Cycling Through Canada
In Canada, there are bears by the roadside like there are cows in Switzerland.
Tobias Renggli
A New Chapter
After Mount Logan, I was done with skis for a while. Two expeditions, two summits, and almost three months on glaciers were behind me. Now came what I had been looking forward to for weeks: summer, tarmac, shorts, and a bike without 60 kilograms of expedition gear.
For the first time in a long while, a friend from home was joining me as well.
In Whitehorse, I packed up all my winter equipment to send back to Switzerland: three completely full duffel bags and a ski bag, all packed right up to the weight limit. I had been looking forward to getting rid of that gear for a long time. As long as the skis, expedition suits, stove, and heavy mountaineering boots were still travelling with me, the next logistical problem was never far away.
Gian arrived on June 29. We studied together at ETH, although we definitely spent more time together above the tree line than in lecture halls. We had said goodbye in mid-March and told ourselves that July was not that far away. In between had been Denali, Mount Logan, and a lot of things that could have gone wrong.
That same evening, I said goodbye to Heli. For three months, we had spent almost every day together, climbed two major mountains, and experienced more than should really fit into that amount of time. Then the three of us sat down for a burger, had a drink, and suddenly that chapter was over.
An Unexpected Salmon
The next morning, Gian and I set off. Our first stage took us 180 kilometres to Teslin Lake. Along the way, three black bears stood by the roadside. They seemed relaxed. So were we.
That evening, we pitched our tent right by the water. It was only the next morning that we realised part of the spot was private property. The owner came by in a small vehicle, and for a moment I expected him to tell us to leave.
Instead, he asked what we were doing and drove off again. Fifteen minutes later, he came back and handed us a whole salmon, already seasoned and wrapped in aluminium foil.
That evening, we grilled it over the fire and ate it with instant mashed potatoes. It was one of the best meals of the entire journey.
The Cassiar Highway
Shortly afterwards, we turned onto the Cassiar Highway. The road narrowed, the markings disappeared, and the wide highway turned into a strip of tarmac through the forest. At the same time, the first longer climbs and descents began.
The third day started with strong headwinds, a dry camp, and a single energy bar for breakfast. The shop we had been riding towards for 40 kilometres was closed, despite Google claiming otherwise. By midday, we had barely covered any distance and were in a correspondingly mediocre mood.
Then we reached Jade City. The place consisted mainly of a few houses and a crystal shop selling chips and Coke, with free tea. I poured so much sugar into my cup that the day immediately started looking a lot better.
That afternoon, two young women pulled over beside us. They had just finished a bike trip of their own and gave us the rest of their supplies: muesli, bars, dates, and powdered peanut butter. Until then, I had no idea powdered peanut butter even existed. Just a few weeks earlier, we had carried ten kilograms of the real stuff up Denali.
By the end of the day, we had covered 170 kilometres and seen two bears, a lynx, and an eagle.
The Long, Uneventful Road
From Kitwanga onwards, the route became more densely populated and much less interesting. Bigger roads, more traffic, farmland, and industrial towns replaced the long stretches of forest.
We rode through Smithers, Burns Lake, Vanderhoof, Prince George, Quesnel, and Williams Lake. On many days, we covered more than 200 kilometres. In terms of scenery, very little of it stayed with me.
On July 9, I wrote in my diary that it had been the worst day of the journey. The highlight was a Japanese fast-food restaurant in Prince George.
The atmosphere along the route changed as well. In Quesnel, fentanyl addiction was openly visible among many people. At the same time, an Amber Alert for an abducted child appeared on our phones, and we kept passing missing-person posters along the road. The whole area felt heavy.
But the night was slowly returning. For the first time since Alaska, it was getting properly dark again in the evenings. When we kept riding late, those final kilometres were often the quietest part of the day.
Off the Highway
From Williams Lake, we left the main road.
First, we descended steeply to a river and then climbed 600 vertical metres in one go. Later, we rode in the dark along a rough gravel track and camped beside a lake we could not even see when we arrived. The next morning, it turned out to be one of the most beautiful places of the entire route.
From there, a short walk led to sand dunes in the middle of a canyon. The dry, almost desert-like landscape did not fit at all with the Canada I had in my head. Afterwards, we rode for hours along a perfect gravel road without seeing a single car and reached a high plateau at 1,600 metres around sunset.
For the first time in days, I felt like the landscape was part of the story again.
The Sunken Drone
July 12 became my favourite day of this section. The road kept getting worse until we were pushing more than riding. We crossed rivers in flip-flops and eventually ended up in front of a lodge that was far too luxurious for us. We ordered chicken wings and Coke on the terrace.
After that came a beautiful road running right along a lake. The scenery was so good that I launched the drone. I looked down at the controller for two seconds and forgot to let go of the joystick. When I looked up again, the connection was gone. The drone was somewhere on a steep, sandy slope.
The real problem was not the drone itself. I had not made a single backup anywhere along the route. All the photos and videos from the previous two weeks were stored on it. We climbed up the slope. The ground was unstable, and rocks kept breaking loose and rolling all the way down to the road. I was genuinely worried that we might hit a passing car or that one of us would send a rock down onto the other.
Eventually, I picked up a signal again and managed to activate the beeping sound. Gian finally found the drone in the bushes. It was completely undamaged.
Gold Bridge
By the time we reached Gold Bridge, the only shop had long since closed. Instead, we found an old, run-down hotel with a pool table, a dark bar, and a long-haired owner who laughed louder at his own jokes than anyone else.
He filled up our fuel bottles and told us how he had once travelled from Alaska to Panama with his seven children in a bus over three and a half years. At the Darién Gap, he said, he had paid locals to cut a road through the jungle. Later, guerrillas in Colombia had stopped him, drunk and smoked weed with him, and eventually sent him back.
It was hard to tell how much of the story was true. The hotel still felt like a scene from a film.
A Mountain Without a Stove
The next day, we left the bikes behind and headed into the mountains on foot. Cycling was slowly getting a bit boring.
That morning, our fuel bottle had leaked inside one of the bike bags. Everything smelled of petrol. At Railroad Pass, we wanted to cook pasta and discovered that the stove pump had stopped working.
We took it apart completely and tried to repair it, without success. That left us without a stove, with hardly any snacks, and with several meals that could not be prepared without hot water. We packed our far-too-heavy backpacks anyway and set off.
There was still so much snow around the lakes in mid-July that our planned route over Faceless Mountain and Locomotive Mountain was not possible. We had trail-running shoes with us, but no ice axes or crampons.
A family was camping by one of the lakes. We asked if we could briefly borrow their gas stove. That turned into spaghetti carbonara and three freeze-dried meals, all prepared using the pasta water.
Instead, we climbed Railroad Mountain. There was no trail, but technically it was easy. Both sunset and sunrise failed to show up. It stayed grey.
It was beautiful anyway.
All the Way to the Coast
After that, things moved quickly. We rode down to Pemberton on a long washboard road and joined the Sea to Sky Highway. The stretch through Whistler and Squamish was beautiful.
By the end of the day, we had covered 166 kilometres. The campsite we had been aiming for was full and would have cost 60 dollars anyway. So we kept going and found a spot in the dark about a hundred metres above the sea, with an island in front of us and water and fir trees beyond it. Perfect.
From there, we had about 45 kilometres left. We followed the coast through West and North Vancouver and crossed the Lions Gate Bridge.
Then, suddenly, the skyline was right in front of us.
Vancouver
In Vancouver, we had a shower and a washing machine for the first time in sixteen days. After 36 days on Denali, even that almost felt like a short stretch.
The next morning, we got up at four to watch the sunrise over the skyline. Afterwards, we had a huge breakfast. In the afternoon, Gian packed up his bike and flew back to Switzerland.
After two weeks together, that chapter was suddenly over too.
Canada was almost behind me now. Mount Logan had been climbed, around 3,000 kilometres were behind me, and only about 50 kilometres remained to the US border.
Now I was looking forward to three weeks of holiday with Nadja.
But that is another story.
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Tobias Renggli is travelling from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to Ushuaia in Patagonia. 35 countries, 35 highest summits, and around 40,000 kilometres under his own power. Denali was the first.
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