Thursday, January 24, 2008

Salmon & butter, whales and Tok

So last night we stayed at a roadside campground. We were the only campers....Again! The cool thing here though is that the owner of the campground thought we were some interesting guys. You see, he was a dog musher and had competed in the Iditarod several times.

If any of you readers have done any bike touring, extended back packing or climbing, you probably know that your body needs a lot of calories. I've struggled this whole trip to figure the food thing out. Lot's of rice, beans and peanut butter sandwiches. I asked this guy what he ate during his races. His answer, salmon mixed with butter. Seriously, take a soft stick of butter and mix in salmon. Anyone hungry. In all honesty, at the time it made sense. I couldn't get enough calories in my body.

The next morning, we woke up with a small amount of snow on the ground and there was a strong, cold north wind. Yikes. I somehow managed to open the tent door to get some water boiling on my little MSR stove. By the time the water was boiling and I had made the oatmeal and hot chocolate, my hands were frozen.

We packed up, again freezing our hands as we packed the tent, closed pannier zippers and snapped all the pack clips. We were in trouble. We hit the road and to keep warm we hammered. In fact, it was a time trial to get to TOK.

This is the only picture from this day. I don't have a memory of this, but I think it was one of the few pictures we took because we didn't want to take our gloves off and operate the camera. John took this one as I didn't want to dig out my 35mm camera from my bag. It also just so happen to coincide with a potty break.

I call this one beached whales. Our bikes were big & heavy and looking at them reminded me of whales stranded on a beach.



If all goes well, we will hit Canada tomorrow!

2 comments:

Jason said...

I'm SO using that butter and salmon trick at a Solo this year. HA!

Guitar Ted said...

Interesting post Jason. It is funny what will motivate you to burn up some miles when you are out there......alone.

Gets ya ta thinkerin', it does, yesss.....it does.

anyway, calories. You are correct, lots of them are necessary. Reminds me of Curiaks little dilemma. Maybe he should try the butter trick. ;>)