Very cold this morning! Cold driving rain and sleet before Greenwood!

I stopped in Greenwood around noon for a latte and muffin. If you ever go there, they have an excellent bakery/coffee shop as you enter the town from the west. The film "Snow Falling on Cedars" was filmed in this town.

The town's claim to fame is "The smallest city in Canada". During the copper rush, the town exploded and quickly became one of the largest communities in BC. It incorporated. Later, the mines closed and Greenwood became a ghost town of sorts. Japanese were interned there in the vacant houses during the second world war and many remained after the war was over. Greenwood has a large Japanese population as a result.

I stopped at the community center/town hall/tourist center to catch up on my email. They had one computer - a 130 MHz Pentium donated from government surplus. The ladies at the center were impressed by my typewriting when I started pounding away at the keyboard. "I'm a computer programmer. I sit in front of one of these all day long…" I explained.

I left Greenwood and started my climb up Eholt Summit, yet another summit not marked on my map. This one was not nearly as difficult, since I was already at a good altitude. It hardly seemed like a climb at all. If I had been approaching from the opposite direction, it would have been an entirely different story. It was a very steep and long descent to the town of Grand Forks, an old Dukhabour town. It was nice coasting along, letting gravity do the work, but I dreaded the inevitable climb that I knew for certain would great me as I left the town.

I had lunch at the Borscht Bowl. I had a borscht soup (really good), followed by voreniki (boiled dumpling filled with potato), a pyrahi (baked tart filled with potato and served with sour cream and butter), and a nalesniki (crepe with cottage cheese filling served with melted butter, sour cream, and jam). I had a rhubarb pyrahi (pyrahi must mean "tart" in Russian") for dessert. There were a few older men at the restaurant speaking Russian.

I have been warned about the Blueberry-Paulson Summit coming up. It will be the highest climb I have to make, one of the steepest, and through a provincial park with absolutely no civilization in sight. With this in mind, I left Grand Forks for Christina Lake, which is at the base of the summit climb. There were a few provincial and private campgrounds surrounding the Christina Lake area, so I chose one close to the base of the climb - Texas Creek PP. It had no showers and the campsites were packed gravel pads again, but at least this one had running, drinkable water and a lake to bath in. I stopped at a grocery store on the way to pick up tonight's super, tomorrow's breakfast, and food for the summit climb.

The lake was ice cold. I pitched my tent off the pad. The park attendant warned me about camping of the designated area, but when I explained that my tent required pegging to stand upright and the gravel pad was too hard to peg in, he let it go. The temperature dropped dramatically with nightfall. I went to bed with just about every piece of clean clothing I had and the sleeping bag zipped up tight with just a small hole to expose my face and allow me to breathe. Fully dressed in a sleeping bag rated to zero degrees, I still found it damn cold.

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