Sabbatical Continues

2022-09-26

This day was epic. I had a great morning waking up in Redmond, WA. I walked over to the Redmond Town Center and snapped some nice sunrise photos while waiting for the coffee shop to open up.

After loading up on coffee and food, I headed back to the hotel to just relax for a bit. I used the ArriveCAN website to upload my vaccine records to speed up entry into Canada along with setting up a time and port I was to entry by. I setup for noon so I had time to kill and just caught up with some friends. After leaving, it was an uneventful drive to the crossing. There was a bit of a line, and it took about 20+ minutes to pass through. I used this time to swap my dash display from US to Metric. After crossing, you get into a fairly urban area and it was a lot of jogging around on local street before I could get on the highway to take me north to Whistler. The highway takes you along a mountain coastline and it’s very beautiful. You can look West across Howe Sound and see the mountainous landscape covered in pines. I would have taken pics but driving was more a priority. I arrived at the First Tracks Lodge around 3PM or so. I checked in and brought all my stuff up. I had a ride suggested to me, Lord of the Squirrels Loop and thought I should have plenty of time to do this loop. I did not pay attention to the elevation gain nearly enough and by the time I was heading out it was nearly 5PM. I started on this loop just after 5PM and it was not enough time. Here is how it started:

Then I made it to the top and was treated to some beautiful views due to the sun startting to set.

Concern is starting to creep in…

I then started the descent. The light was fading fast and I was going deeper into the woods. Soon it was mostly just me trying to discern the lighter areas from the darker areas on the trail. 100% I bought my A game to this descent because I manged to keep it clean the whole time. Really it’s just the perfect amount of technical. It gets steep, but never too steep where you might go over the bars. Everything is rideable and my Stumpjumper just ate it up. While I wanted to finish out the loop, it was so dark that my Garmin was now backlit. The last trail was rated as a double black diamond. I noped out of that and turned back towards a fairly tame section of downhill. Just smooth until it dumped me out onto a road. From there I rode back to the resort by steet light lamps.

I should have died!

Strava or it didn’t happen