The Plan – Kettle Valley Railway
The countdown is on – just a few weeks until we leave on our Kettle Valley Rail Trail bike trek! We’ve been doing a lot in the last couple of months – developing new meals (Chicken Stew, Mac and Cheese) and hats, ordering new bike packing gear, researching our route, cooking and packing new stock for sale, and trying to get out to enjoy some of the northern spring now that the snow is gone. Here’s just a few of the things we’ve learned and our first takes on the gear we’ve got.
I’m the bookie – so I got this one: Cycling the Kettle Valley Railway by Dan and Sandra Langford. There’s a number of places you can purchase your own copy at a reasonable cost, but I took advantage of the handy BC Interlibrary Connect system available through the Vanderhoof library and borrowed mine from the Nelson Municipal Library. This of course was coincidence, but I like to think that there’s nothing more appropriate than a book shipped from the Kootenays to whet your appetite for planning a trip in that region of the province. At first I was a bit disappointed as it doesn’t read like what I imagined a proper travel book should – with a solid narrator and lots of pointers to help a newbie get the feel of the place thrown in around a bit of a tale of their own trek. At first glance it looks like something you would have to take with you to follow along with, each section of the trail broken into various stations, viewpoints, hazards and such at different distances down the trail. Once I looked into it further and paid more attention to the Carmi Subdivision section where we will be biking I started realizing how much information they pack into this.
The edition I had came out in 2002, so there were a few things out of date, most importantly the fires of 2003 that burned out many of the trestles of the Myra canyon. They have since been replaced and upgraded from the originals and relevant updated information can be found at the following websites: The Myra Canyon Trestle Restoration Society, Dan Langford’s Cycling the Kettle Valley site, and numerous other bikepacking blogs.
Anyways, when I had some time to myself to focus on the abundant maps and the detailed notes I could appreciate this book a lot better. I had to read our section backwards, as the author cycled from Midway and we are leaving from Penticton, but I could start to picture how our trip might work out. The distances between places started to make more sense, and it was relatively easy to become familiar with an area of the province in which I have spent little time. We should be able to make Chute late for the first night, enjoy the iconic Myra Canyon with all its trestles and tunnels on day two, and find a spot between McColloch and Midway for one more night on the trail. I really appreciated how Dan included the relevant grades we could expect along the way. While the KVR is an old rail grade, it still has some significant elevation changes over its length. Both Leroy and I are expecting to be pulling trailers as well as hauling gear (or kids) on our bikes so I was happy to see the steepest grade is only about 2.2% coming up out of Penticton to Chute lake. After that its mostly flat in the Myra Canyon and even slightly downhill the rest of the way to Midway. Nothing too terribly ambitious for our first bike packing trek complete with kids in tow.
There are a number of really nice looking resorts on this trail – Chute Lake Lodge was mentioned in the book and they still offer some very nice looking accomodation and food as well as a few camping spots – but the nearby BC Recreation site, also on Chute Lake , is more like what we are used to. That said, it only has four sites – and camping in southern BC is obviously a lot busier than here in the North. I guess we’ll see what’s available on our first night. After that there are three other BC Recsites on the trail – Hydraulic Lake and McCulloch Reservoir both on parts of Hydraulic Lake, and Arlington Lakes further down the trail near Carmi. How well the biking is going and how long we would end up spending in the Myra Canyon itself will likely determine where we end up staying – maybe at two of them, maybe just one. An extra day of riding would bring us into Midway after 215 km.
While I was looking into the where and when of things, Leroy got to work on upgrading our gear and bikes to get the how of what we want to do sorted out. We’ve got a bunch of new gear to tell you about in coming posts.