112kms, point to point, West Bragg to Canmore

I had the idea of riding point to point from Bragg Creek to Canmore mostly on single track and who better than Andy for the challenge?. Also, as Amit had the day off and wanted to do a long ride before the Breg Epic it was easy to convince him for the ride, so the three of us ended up willing to do it and left early with a few changes along the way... I picked them up at around 7:00am and drove to West Bragg Creek. Parked there and started the ride. We took the new West Bragg to Ranger Summit, down Sugar Mama to Station Flat which was a good warm up for the long ride/. From Station Flats we rode Sulphur and Powder Face following the Prairie Link that would eventually take us to Powder Face road to connect with Jumping Pound. Because we weren't carrying a lot of water we had to filter some and refill the bottles before going up Jumping Pound>>
so we had a quick break and got ready to continue with the trip. Andy was riding hard all the time and was looking fresh as usual, I couldn't keep up with his pace up Jumping Pound, but was on sight !! The original plan was to go down at Jumping Pound Ridge to connect with Lusk Pass, but decided to do Cox Hill instead and then ride the road from Dawson to Lusk Pass. We haven't done Lusk before and were looking forward to it >>> It was a great trail and pretty good link to connect with Barrier Lake (for a few minutes and probably ignoring what was ahead of us we considered doing Baldy, but given the fact that we did Cox Hill already we were ok skipping it this time.., good choice :-))). We road down to the information centre by Barrier where Amit (strategically) had left some goodies and coke to add something to our bellies (we stole the idea from Kate and Craig)!! By the time we were there we had already covered 74kms in close to 6:30hrs and 2,400mts of elevation.. My legs were feeling good, but not as good to beat Andy up Prairie View (who took the king of the mountains this time :-(  >>>).

We went up Prairie View and got up there with little over 81kms. Down Quaite to connect with TransCanada Trail where we ran into a black bear (pretty close encounter, like a few feet !!! crap Andy yelled !!! bear bear bear !!!!! I was right behind and look at him so close !! and Amit started to yell at him get out of here bear get out of here!! (apparently that is the secret yell of rangers :-)))) after that and a good laugh we kept going all the way to Three Sister (pretty happy to see paved road this time..), we connected with the low line trail that took us all the way the Canmore Nordic Centre. It was 7:40pm when we got there with total of 112kms and over 3,600 mts of elevation in 9ish hours of riding time.. Awesome trip, awesome company, we were ready for some food and Amit had arranged reservations in all you can eat sushi in Banff "Miki" (I have to admit that even though I am not a sushi fan, I really liked it this time!!)







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