Due to the busy weekend, I was unable to get anyplace to stay that was close to Radium, so we ended up down in Canal Flats. So far we had done pretty good at the locations we stayed at, but that luck was about to run out. Scenic? Nope. Nice grounds? Nope. Cheap? Nope. Three strikes. The picture at the right is the only one any of us took. As my friend Ken says, it was dry as a popcorn fart. The only good thing was that it was big enough that we could spread out quite a bit. Weirdly, it was the most comfortable for me. It's hard to see in the picture but there was this really tough and springy ground cover that was in large 8 or 9 foot patches. I purposly pitched my tent over one of these and with my self-inflating sleeping pad had a really nice mattress.
We made a fire and talked late into the evening. The original plan was for us to camp another night in Trail, BC, but we're close enough to home and there's nothing in Trail for us to see, so we decided to head home a day early. It would make for a longer trip, but nothing that we couldn't handle.
Day 6 - Sunday, July 31, 2011
The day would prove to be a pretty warm one. We got up, took showers, broke camp and had breakfast at a little restaurant across the highway from the campground. After that we were heading south on 93/95. Rather than take the straight and boring way, we turned off and went through Kimberly which is a pretty nice little town. Certainly the road was more interesting. Then back on to 3/95 on through Creston (stopping for lunch) and continuing up the long upward climb across the mountains and eventually back down to 6 and turning left back down to Nelway, where we crossed into Canada a week prior.
After crossing back into the states (where I could start using my normal speedometer again), we headed down 31 and after a short while had our first split. We decided to head over to Kettle Falls and follow 25 down Lake Roosevelt. So Tim left us and headed home when we turned west at the Tiger Store to head over the pass. Normally this would be a lot of fun, but like a lot of roads in the northeast part of the state, they were chip-sealing a lot of it, so we had to take it easy. It's too bad because when the pavement is good, it's got a lot of turns.
Tom Clark
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Intellitect, living in Spokane, Washington. I also do a little development work on the side. And I love riding motorcycles all over the country with my friends.
