I love the mountains.  My bike tours always offered many things that are exotic to me…wineries, oceans, canyons…but what always gave me the most excitement and brought me back were the mountains.  On every tour I have to spend an entire day of riding across the bald prairie to reach them…and on every tour once I see them and ride into them I feel like a kid again.  Therefore…in the spirit of encouraging childlike wonder at a time when grown up realities are all around me… the second episode of the Lord of the Roads Tour is dedicated to the Tall Towers of the West.

The best places to go if you want to see great mountains and enjoy great mountain riding are the Rockies and the Kootenays.  This will be the focus of this episode without distractions, for the latter of these two is where the best motorcycle roads in all of Canada are located.

The goal for the first day was to get to Canmore.  My friends Laura and Matt were moving from there and this would be my last chance to see Laura before she moved (Matt already did).  I was packed and ready to go the night before and had hoped for an early 8:30am start, but a last minute chance to jam with my musician friends kept me up a little later than I expected, and getting up was a bit of a chore.  I had to settle for a 10am takeoff.  Still not bad.

I ended up taking the reverse route of the final day of the Road Warrior Tour 2012…head southeast through Wilkie and on to Macklin and Provost.  The day was windy as hell but it was from the southeast so it was at my back for most of the way.  The temperature was only about 22degrees but at least it was sunny and not pouring like the first day of the Fellowship of the Road.

From Provost I took a few secondary highways to Castor, and from there kept heading west through Stettler and Red Deer to reach the junction of the road to Sylvan Lake.  I knew this route may be the longer one, butI wanted to ride down Hwy 22 (called the Cowboy Trail in Alberta).  By the time I was heading south on Hwy 22 it was nearly 5:00.

The Cowboy Trail is a little overrated as a destination highway although it’s better than the droning dullness of the major highways in Alberta.  The wind had died down, however, and the temperature increased. I think it must have been a hot day in southern Alberta.  By the time I reached Cochrane I could tell that my face had burned from exposure to too much sun.

Turning west at Cochrane to take Hwy 1A was exciting.  It was here that I got the first glimpse of the Rockies.  They look so mysterious and menacing from the distance…first you can see the faint outline…then they start to take on dark blue forms in the distance…then before you know it you are staring at massive towers of rock…all in a straight line like an army of soldiers guarding some kind of secret ancient treasure.

The excitement came right back for me…this was an experience I was robbed of on the Fellowship of the Road because the sun had set already.  A year’s worth of anticipation had built up and was now pouring out.  I rolled into the mountains just after 8pm and was still in a state of euphoria over finally being in the Rockies by the time I reached Canmore.

I met up with my friend Laura and we enjoyed a dinner out, caught up, and she gave me a little tour of the city so that I could see all of the damage caused by the recent flooding.  The remnants of the disaster were still evident…a stark reminder that no matter how high the feats of human engineering and planning…you still can’t mess with nature.