Due to a traffic accident today, I wasn't able to bike the entire distance to Field and had to hitch a ride for the last 20km or so. Read on.

I had a relatively flat and uneventful ride to Golden this morning. I had a slow moving river, marsh, and beyond that, a long string of mountains (the Rockies?) to my right for most of the morning.

Golden is actually off the main road, a fact I wasn't aware of. So when I saw the first few gas stations, fast food restaurants, motels, and nothing else, I was pretty disappointed. I stopped at a Smitty's (or was it Deny's?) for breakfast. Then I biked a little further to find the turnoff for the actual town of Golden. Doh!

I found a good internet café with excellent cappuccino and fresh muffins, and got caught up on my email. Back on road again, I climbed a steep section of road leading away from town and towards the Kicking Horse Pass. I stopped at a lookout above Golden to take some pictures and met a couple from Australia, originally from Croatia.

I continued deeper into the Kicking Horse Valley. This was perhaps the most dangerous leg of my entire trip. A lot of steep climbs and descents, sharp turns, narrow lanes, crappy or non-existent shoulders, steep cliffs above and sudden dropoffs below, heavy truck traffic, and to top it all off, lots of road construction. There were some great views of the Kicking Horse River below, but I was too busy trying not to get killed.

Fortunately, it didn't last forever. The road leveled out and the paved shoulders returned after an hour or two of sheer biking hell. I stopped at the entrance to Yoho National Park to pick up a pass and beg some water from the attendant there.

I biked a bit further and stopped to do the Wapta Falls Trail. The hike was less than an hour long, but I had to take a dirt road to get to it. Like Glacier National Park, many of the hikes I wanted to do in Yoho or Lake Louis were closed due to bear habitation or low snow line.

Back on the road, I noticed some black smoke rising from the woods a few kilometers away. A forest fire? As I rounded the corner, I could see the cause: a massive traffic accident involving three trucks and a passenger car. One of the trucks was jackknifed across the road, another in the ditch, and another well off the road and on fire. The car was flattened like a pancake. Vehicles were held up for 2 kilometers at least in either direction. If the accident had happened elsewhere on the road, I might have been able to walk around it, but with the Kicking Horse River on one side and a steep wooded cliff on the other, there was no way to get past it.

I struck up a conversation with two truckers, Peter and Kevin. Peter turned out to be my wife's friend's half-brother! Talk about a small world!

The accident took a good three or four hours to clean up. It was getting close to evening, so I gladly accepted a ride from Peter. We pulled into Field around 7:30 and I headed straight for Truffle Pigs Restaurant. The locals called it "The Siding".

I downed an excellent Pasta dinner in record time and hopped on my bike for the remaining five km ride to the campground. The camp was nearly full. By the time I found a free site, it was well after sunset. I hate setting up camp in the dark! The temperature was dropping fast. Another cold night, fully dressed.

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