John Bolton - September 11, 2018


Big Elbow - Little Elbow (Kananaskis)

Hosted by
John Bolton
Mentioned
Kananaskis Andre Elbow Fire Road
Greetings from Kananaskis country Moose Mtn Road-Trail (Kananaskis Country)

Episode Stats


Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

131.78

Word count

2,439

Sentence count

188


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the first section of the Big Elbow Loop in Kananaskis Country, Alberta, Canada. This is a 46km loop around the Little Elbow River, and it's a tough section. There's a lot of snow in the area, but I think I'll be able to get through it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So here I am down at the beginning of the Big Elbow Loop, Kananaskis country, and I'm going
00:00:12.700 to be riding that way. It's a 46, 47k ride today, close to 1,000 meters uphill. I might see snow
00:00:23.960 today, so I'm going to have to see what happens, but it's cool, very cool. I'm in cold weather
00:00:28.840 gear pretty much, but it feels good out in the woods, not too bad as far as the temperature.
00:00:34.220 Once you start riding, get warmer, have a jacket, some extra clothes in case they get too cold.
00:00:40.640 So here I am on Big Elbow Trail. This is in Kananaskis country, southwest of Brad Creek, Alberta.
00:00:51.820 It's very quiet out here today, and it's warmed up significantly because I've been riding pretty
00:00:56.880 hard. I'm about 8k in right now. You can see the low cloud cover today, and I think I'm
00:01:04.180 going to ride up into that. Getting a little bit of sunshine, which is kind of nice as well,
00:01:07.920 so it's making the ride a little bit warmer as well. But I'm riding up to, I think it's
00:01:13.460 2,250 meters today, so I do think I'm going to see snow. I could see snow up in the hills
00:01:20.720 up there a little bit, just beyond that rocky section, so I'm going to get that high at
00:01:25.160 least. So I'll probably ride through snow at the top, hopefully it's not too much, and
00:01:30.000 get over the top because it's a pretty fast downhill back to the car. I think about 14
00:01:36.200 or 18k straight downhill. I don't think I'd go uphill hardly at all in 18k, so it's going
00:01:41.160 to be an interesting ride, and making good progress right now. It's a lot harder though.
00:01:47.160 When I was planning on taking a ride today, I wanted to do something a little longer,
00:01:55.120 and I looked along 66 Highway, which is southwest of Brad Creek, and I didn't find anything else,
00:02:05.120 so I came back here. I did this ride earlier this year, and I almost didn't do this because
00:02:09.560 of this area right here. Back in the spring, when I walked through here, there was no rocks
00:02:16.520 in the middle. These cement pieces weren't here either, so I think they're preparing to
00:02:22.440 put a bridge across here. We had to walk across this whole section, right from where the water
00:02:28.640 is here to the water is over there. It was all water, so probably they've thrown rocks in
00:02:33.560 here or the river has changed a little bit, but this should be a little bit easier, I think,
00:02:38.360 to get through today than it was back in the spring. We got our feet pretty darn wet in some
00:02:43.720 pretty cold mountain water here last year. Andre, my friend Andre and myself, so I'm going to try
00:02:49.480 that. I'm going to get a little bit of wet feet here, but I think I could avoid it a little more
00:02:56.120 by going through here, across there, and over there. I'm going to have to walk in and get my feet wet
00:03:01.800 through here, but luckily I brought along some warm thermal socks, some additional socks,
00:03:11.960 so it should make it a little bit easier for me to get through here and not have terribly cold peat,
00:03:19.640 which I've got right now because the water is coming right out of the mountains.
00:03:24.360 All right, so right through here. Feet are already wet, so what the hell, you know,
00:03:31.800 and then this is the hardest obstacle. If you get a bridge across here, it's still good to go
00:03:42.440 all the way down this trail. I won't have any difficulties getting through here
00:03:48.440 at all in the future. So here we go. So there we go.
00:03:54.200 I did notice that back on the trail this way, it looked like they had come through and widened the
00:04:03.640 road a little bit. Probably try to get some equipment down here to move this cement in here,
00:04:09.640 but this is looking good, and the hardest obstacle is out of the way. I'm about 7k into my ride.
00:04:20.680 There's a river down there, and there's a lot of fire road through here, but this last section here
00:04:29.480 was tough because you really got to work for your kilometers like this. Up, down, up, down. There's
00:04:37.400 some really steep sections I had to push my bike. They're just really impossible for me to pedal up.
00:04:43.400 20% grades on rock like this is really tough sometimes, but nice scenery, and my feet have warmed up
00:04:52.120 up. After getting soap back there in the river. Really pretty along this stretch, right along the river,
00:05:09.720 and just as I got to the top of this hill, the sun came out, and you can see the clouds kind of
00:05:17.480 hanging over the mountains right in there, and it's really lovely through here right now. I don't know.
00:05:25.640 I still think I might see snow, but I don't know. I'm up at about 1900 meters now. I got about 300 meters
00:05:36.680 of elevation to go up still, so it's possible.
00:05:46.520 Lovely view here. I'm probably, I think I'm about 5k from the top now.
00:05:58.760 I'm still on the Big Elbow trail, and I'm going to get to the Little Elbow soon, but I think I'm about
00:06:06.280 4 or 5k away from that. Still some significant uphill to do before I get there, but a lovely view
00:06:12.520 here as well. This is a great view in the summertime when you'll have the cloud cover there, because you can
00:06:19.720 see it further on and mountains beyond that as well, but you start to feel pretty isolated
00:06:25.960 when you get out this far. I'm 18, 19k into the mountains now from my car. I haven't seen anybody.
00:06:32.520 This is one of the more beautiful views along this trail with the creek running or the river running down here.
00:06:49.800 And as a matter of fact, if you look along the side, on the side that doesn't get as much sun,
00:06:56.440 that's snow down there. Not up here, because this is getting the sun. That's shaded, but there is snow down there.
00:07:07.800 Just a beautiful view here. Absolutely gorgeous. A little bit of sunshine coming in as well,
00:07:11.880 making it, or brightening it up a little bit. All right, so right now I am about to make a turn.
00:07:22.280 Now this road here continues to go up, and it goes up significantly and gets much steeper
00:07:28.040 around the corner. I think it's about a one and a half to two k climb up this road right here,
00:07:34.840 and then you're at the top. This is in the 2250 meter area. Here's the
00:07:43.160 here's the trail right here, and that's where I am, that little spot.
00:07:45.800 I've done all of this right here, and once I get up to the top, and I'm on the little elbow,
00:07:53.240 which I'm about to go on to right now, it's a bomb downhill. I should be back to the car,
00:07:58.600 which is parked back here, in about an hour and 10 minutes. I've been riding right now, let me see,
00:08:08.600 an hour and 43. I did pretty good to here. So I think it's about two hours I need to get to the top,
00:08:13.000 another 17-18 minutes to get to the top. I have gone up 644 meters at this point. This is a 950 to
00:08:22.760 1,000 meter ride today, and there's a little bit of climbing on the way back, but it's nothing too
00:08:28.120 difficult. It's much harder coming this way. So we'll see how it goes from here, but there are actually
00:08:35.640 some trucks down there. I don't know if you can see them. I'll walk over here. You can see some trucks,
00:08:40.200 pickup trucks down there, and over here, I can hear some sound. Listen,
00:08:45.480 as long as you can hear that, but there's a man working sign here. They're obviously doing some
00:08:49.720 work, and you can see where the trucks have come down and used this road, and I'm going to ride
00:08:54.520 up there right now. Lovely view though. Wow.
00:08:57.560 I'm at the top. I'm at 2,218 meters above sea level. I can kind of get a view of the background. No snow
00:09:13.080 up here. It's because it's so open. There were places on the way up that I did see some snow,
00:09:18.600 but they were sheltered from the sun, and 22.8k, 877 meters of elevation. So that's how much I've
00:09:27.000 gone up today, 877. And still a little bit more to go, but not much. It's all downhill from here,
00:09:35.480 I swear. It's like 18 kilometers downhill right here, and it's pretty fast. It won't take me long
00:09:40.840 to get back, and it took me two hours to get here riding time. Stopped a couple times, take some
00:09:47.320 pictures, get some videos, have a drink, eat something. But a lovely day up here, and you can
00:09:53.960 see we've had snow. It wasn't like this in the summertime. I was here in the spring. There was
00:09:58.920 no snow like this. I don't think in the spring this snow has fallen over the last, you know, week or so.
00:10:04.520 Getting closer to snow falling in Alberta.
00:10:10.840 Getting closer to snow falling in Alberta.
00:10:40.840 Getting closer to snow of Delta.
00:10:44.760 80's
00:11:14.760 Lovely out here, a little bit muddier coming down than it was going up, little slippery
00:11:42.080 sections when you get rolling through the really fast downhill, fun though I'll tell you.
00:11:57.640 Beautiful view out here today, look at that, let's stop here for a sec, wow, what a view
00:12:10.680 beautiful sunshine, after a pretty gloomy start to this ride I'll tell you, my goodness,
00:12:22.680 I'm puffing, I hardly pedaled it all and going downhill, yeah, takes a bit out of you.
00:12:33.680 Just continuing along with this ride heading back on Little Elbow, the Elbow River is right
00:12:40.680 along here, I'll come along it in just a few minutes but I just wanted to get a, you know,
00:12:45.680 some shots of this unbelievable scenery today and the clouds have cleared out from the mountains,
00:12:51.680 they were hanging over and kind of blocking the view earlier but they've blown away, the
00:12:56.680 sun's come out, warmed up a little bit more and this ride is getting better all the time.
00:13:03.680 I'll just ride down here a little bit further with the camera on.
00:13:07.680 Maybe I'm going to a flight.
00:13:28.680 Here's what happens.
00:13:29.680 All right, so I thought I'd get sort of a 360 here as you get closer to my original
00:13:53.500 departure spot. So here we are, kind of in a clearing. And again, it's mostly Fire Road. I've been bombing downhill. I've hardly done any uphill in the last 14, 15 K. So I've still got only about 20 or 30 meters of up to do and all the rest of it is down. But you get some beautiful views out here. And we're into some campground area.
00:14:18.880 Once in a while, I think I hear somebody, but it's possible. It's been pretty quiet out here, but you can hear the river off in the distance.
00:14:31.040 So here is the Elbow River. I'm about 8 or 9 K, I think, from my car. And I actually walked through a river earlier. If you've watched this video, you saw it. Water's pretty darn cold coming out of the mountains.
00:14:46.500 And it's pretty through here. I think I might end up seeing some people pretty soon. They don't usually stray too far from the parking lot, but probably within a couple of K of the parking lot, I'll start to see some hikers out here.
00:15:01.660 And I am pretty close to the car now.
00:15:16.480 The gate here.
00:15:19.020 And I'll tell you, conditions changed a lot from when I left to now.
00:15:26.860 When I left, I think it had just rained out here. Some of the cars in the parking area were wet.
00:15:35.520 And that's not the case now. It's pretty sunny. It's actually pretty nice.
00:15:39.540 Although the high out here today is expected only to be 11.
00:15:45.260 And it's only early September. 11 degrees.
00:15:50.600 Not good.
00:15:51.400 I am back at the car.
00:15:55.320 And I'm back pretty muddy.
00:15:57.500 I don't know that my face is covered in mud.
00:15:59.160 It could be. I know the lens could be a little dirty.
00:16:01.260 Because when I took it off my helmet, it was a little dirty.
00:16:04.680 I cleaned it off the best I could.
00:16:06.840 And the bike is pretty dirty, too.
00:16:11.540 The trail going out pretty dry.
00:16:13.180 I was pretty happy.
00:16:13.900 And then coming back, it was pretty muddy.
00:16:16.200 It was wet coming down.
00:16:17.400 But, you know, what do you expect?
00:16:18.980 We did get some rain yesterday in Calgary and down in this area.
00:16:23.420 I expected to clean the bike anyway.
00:16:25.260 But here's the parking area.
00:16:27.700 That, well, just at the end of 66 Highway, not too far from Forget-Me-Not Pond.
00:16:36.240 And it's beautiful down here.
00:16:38.120 It really is.
00:16:38.920 And I almost think I might pull my tires and wheels off my bike and go down and dip them and clean them off in the river.
00:16:45.120 I'll have to do it at home for sure before I take it in the house.
00:16:47.760 But a great ride.
00:16:49.060 So let's just take a look at the tail of the tape today.
00:16:53.160 Let's see what we got going here.
00:16:57.000 All right.
00:16:57.780 So let's see that okay, I hope.
00:17:01.240 All right.
00:17:02.040 So three hours.
00:17:04.380 So it took me three hours to do 42.7K.
00:17:08.220 So I'm pretty pleased with that.
00:17:10.740 I went up 1,048 meters.
00:17:12.960 It'll probably be adjusted down a little bit.
00:17:15.360 I think it's about 950, 960.
00:17:18.000 Maximum speed, 49.1.
00:17:19.900 I averaged 14K an hour.
00:17:22.400 I went down 1,042 meters.
00:17:24.900 Burned 2,138 calories.
00:17:28.580 So it was pretty good ride.
00:17:34.380 And I'm going to put it up against the ride I did here in the spring.
00:17:37.600 I think overall, I mean, I think I did it faster and I didn't take as much time on the trail.
00:17:42.680 I stopped more in the spring than I did on this one.
00:17:45.460 So I kind of hooked it a little bit faster along here.
00:17:49.600 But overall, a great ride today.
00:17:51.200 I'm glad I got it in.
00:17:52.000 I needed to challenge myself again.
00:17:53.860 And if you're ever in Kananaskis country and you're just a little bit southwest of Bragg Creek,
00:17:59.180 you might want to try the Big Elbow, Little Elbow Loop.
00:18:03.840 Do the whole thing.
00:18:04.580 I would suggest you do it clockwise.
00:18:08.260 Kind of clockwise might be as much fun, I wouldn't think.
00:18:10.920 There might be a place to go.