My Mountain Biking Adventures

Incredible…  It stopped raining!

We decided to take Jon from Derailed’s advice and headed for the Canyon Creek trail, which is part of the Moonraker Trails on the way to the Kicking Horse Mountain Resort.  After getting the 4-hour estimate from him the day before, we gave ourselves plenty of time to complete the ride in daylight should something go wrong.  Stocked with plenty of food and water (no Boston Cream for me today, I’m still burning the calories from the one in Revelstoke) we parked at the Sander Lake Campground and began the ascent up the 2% incline on an old railway bed.  The first thing we came across was a sign from the Golden Cycling Club which welcomed bikers, hikers, horses, and cross country skiers on a gate meant to block out all motorized traffic.  Luckily I was on my Specialized Stumpjumper FSR Expert and Colin was on his custom built Specialized Rockhopper so we knew we were welcome to pass the iron gate.

After travelling approx 3 km the grade got a bit steeper and we continued up for another 6 km to the trailhead.  The trail started off on some nice easy double track which was fun but nothing overly thrilling.  An older couple passed us on the trail going the other direction and I wondered what trail they had come from as I’d seen them at the parking lot earlier…  Then the trail gradually started to descend and turned into some nice single track. We started to really enjoy ourselves until we got to a bend in the trail…  Both of us had one of those religious experiences where the only thing we could say was “HOLY ****!”.  It looked as if the trail gave way to a 200m cliff!  (See photo to the left.)  Definitely not a trail for those with a severe fear of heights.  That’s when I knew what trail the older couple had come from… And it explained why they going the wrong way…  We stopped for a bit to admire the stunning views of the canyon and check out the trail to see where it lead before we dropped our seats and continued on.

Canyon Creek, Golden BC from Kookjai Media on Vimeo.

The trail hugged the canyon for a bit before going back into the forest (see video of me above) where we came across some sharp switchbacks.  The trail map mentions these and says that this is an old wagon road.  Further down the trail began to widen again and we saw an old log cabin that had seen better days.  Not far past here several trails intersect and we played eeny-meeny-miney-mo to decide which one to take back to the car.  We chose Klahowya which then turned into Ptarmigan Trot.  Nice easy single track to finish the ride.  Total time including breaks to stop trembling in our shoes - 2 hrs 45 mins with a distance of 15.5 km.  Not a bad day’s ride and we were way ahead of schedule.

Golden gets 2 thumbs up!

Tags: canyon creek, derailed, golden, kootenay, moonraker, women mountain bikers

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 5:49 am and is filed under Kootenays, mountain biking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.