Exert from my Alaskan bicycle tour journal.
June 26th 09
I think I just hit some nettle with my shin. It has that burning itchy sensation that only nettle seems to create.
I am in my hammock now. Earlier I was outside helping Steven hang food. We are just past the city of Whitecourt next to Chickadee Creek, at the section of the highway where to two lanes divide and go around a small wooded area.
I would like to share some things that I have now learn't about my hammock. First you need a toque, it can be chilly, you need to wake up to roll over, getting into your sleeping bag works every muscle in your body and the sound of mosquitoes is not as traumatic as the reviewers claimed.
Today was a rough ride. It was meant to be a long day in both length and time (~130km) but mother nature saw to it that we would manage to go a far shorter distance. The morning started with a constant but tough headwind. By 10 am and for the rest of the day the winds blew so much that we moved no faster than 12 km/hr and had to yell to hear each other on our breaks.
To it off Steven went a bit funny on me. It started off with him being whinny and then moved into the weird. To be fair today seems to have been really tough on Steven and myself as well. Still he said some funny things (and perhaps some not so funny things). Mostly he complained that we should have started in Whitehorse,since the wind would then be in our favor. I did get a laugh when he tried to cut down a 6 inch tree with the sharp end of a multitool... aannnd when how he complained when I bought him a strudel because they "are for fat people" and then proceeded to eat 2 of them but my favorite comment was when we needed water
Across the highway on the other end of chickadee creek is an abandoned wood smocking facility that we explored earlier. Steven wanted to camp there but I wanted water access. It was very cool none the less. I was particularly interested in it, not just because it was a large abandoned facility but because their were remnants of past remediation work. Water monitoring wells poked out of the ground everywhere. Inside one of the buildings I found the remediation drawings from 1992. The whole area was contaminated with various hydrocarbons. Their solution was to pile all of the contaminated soil in a heap on the north end of the property and collect the leachate from it. The leachate was then directed to two small ponds. Ironically, or perhaps t radically we still found nearly a dozen full barrels scattered around the site. We explored, Steven took photos and then seriously tried to assure me that we could draw our drinking and cooking water from one of the ponds.
Update, during my aerobic routine (aka getting into my sleeping bag) my hammock feel a strait 6 inches.
Some notes about the hammock: It ended up being very reliable. Shortly afterwards I would rarely wake up to roll over and I mastered getting in and out of my sleeping bag. However my toque always fell off and later in the trip the sound of mesquitos did get rather dramatic.
June 26th 09
I think I just hit some nettle with my shin. It has that burning itchy sensation that only nettle seems to create.
I am in my hammock now. Earlier I was outside helping Steven hang food. We are just past the city of Whitecourt next to Chickadee Creek, at the section of the highway where to two lanes divide and go around a small wooded area.
I would like to share some things that I have now learn't about my hammock. First you need a toque, it can be chilly, you need to wake up to roll over, getting into your sleeping bag works every muscle in your body and the sound of mosquitoes is not as traumatic as the reviewers claimed.
Today was a rough ride. It was meant to be a long day in both length and time (~130km) but mother nature saw to it that we would manage to go a far shorter distance. The morning started with a constant but tough headwind. By 10 am and for the rest of the day the winds blew so much that we moved no faster than 12 km/hr and had to yell to hear each other on our breaks.
To it off Steven went a bit funny on me. It started off with him being whinny and then moved into the weird. To be fair today seems to have been really tough on Steven and myself as well. Still he said some funny things (and perhaps some not so funny things). Mostly he complained that we should have started in Whitehorse,since the wind would then be in our favor. I did get a laugh when he tried to cut down a 6 inch tree with the sharp end of a multitool... aannnd when how he complained when I bought him a strudel because they "are for fat people" and then proceeded to eat 2 of them but my favorite comment was when we needed water
Across the highway on the other end of chickadee creek is an abandoned wood smocking facility that we explored earlier. Steven wanted to camp there but I wanted water access. It was very cool none the less. I was particularly interested in it, not just because it was a large abandoned facility but because their were remnants of past remediation work. Water monitoring wells poked out of the ground everywhere. Inside one of the buildings I found the remediation drawings from 1992. The whole area was contaminated with various hydrocarbons. Their solution was to pile all of the contaminated soil in a heap on the north end of the property and collect the leachate from it. The leachate was then directed to two small ponds. Ironically, or perhaps t radically we still found nearly a dozen full barrels scattered around the site. We explored, Steven took photos and then seriously tried to assure me that we could draw our drinking and cooking water from one of the ponds.
Update, during my aerobic routine (aka getting into my sleeping bag) my hammock feel a strait 6 inches.
Some notes about the hammock: It ended up being very reliable. Shortly afterwards I would rarely wake up to roll over and I mastered getting in and out of my sleeping bag. However my toque always fell off and later in the trip the sound of mesquitos did get rather dramatic.