Day 6: Rossland- Creston

Well our biggest summits are behind us!!  Today was a gruelling day but it almost didn't happen.
We started the day leaving Rossland around 8:00am.  Right off the bat we had a very steep descent into Trail, a 10km, 10% grade downhill, it was a pretty fun ride, but then everything came to a grinding halt.  Just before leaving Trail we came across a highway sign which said the HWY 3 was closed just past the Kooteney Summit due to a fuel spill.  After making some phone calls we decided to keep going to the next town in hope of more info by then.  We stopped in Selmo to regroup and made a decision on what to do.  I must admit that secretly I was hoping the highway would remain closed and we could leave the Kooteney Summit for another day.  But just when we were about to settle into the motel that the volunteers had already lined up we got word that the highway was opening single alternating traffic and we decided to go for it.  We then road for another 16km to our lunch break.
Everyone had a pretty difficult morning despite the fact is was a pretty flat ride.  It seemed like everyone's legs were having a hard time getting going and no one was looking forward to the Kooteney Pass.  The Kooteney Summit is the hardest climb of the trip- 20km of 6-9% grade with no breaks or flat sections to rest the legs on, it is just up, up and up some more!
After lunch I basically put my bike in first gear and just set a pace and didn't stop until I hit the summit almost 2 hours later.  It was an amazing climb!  There is nothing really to compare it to near Vancouver except maybe doing Mount Seymour back to back, it just keeps going and going.  The crazy thing also is that it follows the side of a mountain and so there are points when you can look up the valley and see the road climbing about 5km's ahead.
It was a pretty emotional climb for me.  I rode the whole thing by myself and had a lot of time to reflect.  I thought about people in my life who are going through a hard time right now but I spent the majority of the time thinking about my cousin, Erin, who lost her battle to CF in 2003 at the age of 19.  I have Erin's picture taped to my handle bars and every time I look down in frustration and exhaustion I see her beautiful smiling face looking up at me.  I know that it was Erin and her inspirational spirit that kept me going on that climb.  It was an amazing climb and when I hit the top I had the greatest feeling of accomplishment I have had in a long time.   As I said, it was an emotional climb and though it couldn't be seen on the outside, I was smiling the whole way up.
From the top of the climb we had about a 50km ride down the mountain, along some beautiful farm land, and into Creston.
It is an amazing feeling to have the Kooteney Summit behind us.  All our big summits have been climbed and everyone is feeling really good to have this one out out of the way.
For more info on the ride remember to check out the right hand column of the blog to see what the ride actually looked like according to my "onboard computer."  

Here are a couple pictures from the top of Kooteney Pass.