Chilcotins Canada Day Adventure

After a busy spring with a few races and a lot of work what better then to escape to one of the best kept secret in BC; Bralorne. This small town is pretty much a paradise for mountain bikers who are not scared to be self-reliant. Bralorne has it’s own network of trail which we tackled a little bit… well let’s say one of the trail started pretty much from the front porch of the beautiful log cabin where we stayed (thanks to Andrew’s friends Charlie and Matt) so we had no choice but to go for a spin in the area around Mt Ferguson.

The main goal of our trip was to go on an overnight trip in preparation for longer exploratory missions later on this summer. Both Andrew and myself have dreamt for quite a long time now to ride the famous Spruce Lake area. This is a trip that can be done with floatplane access but we decided to use our legs and lungs

to climb the long Gun Creek Trail. The multi use path presents obvious sings of horses use but is really nice and easy to ride. We started the first day armed with our big packs and climbed slowly our way to Spruce Lake. To our surprise, the meadows were blooming which gave us breathtaking scenery… it was actually hard to keep the eyes on the single track ahead. We camped for the night at the main Spruce Lake Campground where to our surprise, we got snowed on! ….the white stuff milted by breakfast time and the sun came out to guaranty us an other day felled with amazing views. We first explored the trails on the Tyaughton Creek side, and climbed back up to Spruce to take the trail to Cowboy Campground and to Hummingbird Lake. Unfortunately, there was a fair amount of fallen trees in the trail to Hummingbird lake but it should be all clear by now since we met the magic chainsaw men on the way.

From Hummingbirds Lake we then charged back all the way down the valley… and god was it ever fun. The single track that we nicely climbed the previous days was now a flowy tunnel through high grass, flowery meadows, sandy berms and thick forest. You can get going so fast on that trail it’s pretty scarry… Euh.. I mean amazing.

After our 9 hour day, we got back to the car with scratched legs, a few bruises (well not Andrew, just me), soaking wet shoes from river crossings, squeaky bikes but most importantly large smile up on our faces. As images are worth a 1000 words, here they are!