Where does an adventure begine, it's a question I'm always asking my self, this time it was at 7am, peddling my way up a logging road on the way to some typical B.C. back country. my plane ticket out of the country was on the back of my mind, but for the time it was the road that lead to this road that was on my mind.

About a week before I was driving to a treeplanting contract, where I picked up a female hitch hiker and her dog. she was travelin across Canada, riding here thumb, a routine I know only too well. along the road we swapped stories and drank beer before I dropped her in the middle of the fraser canyon, my self about to spend a last week slamming trees into the steep ground sounrounding the canyon, she was going to dip her toes in the pacific ocean before heading back east. I'm not sure why, but that day seems like the start of this adventure!

connecting that day to the persent time of peddling up into the alpine was a blur of crawing over slash piles and nights in a hottel parking lot drinking with old friends, and a week in Pemberton spent riding my bike. what connects that day to this day I'm not sure, but an adventure has to begine sometime, and the one thing I do know, an adventure never starts when you in the midsts of it, there is a whole sequece of events leading to the present time, seeminly unconected except for the fact that they have lead me here, chasing that ribbon of single track.

all this is going through my mind as I round a coner in the increasingly overgrown road I'm following and notice two Grizly bears not ten feet from me. it's not too uncomon for me to get close and personal with bears, bikes move fast and quiet through the bush, even when you gaining over 2000m. still being that close to the kings of the alpine send a shiver down my spine. one looks over it's shoulder at me, and I put my head down, put more power into the peddles and I'm past them.

A few short hours later I'm at the top of the climb, compleaty blown at the end of a 10 days of constant activity, looking down on 2000m of pure single track decending through the alpine and into the forest below. all other thoughts are behind me. I take one last look around me before dropping in, taking in the snow covered ridges that I have pushed my bike through, the mountain across the vally, the lakes below. so this is B.C., this is the end of this adventure, in a few short days I'm going to be on an air plane back to the Yunnan Highlands, but none of that matters right now. I quickly re read Alisons' trail notes, "it's all down hill from here". thanks Al, see you next year.