Riding Yukon Style part II
It was the day we wished would never end...
Words by Pete Roggeman. Photos by Dan Barham.
Date: 2010-03-07
I’m not one to toss around big statements like “best day of my life”, but by the time we sat down for dinner on our second day in the Yukon, it was already clear that the best day of the summer was close to being clinched – and more was yet to come.
Dustin Rainey (left) comes straight from the mold of guys you always want along on a ride - good-natured, fun-loving, and smooth on the bike. Actually most everyone in Whitehorse seemed to come from that mold. Cam is working on yet another epic meal - we needed a LOT of fuel to keep going on those long days.
The lead story in this adventure up north was the riding, of course, but like any trip that defines your summer – and this one did – good riding alone isn’t enough. What made our time in the Yukon so amazing and complete, was the fact that everything else measured up to the incredible riding. The people, our hosts, the food, the beer – even the espresso at the Midnight Roasters café (which shares space with the Icycle bike shop) was simply first class.
How good was the food? Moments after waking up in yurts with hardwood floors, we were greeted with this morning feast:
Locally roasted coffee
Lemon and wild (handpicked) Yukon cranberry cream scones
Homemade granola and yogurt with wild (yes, also handpicked) blueberries
Apple pecan yogurt coffeecake
Locally made spicy chorizo bison sausage breakfast casserole
Cam covered his hat head with a toque - I was too hungry to care. Chef Carol recounting the making of the bison sausage and the picking of the cranberries - this is the way we should all be eating: like it was back in the day. Marsha and Sylvain are on the right of the frame.
All that in one meal. But we suspected the calories were needed, and we were right.
We followed breakfast up with a late morning ride that included dramatic big mountain scenery at the top of Mount McIntyre, accessed by a fire road that might as well have had a guard checking for your ‘big ass truck pass’ to access it.
This is at the start of the digging out. The ground got a lot closer to the axles before we finally got unstuck. This soil looks dry but patches were wet and there was snow mixed in as well - it might have been a trap, except that road may not have seen another vehicle on it for days.
The early summer conditions resulted in a not-so-blessed union featuring our summer tire-equipped rented truck with a swamp of mud and snow. We would have had to leave that truck on top of the mountain had we not dug it out like ground squirrels with gold fever, and Marsha’s 50 pound right foot. If a truck could be an S&M fetishist, it would want Marsha delivering the punishment.
After getting unstuck, we Blitzkrieged a few more snow bogs, unloaded at the top, and were met by a glimpse of the power of the Yukon: it was not just the big mountain scenery but the potential it represented. One of the Yukon’s principal industries is tourism and the government encourages almost anything that will feed that industry without compromising the rugged ties to the land that are essential to the way of life up North. Trail building is allowed almost anywhere on Crown land, or perhaps more accurately it is not disallowed, and as Sylvain and Marsha were explaining this, we just stood at the top of the flattened peak of Mt McIntyre and imagined ribbons of trail streaming down through meadows of heather and tundra towards still-frozen lakes.
Those smiles are not just for the camera - after 45 minutes of digging we were stoked that we would be riding down without having to leave the truck behind. You can see the limitless trail potential in them thar hills.
Most of the mountainous terrain around Whitehorse was formed by glacial shifts and river flows, resulting in terrain that is rugged but not jagged and impassable. The riding is steep in all the right ways and the mountain environment is, ah, legitimate to say the least, but very mountain bike friendly. We saw our share of imposing granite walls but there was usually a line over or around any crux feature. A trail builder’s biggest problem would only be in deciding where to start – logically wherever there were roads for logging or geological surveying, but if multi-day unsupported riding ever needed a genesis, the mountains surrounding Whitehorse would be a perfect area to pioneer.
No trails had been built up top yet – and any that were would only be rideable 2-3 months per year, but that was only one of many reminders of the potential of Whitehorse to become a major global riding mecca. With the efforts of people like Sylvain and Marsha, the only thing standing in the way of that happening is the passiage of time. There is so much terrain to be ridden that the locals don’t even seem worried about their secret stashes being discovered.
We headed back down the road a short while and then dropped into the Goat Trail, newly cut on a steep, gladed pitch with tight switchbacks between sections of moist, loamy singletrack so raw that we were the first people to taste it from top to bottom. It had that hand cut feel that forces you to pick a line and commit and then scramble to correct a mistake before the guy behind you leaves tread marks all over your body without stopping on the way into the next roost. It was extremely rewarding to nail one blind line after another, winding down and through young Spruce and Fir, diving into one section after another, only stopping at the end to pick the needles and mud out of hair, teeth, and eyes.
Icycle Sport and Midnight sun Coffee Roasters fit together like dogs and trucks.
Sound like time for a beer? After a pause for a few necessities and one broken main pivot diagnosis at Icycle Bike shop and neighbouring coffee roaster Midnight Sun, drinking beer was the only logical thing to do next.
Waiting for repairs is much easier when you have all this coffee to keep you busy.
Growler joke INCOMING! Darcy, our guide and the Yukon Brewing sales and marketing guy describing...something.
Our guide was Darcy, who is the sales and marketing manager at YB Co. and it was not your average tour – nor is YB your average brewery.
Good beer requires top ingredients, and this barley smelled and tasted great even before it was to become another masterpiece.
The owners are engineers who wanted to found a sustainable brewery that put out quality product, and it’s safe to say they succeeded, since they boast 54% of Yukon’s beer sales. After trying their beer it’s hard to know what the other 46% are drinking instead. Many pints and growler jokes later, and we were ready for lunch.
There's something comforting about well-used steel equipment. Whether it's a well-loved hardtail or a brewing pump station (is that what this is?), sreel gets better with age.
It was now about 3 pm and although we had a half dozen pints in us, we also knew well enough that with a nighttime ride ahead of us, lunch was easily as important as our breakfast had been. I won’t recite another menu but I do need to mention how delicious Arctic Char is – think of a cross between the texture and flavour of halibut and salmon, but lower in fat and higher in Omega 3s. It is the uber fish, hands down. Throughout our trip we had it grilled, smoked, and fried and I think if I could have one fish for the rest of my life, that might be the one. Oh, and the chef caught all the char we ate herself.
We had time between that light lunch and dinner to work on bikes, head to the lake for a dip, and take in the view from the Boreale HQ, but what launched the day into a category all its own was that we had planned a big ride for that night on Grey Mountain, and that we weren’t even going to hit the road until 8.30 pm. Or bring lights. We would be riding with the midnight sun.
It's 9 pm. We've already shuttled above the treeline, gotten a truck stuck, dug a truck out, ridden singletrack sashimi, got a beer buzz on, sampled 1 too many coffees, broken a bike, fixed other bikes, swam in a lake, ate 3 gourmet meals and the adventure is only half over for the day at this point.
Looming over Whitehorse, Grey Mountain is big and chunky with ridges and flat spots all the way up (or down) meaning that your vertical is used efficiently. We posse’d up in a group of 10 and shuttled in two trucks. At the end of the shuttle we rode and hiked for another 35 minutes to the peak. This was really the only time in our trip where the mosquitoes were bad but the scenery made up for it. If you kept moving, they weren’t too hard to deal with, but when we stopped on the peak and took 10 minutes to grab some photos and gear up, that was when all you could focus on were keeping them out of your mouth, off your face, or under your pads. Barham picked the first photo angle and one by one we dropped into the opening move of Money Shot.
The mosquitoes didn't sign a photo release but they're definitely there. But the view, the warmth and the bromantic vibe kept the mozzes from being a big issue.
We nailed one rocky elevator shaft to berm line after another with views stretching out into the valley far below. Every gnarly steep pitch was followed immediately by a flattened section so you could centre yourself again and prepare for the next drop-in. None of the exposure was especially bad but you were definitely kept on your toes and could add a little speed to make sure your personal pucker factor was met. Bikes varied from 5 inch trailbikes to DH race rigs and no one setup was perfect – they all worked equally well, just differently.
I don't even remember Barham shooting us in this location but for once the photo does a decent job of profiling the pitch. (Yo Pete - that's because I shot it - Cam)
Rock gardens and steep loam gave way to lightly treed sections with steep chutes that wound their way around trunks and branches – lots of opportunities to balance technical moves with speed. Easy Money was more of the same, but the mid mountain was a bit less steep, but might have had more flow. Girlfriend was and Juicy were both incredibly fast and hound dogging and whooping was rampant – at that point it was clear that the potential cluster factor was way overridden by the hilarity of 10 grown up kids railing through the woods in plenty of light, past most people’s bedtimes.
Sylvain Turcotte is not at all concerned about whether it's past his bedtime.
Golf course designers often talk about the piece of land they're given to work with. If you were a trailbuilder, you'd certainly be saying the same thing about Grey Mtn.
Eventually we were spat out along the Yukon River and a trail by the same name. At this point the sun had set but at such a shallow angle that we were treated to a dusk that lasted for about an hour and a half. Our photographer, Dan Barham, was loving the long lasting soft light, and we all loved the feeling of not having to rush back to the truck.
The trail was a smooth, undulating sliver of off-camber singletrack along the high bank, usually 50 - 80 feet above the water. A few new sections at the end were tight and twisty but it generally was a mellow but very enjoyable way to spin out the legs and cap off the ride. By the time we got back to the trucks it was 1.30 am and mostly dark. By 2.30 when we went to bed the light was already improving again.
If the day's adventures had happened over the course of a long weekend, we would have been pretty happy, but it was just one more day of mountain biking in Whitehorse. We could hardly be luckier than to experience that kind of day again sometime soon.
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Have you ever had a day of riding that went on and on, that you wish had never ended? Whitehorse is the kind of place where that seems to happen a lot. Tell us about your rides there, or anywhere else where you can ride after bedtime here...
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