We woke up to the beautiful morning, cold but clear. Today we decided to left Hwy #3, because it goes straight through the mountains. Instead of spending whole day biking uphill on the busy road, with trucks trying to sweep us down from Hwy, we decided to do "small" detour, quite nice and scenic one, though. So from Creston we headed to the north on Hwy #3A, following east bank of Kootenay Lake (huge water dam, solution how to deal with floods, just flood the whole valley...). The Hwy was like rollercoster, but with nice downhill rides and not very bad uphills. Also the views on the Selkirk Mountains were amazing. During our lunch break, Baska didn't resist and swam in the lake for a while, it was sunny day, but not very warm. Then, when we returned back on the Hwy, we met a Black Bear. First, Baska thought that it is big a big dog, no it wasn't. The Bear stopped about 300 feet in front of us, quite surprised what are we doing there. Maybe he/she never saw people on the bikes, so he/she started to run away. How surprise was, when we followed, trying to get as close as possible. It wasn't very easy to catch up with him/her, a bears are pretty fast. But after a while he/she left Hwy and started to climbed hillside away from lake, so we got right under him/her, maybe to 60 feet. This bear was so fat, shiny, nice and like a huge toy. He/she tried to climb a tree, but was so fat that it was impossible. So for a while we just starred at each other, than he/she walked away from these Slovak nuts :-) Everything happened so fast and we were so surprised that we didn't take any picture, shame... Last part of today's trip was on ferry through Kootenay Lake, but to get on, we had to biked through very steep hill from Crawford Bay to Kootenay Bay and through tourist resort with many art galleries and magic/fairy/Celtic/spiritual shops, typical tourist trap. At least from hill was nice view on Kokanee Glacier. Ferry was operating every two hours, so we had to wait about one hour. Sun set behind a mountains and suddenly was very cold. Finally we used some of our warm clothes, which we were carrying uselessly a whole summer. While we were on the ferry, a full moon came up and enlightened the top of Kianuko Mountain on the east. Last part to Kokanee Creek Provincial Park we biked in the night. It was nice when we found out that bikers can camp there for free.
Pictures:
Kootenay Lake with Selkirk Mountains
Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park
... a little bit of magic...
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