restaurant I was in had destroyed her advertising sign. This the Korean owner of "my" restaurant equally loudly denied, and pointed out that her sign had been on his property, anyway, and she had no right to advertise a competing business on his property. Our cook got involved and there were threats and counterthreats.

When the storm cleared I took a diversion around Lac Ste. Anne and through the resort community of Alberta Beach, where the lakeshore was lined with very swish summer "cottages".I came out on the main TransCanada Highway, and by evening was in Edmonton. It turned out that even the Motel 6 cost $145 per night, so I called Ingrid and asked her to go on line and find the cheapest hotel in the central area and book it for me through Travelocity. This she did, but due to the incompetence of a newly-hired desk clerk and the delay in Travelocity bookings showing up in the hotel's system, not only was the first room I was assigned un-cleaned from the previous occupant, but we have been charged twice! Everywhere in Alberta and western Saskatchewan waitresses and store clerks would answer my questions about prices or menu items with "I don't know, I have only been on the job two (or one or three) days." I eventually discovered that the natural resources boom has created such a job shortage that employers are offering even unskilled workers bonuses to sign up. This has resulted in employees hopping from job to job, collecting sign-up bonuses but never working at any one place for more than a few days. Hotel prices are vastly inflated because oil rig crews get a $180/day cost-of-living allowance, and the hoteliers have figured out that it costs them about $40 to eat. The other $140 is available to spend on a room. The smart roughnecks are camping out in tents or secondhand trailers in municipal campgrounds for $5-$10 per night. Roughnecks earn $350 for an 8 hour shift, with typically several hours of 1 1/2 or double time overtime, so they are taking home up to $100,000 per year. Alberta alone has 300,000 jobs going begging for lack of people to do them.

I was going to spend Saturday, July 19th, as a rest day in Edmonton to tour the city, but in the event I just found my way across the High Level Bridge, a spectacular crossing of the Athabasca River, which is incised several hundred feet in a gorge, to Red Bicycle, who replaced my front derailleur. I then left the city via Broadway and 82nd Avenue, a very "hip" shopping street, rather than pay for another expensive night in a hotel. At the little town of Tofield a rainstorm caught me, so I went into the library to check on my e-mail. While there I made enquiries about Lutheran Churches in the area and was told by a young lady who had been married in it that there was a very nice one in the town of Viking. When the storm was over the wind had become a headwind (which lasted the next three days, until I reached Battleford, in Saskatchewan: this was a tough 200 miles). After a long slog I stopped at the hotel in the town of Holden for dinner, and found that the cook there was a young and rather pretty lady from Newmarket, in Suffolk, England, a few miles from where I grew up.

I then went to the municipal campground, where there only two RV's. I called Ingrid, but the reception was bad and I had to walk around the site to try to find a "sweet spot", and was near one of the RV's while telling her that I intended to go to the Lutheran Church in the very Scandinavian-sounding town of Viking the next day. When I finished the couple from the RV asked why I was going to a Lutheran Church, and I explained Ingrid's background. The man then asked me where I was from, and mentioned that he had spent his very early life in the Isle of Man. He had only been back once, and was from the south of the island, and therefore did not know the area around Ramsey, where I had spent my summer holidays, or the Dhooar School, which I attended for a year back in 1947.

He also told me that he was a glass technologist, and I mentioned that I had had some glass-blowing equipment that belonged to my father. He then asked my father's name, and when I told him his eyes lit up and he started to tell me chapter and verse about what my father had done when he worked at Pilkington's (owners of Pittsburgh Plate Glass) from 1936-1942, there. I knew that my dad had perfected the float glass process that enables the modern style of glass-curtain walled office building, but this man, John Arniel, told me that he was also responsible for some of the earlier steps in the development of this process as well, in addition to the development of laminated glass and toughened glass. He told me that he had taught glass technology and that my Dad's achievements were all part of the historical introduction to the first year course, and that Pilkington's had put out a huge history of glass that detailed them. When I then mentioned that he had left Pilkington's to work on the Jet engine project in Rugby, he not only told me that Dad was responsible for the design of the Spitfire windshield, but that he had worked on ceramic turbine blades for the jet at Lodge Plugs, which I did not know. He then told me that Dad had been heavily involved with the development of new alloys for Naval propeller shafts when he was at Manganese Bronze in Ipswich. I knew that Dad had a Royal Navy underwater test facility off Felixstowe where alloy rods were placed under huge stress to see when and how they would fail, but had not known that it was specifically directed at material for prop shafts. All in all, this conversation left me very shaken: to have a chance-met complete stranger tell me reams of stuff about my own father that I did not know, and to have it mesh so nicely with what I did know, was spooky enough: but to realize that Dad was a much more important scientist (or technologist) than even his own Obituarist, Ray Patterson, knew, was even more spooky. Ray knew only about Dad's work at Manganese Bronze: Dad must have left his work at Lodge Plugs and Pilkington's so completely behind that it had never even occurred to Ray to look it up. Church at Viking was very nice, and I was treated to lunch afterwards by Don and Valerie Erickson.

That night I stopped at Irma for dinner, and went in the bar for a beer. One fellow was wearing a "Canada, eh?" T-Shirt, and I mentioned that I would like to buy one like it for a souvenir. He ripped it off his back and insisted on giving it to me. Another person insisted on paying for my meal, and Morley Muldoon invited me to stay the night at his place. Unfortunately, the headwind meant that I could not reach Morley's place before nightfall, so I spent the night in the municipal campground at Fabyan.The next night, Monday, I spent in the hotel at the little town of Marsden after a very hot day (33 deg C). There I was able to dry out the fly to my tent, which was soaked by dew at Fabyan, and to avail myself of the very reasonably-priced laundry service offered by the hotel - the Laundromat in the larger town of Wainwright, near Fabyan, had been closed because their parking lot was being repaved. While eating lunch at Wainwright I met the cast members of the Canadiana Musical Theatre Company, from Vancouver. They had been putting on a musical in Wainwright, a railroad town, about the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

I ate dinner at the Chinese restaurant in Marsden, but could not stomach the Ginger Beef, which was dried out and tough, and tasted as if it had been left out for two or three days. The owner got very upset at me for sending it back, but did not charge me. Dale Wayne, at the hotel, told me that all the local farmers went to this same restaurant for coffee in the morning. One of them had the key and opened it up, and coffee was on the honor system. So in the morning I joined them in spite of the ginger beef. I stopped for breakfast at Neilburg, the next town, by which time their restaurant was officially open and serving food. Otherwise it looked the same as, and had the same kinds of customers as, the one in Marsden.

From there it was a long haul against the wind to Cut Knife, scene of a defeat of the Mounties by Poundmaker's Indian forces. The previous night Kevin Murphy had told me there was a very nice store just before Cut Knife, Wilbert's. This was rare in Canada: a store along the road and not in any settlement. I stopped there, and the proprietress, JoAnne, was indeed a very gracious host for lunch. It turned out that Kevin had been past twice already during the morning to let her know that I was coming and to find out whether I had been there! From Cut Knife it was a long hot slog across somewhat more hilly country to Battleford. I expected the last part of the ride to be more with the wind, because the road turned south. But the tricky wind also turned south, and the last part of the ride into Battleford was, if anything, more tiring. I checked into the Motel there and went to the library where I had such a terrible time trying to do my blog. On Tuesday morning I went to the local museum: Battleford had been one of the most important early settlements in Saskatchewan, and capital of the NW Territories for a time. The Mounties had a major early post at Fort Battleford. So the museum was interesting. I then went to the Fort, where a very bad storm caught me and the rest of my group of tourists. The bicycle was parked on the "wrong" side of the Park HQ so the driving rain soaked it thoroughly, and I was soaked as well, but lunch back in town helped that. At 2 p.m. I set out for Saskatoon, with a strong favorable NW wind, and covered the 87 miles in 5 hours. At Saskatoon hotels were also horrendously expensive (Motel 6 = $105), so I rode back a kilometer and stayed at a commercial campground. Even this cost $24.50, for which I got a patch of grass between two RV sites, and not even a picnic table. A partially-serviced RV site was $26.00, so I wondered aloud what I was actually paying for, which was a mistake.

At Saskatoon I stopped by a bicycle shop to get the new derailleur re-adjusted, had a very nice cup of coffee at a sidewalk coffee shop while I read the tourist information, and visited the Anglican cathedral and the Ukrainian Museum. On leaving the Museum I was stopped by a person who wanted to know all about my trip. This turned out to be Kim Fehr, a member of the Saskatoon Police Force, who had done a transcontinental bike trip in his youth and was thinking of doing another one in the next year or so with his wife. I ate lunch at Alexander's, on the University campus, where I had a meal with more nutritional value than the usual fare of hamburger and fries, and continued on my way. In trying to get out of the city while avoiding main roads I got into a suburb where the streets were not rectilinear, and had to stop a passing cyclist to ask directions. This person, Doug Gilmore, volunteered to lead me to the Yellowhead Highway. He left me and I started off towards Clavet. I was nearly there when a little white car came past and stopped. It was Doug Gilmore and his wife Janelle, who wanted to make sure that I knew about Saskatoon berries and had brought me a present of a pound or so of them. They showed me a piece of a bush so that I would be able to identify and pick them in the wild, for they are now in season. I had seen signs offering "U-pick berries" or "U-Pick Saskatoons", but had assumed that these would be raspberries, etc., as Doug and Janelle had rightly surmised that I would if I were not specifically clued in. The blueberry-like berries are, in fact, delicious.There is more to tell between Saskatoon and Winnipeg, but I will end here because this is already long and time is a-flying, and I have described some of the most wonderful experiences that have happened so far on the trip.