7/27/22

After morning coffee, I say bye to Guy and load up my bike and head out with Andrea. She's taking her VStrom 650 into Holeshot for a tire change so we both head out together. I'm making my way east to Montrose via the Crowsnest Highway to stay with Bunk-a-Biker host Leah.

https://goo.gl/maps/BXN9cXFSJpGcfZvd6

It'll be a decent travel day just shy of 400 miles. I take the Trans-Canada east for 55 miles and then exit onto BC-3/Crowsnest Highway. The Crowsnest will run east all the way back to Medicine Hat, Alberta but I'll be stopping in Montrose, BC which is just northwest of Bonners Ferry, Idaho where I plan to cross into the US the next day. As the name implies, the road runs up thru the mountains of BC and there are some wide sweepers and curvy mountain roads.

As I ride into the afternoon, the temperature rises. By 3PM, I get into Osoyoos, a popular vacation town in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. The thermometer on my dash reads 106F/41C.

Three hours later, I arrive in Montrose, a tiny little town with a population of just over 1,000 people. Leah and her friend Charlie were in the backyard grilling and patching an above ground pool (Flex seal really works!). They're both avid riders and Leah is on a Yamaha VStar 900 and Charlie has about 18 bikes but the one he's on today is a Yamaha VMax with an additional fuel tank that he made himself. Charlie is a boilermaker so that additional tank was a cake walk for him. I was so tired from the heat that I completely forgot to take any photos with them and their bikes.

They give me some excellent routes for the following day into Idaho. Instead of taking a straight shot across the border, they convinced me to take a northern loop into a hippie town and then a quick ferry ride before crossing back to the US. Might as well keeping exploring on my last day in Canada.