The Final Installment

Howdy! Apologies for leaving everybody hanging here… I assume most of you reading this know, but I finished my ride in Banff last Monday, July 15th. My parents met Sarah in Banff and were there when I rolled into town and “crossed the finish line,” and we all spent the rest of the week relaxing and hanging out in Canmore (a town just down the road) before Sarah and I started the drive home to Santa Fe.

We just pulled into the driveway yesterday afternoon (it took us a little less time to drive home than it had taken me to cover the distance on a bike), so I haven’t really had the chance to settle in yet… but I wanted to update the blog while the memories of the last few days on the trail are still fresh. So, here we go:

As I alluded to in my last post, rolling through the Canadian border crossing at Roosville, MT on July 12th, was a pretty emotional experience. I was tired, it was brutally hot (and had been for several days), and I definitely got a little teary rolling up to the border crossing. The magnitude of the ride hit me the day before when I saw a sign for the Canadian border, but it really came to a head when I handed the border patrol agent my passport. In some ways, it felt like the end of the trip, even though I still had a couple hundred miles to ride. It was a bit surreal, and I felt this strange sense of both accomplishment and sadness that the journey was nearing its end. The milestone also led to a moment that evening where I felt like the ride was already over and was ready to be done with the whole thing. Let’s just say I did not want to get back on my bike the next day.

But, I did. For me, a long bike trip has a way of magnifying emotions. My friends and I found this on the Colorado Trail 5 years ago, and the same proved true on the Divide: that magnifying effect makes you feel things much more intensely, both the highs and lows. For someone who struggles with depression and anxiety, and often finds themselves deep in the throes of “emotion mind,” it’s an illuminating thing. The ability to step back, zoom out, and see just how quickly things turn around, and go from thinking about throwing in the towel one afternoon to loving every minute the next morning is almost incomprehensible. It must offer some greater life lesson about riding the waves of emotion and, for lack of a better term, “enjoying the ride.”

I stopped for lunch in the town of Fernie on the 13th, which Sarah and I quickly added to our list of places we’d move to outside of the U.S. The entire ride that day was through some of the prettiest country I’d seen on the whole route—people told me the Canadian section was breathtaking, but I was still shocked by just how gorgeous it was. I rode 71 miles total that day and met Sarah at a campground in Sparwood, a mining town that also happens to be home to the world’s largest dump truck… We made a stop by the truck on our way out of town the next morning so we could send a photo to our nephew, who’s obsessed with tractors and farm equipment, and found ourselves in awe of the thing. It was actually pretty insane how large it was! 

July 14th ended up being one of the hardest days of riding of the trip for me physically. The route from Sparwood north to our campground near Kananaskis Lakes ended up being 86 miles over 7300 feet of elevation gain, which was the second most amount of gain in a day of the trip behind Day 3 in the Gila. The route also followed a somewhat confusing network of bike paths and singletrack sections early on, and was pretty much a steady uphill grade the whole way until it reached its steepest point right at the end. Thankfully, the scenery was even prettier than the day before! If I was riding solo at that point I probably would have split the ride up over two days, but the route goes through an area closed to cars and the only way for me to camp in the van with Sarah that night was to push through to the lakes. I didn’t roll into camp until well after 9pm, but the dinner Sarah cooked up and the comfort of the van made the long day in the saddle more than worth it. I did, however, wake up with leg cramps in the middle of the night for the first time on the trip, despite drinking a staggering amount of beverages before bed. Ouch.

The real benefit of the big day on 14th was that it set me up for a relatively easy last day on the trail—we camped just 55 miles South of Banff. I left Sarah and the van that morning with plans of meeting her and my parents in Banff sometime in the early afternoon. The first thing that struck me about that day of riding was just how well Canada has their national and provincial parks system figured out, and how amazing all of their camping and outdoor recreation infrastructure is. Every place we camped in Alberta and B.C. was extraordinarily clean and well laid out. There were no loud generators running all night, no screaming kids, the showers and bathrooms were immaculate, and the campsites themselves were absolutely lovely. Most of the Provincial Parks I rode through also had dedicated bike paths connecting them, which made it incredibly easy (and so nice) to travel by bike through them. Moral of the story: Canada is awesome.

Somehow, the scenery continued to get more spectacular the further I rode. I stopped for lunch at one of the prettiest alpine lakes I’ve ever encountered, and sat on the shore reflecting on the whole ride, and trying to fully appreciate the fact that it was my last day on the bike. The route threw a bit of everything at me that day: long climbs on lonely gravel roads, some washboard, cars whizzing by and dusting me, some bike paths, and even a bit of singletrack. It all felt very appropriate for a Divide finish day.

I made it to Banff right around 4pm, passed the hotel where the Tour Divide race starts, and immediately got stuck in traffic behind a line of cars. It was a bit of a shock to the system to come out of the woods and into an incredibly busy tourist town during the busiest month of the year, but as I rode through downtown and onto main street I couldn’t wipe the smile from my face. There’s no official end point for the route—in fact, technically the ACA route now ends in Jasper several hundred miles north)—so I had planned to meet Sarah near the Banff Visitors Center (it seemed appropriate). As I rode through the barricades that blocked vehicular traffic onto the main drag in downtown Banff, I could hear yelling, and looked up to see Sarah, Mom and Dad all standing there waving signs and cheering. Bikepacking is not an activity where people cheer at a finish line—hell, the Tour Divide racers finish alone at the border wall in Antelope Wells—so it was a pretty amazing moment. Several other riders who were either leaving Banff or who’d finished earlier that day came up and jokingly asked why they didn’t receive such a warm welcome. As I’ve said many times throughout this blog, I’m a truly lucky guy,

I don’t think it’s possible to sum up a trip like this in a few sentences, but I’ll leave you with what I posted to Instagram the night I rode into Banff:

Today was my last day on the Divide. This ride has been a dream of mine for over 10 years now. The main thing I’m feeling (aside from an impressively deep fatigue and achy legs) is an overwhelming sense of gratitude. 

I’m grateful to have legs and lungs capable of propelling me and my bike some 2700 miles; grateful for all the love and support via text, call or Facebook comment from my friends and family along the way; grateful for all the wonderful people I’ve met out here I can now call friends; grateful for the incredible kindness I’ve been shown from complete strangers; grateful for all the advice and beta from Bailey at Sincere Cycles before I left; grateful to my friend Aaron Gulley for taking me on a shakedown ride before this trip and then shepherding me over Marshall Pass, grateful to my sister Lauren for dealing with hundreds of photos and publishing blog posts for me; grateful for my best bud Eric who spent six days slogging through some of the hardest terrain and worst weather of the entire trip (with a smile on his face the whole time); grateful for my father-in-law, who religiously watched my dot and texted me about my progress at least once a day; grateful for my sweet parents for reading every single word of my blog and showing up in Banff to see me cross the “finish line,”; grateful for lemonade, Fritos and huckleberry ice cream; grateful that the Adventure Cycling Association put this incredible route together in the first place; and beyond grateful for my incredible partner Sarah who wholeheartedly supported this wild notion of mine from the very beginning, held down the fort while I was gone, and drove thousands of miles to (quite literally) support me as I finished this trip. 

Most of all, I’m grateful for the gift of time, because having spent nearly six weeks riding my bike from Mexico to Canada is something I’ll never forget, and hopefully never stop learning from.