June 15 – Grassy Lake to Maple Creek (SK)

Bike log: 168 km, 506m of vertical, average speed 37.3 km/h

That was a great ride – what a tailwind! Payback for yesterday, for sure. All day the winds were blowing from behind, probably about as strong as they were from the front yesterday. Much more enjoyable!

Passed another provincial boundary today into Saskatchewan, and at the same time we crossed another time zone as well. But we’re still just 1 hour ahead for now becaues Saskatchewan does not observe daylight savings time. I can see why – it was still light out until well after 10PM, even without the extra hour. Both of these seemed to come up pretty fast, it’s due to cutting across just the bottom part of Alberta. It’s quite narrow there, we only spent 2 nights in the province.

Speaking of provincial borders, there was a noticable change in the quality of the roads as soon as we crossed out of Alberta. Both highway 1 and 3 were fantastic coming through Alberta (better than BC, from what we saw), as were any of the backroads that I saw. Highway 1 seems to be in pretty bad repair at this point, I have heard that it is not great through here or Manitoba. I say we raise the price of a loaf of bread by a penny and give all the extra money to the farmers of these provinces so they can keep up the roads! The other difference, which was entirely unexpected, was that it immediately got hilly as well - we are just north of the Cypress Hills. Not huge hills, but a couple of 100m climbs. Our route through Alberta had been really flat by comparison.

First stop today was at a town called “Seven Persons” Alberta, about 24km outside of Lethbridge. We got a tip there from Frank Church (who runs Church’s Trading Post) about how to bypass Lethbridge – take Township road 120, which is about 12km from Seven Persons. If anyone is coming through this way and want to avoid Lethbridge (bigger cities, especially the approach to them, are no fun on a bike) I highly recommend this!

A lady in the laundromat here said that they’ve been through Saskatchewan a few times and that there are long stretches was absolutely no camping facilities or anything. We will have to pick our destinations fairly carefully for a while.