Okotoks to Claresholm With a Detour

Saturday - July 20

We are SO glad that Jan has a ranch truck and offered to ferry us and our bikes to the top of the hill!!

This guy reminded Donna of Lotta Bull, the Appaloosa stallion that her family had a long time ago.

We ejected ourselves and our gear and said a fond farewell to Jan. It really was nice of her to give us a ride, especially since she fed us such a wonderful breakfast and our legs would have been starved going up that hill.

Can't quite see Claresholm from here but almost.

We were just outside High River when we passed this temporary village of trailers. We suspect that they are housing flood relief workers. 

High River was the hardest hit town in the area.

Clean up crews were still hard at work in many of the downtown businesses and the flood was a month ago.

What a great road to ride on.  We did not see a single vehicle.

 

There is a good reason for the absence of cars.  We can usually get by places when they close the roads to cars.  A local relief worker we talked to said, "I don't know why the road was closed, but they just put up the sign yesterday".  We decided give it a try, since it was part of our tentative route south.

We started to see the reason they closed the road to motor vehicles.

There were some pretty good indicators of how high the water  reached.

Opps!  Now we see the real reason the road was closed.  We had to do a little backtracking and take an alternate route.  We ended up on a major highway.  It had good shoulders and was safe to ride on .  However, it was little busy.

Even thought the flood occurred 3 weeks ago, there was still a lot of mud on the roads, especially in the town of High River.  Compared with what the town was dealing with, a little mud on the bikes and panniers didn't even register on the "problem scale".

Doug never looks a gift horse in the mouth - Yep, he picked it up and ate it!

Notice the flag. Looks like a house divided!

The little village of Nanton was our lunch stop for the day. The cafe makes their own bread for the sandwiches and it was delicious. The headwind did pick up a little, while we were eating.

While the potential for strong winds was present, we were very lucky and only experienced light to moderate headwinds.  The Alberta prairie is really beautiful when the flowers are in bloom and the grass is still a lush green. It has been said, "If your dog has long legs and the grass is not too tall, you can watch him run away from home for three days".  

We thought it might be a good place for a snack (read ice cream) but there wasn't anything in sight. 

Instead we decided to stop at the first place in Claresholm that had ice cream. It turned out to be an A&W with root beer floats which, after 57 windy miles on the road, really hit the spot.

Our home for the night.

Waterproof panniers make washing the mud we picked up in the the flooded areas a pretty easy job.  The motel owner let us use a hose and bucket to clean the gear and bikes.  Doug usually does bike cleaning and routine maintenance periodically, usually on our "short" days. The wind did pick up later in the day so tonight we decided to split the route from Claresholm to Pincher Creek into 2 shorter days instead of 1 long one so our legs will be rested for the mountains to come and we can avoid the late afternoon winds.