Our Route Plan - - Earth Wind and Fire Permitting - Fire On The Mountain - A Small Section of the Great Divide Ride 2021

Our Route Plan - - Earth Wind and Fire Permitting

Our First Foray With Multi Day Off-the-grid Touring

Riding the Great Divide route hasn’t been near the top of our ‘touring list’ due to the extensive (i.e. just about all) amount of rough gravel roads (Kirsten’s issue) and the distinct lack of patisserie / konditorei along the way (my issue).

However since we know so many folks who’ve ridden this and really enjoyed it, and given our lack of other touring options at this time, the Great Divide south Canada section has filtered it’s way to the top of our list.

We did a gravel ‘taster’ in June, a ~300 km 3 day loop over the Highwood pass that included about ~35 km of gravel fire road that would be similar to the GDMBR. Kirsten was surprised at how good that section went so we decided to take the plunge. We’ve up the distance ante to around 400 km and change the paved / gravel ratio for this ride from 90/10 to 10/90.

We are going to start at the Elk Pass trail head by Kananaskis Lakes, about an hours drive south of Canmore, and pick up the GDMBR there. We’ll ride south to Sparwood where we’ll head east for a bit to pick up the Flathead Alternate route that the ACA refers to as ‘the Serengeti of North America’ (might be tough for us to buy into that when we had 18 elk in our front yard yesterday in downtown Canmore!). The Flathead Alternate pops us out onto the main GDMBR route right near the Canada /US border and from there we will ride the main route back north to Fernie.

All in, about ~400 km of riding with only about 10% paved. We’re going to take 6 days to do this, all camping and carrying all our supplies (with a restock of a few bananas in Sparwood). Kirsten’s been fiendishly cooking and dehydrating all our meals so most of our cooking will just be ‘boil water and add to bag’. Ten minutes later …. a meal incomparably better than the store bought dried stuff (K’s very good at doing this!).

The southern part of the Canadian section of the ACA Great Divide route. We are starting at Kananaskis Lakes, about an hour drive south from Canmore. We could leave right from home but that would mean riding either the Smith Dorien Road, which is horribly dusty and washboard, or the High Rockies MTB trail, which is a great ride .... on an unloaded mountain bike!). Plan is to take the standard ACA route over Elk pass and then down the Elk Valley to Sparwood where we will then pick up the Flathead Alternate route - much more remote and scenic so we're told.

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We’ll be using the same gear we always do, our trusty Toute Terrain Silk Roads and standard camp set up that we’ve detailed in other journals.

One small change will be our front bag set up. We do like to have some gear up front for weight distribution but our ‘regular’ set up of small Ortlieb panniers on Tubus low rider racks needed some change. First, the bags are too big for what we want on this trip, which inevitably means we will fill them and hence take too much stuff, and second, they ride too low and will make riding any single track that we run across difficult.

The ‘bike packer’ solution of large fork cages with smaller dry bags looked like it would be the ticket. That is until we ran into the reality that this is 2021 and the availability of bike parts is less than that of Golden Unicorns. Coupled with the lack of availability is the price vendors wanted for what are essentially oversized water bottle cages …. upwards of $75 per cage, if you could get one!

Scottish heritage and an engineering degree led to the following . A few pieces of 5 mm aluminum salvaged from some shelving a friend had, some 5M hex bolts and spacers, and the piece de resistance, 1mm flexible HDPE cutting boards from IKEA (C$2.99 for a two pack!!!) and Le voila! I've christened these Elÿl Snarv racks, or 'The Snarv's' for short.

Why the odd name you ask? I recently heard someone say that you could create your own Ikea name by writing your own name backwards and putting an umlaut over one of the vowels. That accounts for Elÿl, and Snarv ... well I just like it and it sounds so Ikea'ish. I looked to see if it was an actual Swedish word and it turns out it is not. However 'snarvei' is 'shortcut' in Norwegian. Good enough for me!

5 mm aluminum strips fit to existing low rider rack fork eyelets

Two aluminum strips sandwiching an IKEA cutting board

Finished off with two ladder lock straps holding a 5 litre dry bag! I cut in a few strap guide slots in the cutting boards in the final product. Looks and feels pretty sturdy .. lets see how they perform!

One other small equipment modification/repair was also required. Sidebar background story …. About two years ago in Puglia, my SKS front fender, which was riding on borrowed time with a duct tape and crazy glue repair job, finally gave in. In a true McGyver moment, with a Swiss Army knife and two zip ties, I was back up and running in 15 minutes. I remarked at the time the true test would be if I still had this set up when we did our next tour. I won’t incriminate myself with a current close up of my front fender, but Kirsten’s now looks the same! And this will be the third (small) tour since Puglia 🙄.

New fenders are on the maintenance list …. someday!

Kirsten’s pre-emptive McGyver fix. This actually took longer in our garage than it did on the side of the road in Puglia!

Bikes modified, bags packed, we’re ready to ride!

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