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George. To make sure we wouldn’t be stranded by a breakdown, we had stocked up in Victoria on spare parts—a rear derailleur, two tires and inner tubes, spokes, bearings, a cluster, some brake and shifter cables, and a complete set of tools, including a crescent wrench, screw drivers, and Allen wrenches. Each of us lodged a spare tire in the space near the hub between the spokes of our rear wheels.

      From Prince Rupert to the next town, Terrace, it was ninety-five miles. So before we set out on the Yellowhead in the early afternoon of July 2, Larry picked up a two-day’s supply of food: peanut butter (which I scooped from its jar into a lightweight plastic container), two loaves of bread, and oranges for lunches and snacks; a package of our old standby, macaroni and cheese, for dinner; and six eggs and a box of granola for breakfast. The last sign we passed after we pedaled out of Prince Rupert and partway across the dark, barren plateau east of town read, check your gas—next services 90 miles. It seemed strange, almost ominous, to think that for the next day and a half we wouldn’t pass a town or even a house. Larry stopped and rechecked our food supply to make sure we had enough to see us through. About six miles east of Prince Rupert, the road came to the end of the plateau and dropped down into the Skeena River valley. From the top of the plateau, Larry and I looked out over what appeared to be an almost endless expanse of perfect, unspoiled wilderness. Except for the road and its neighboring ribbon of railroad track, there were no signs of man anywhere. Pine forests, unmarred by logging, spread like soft green comforters through the valleys and curled around the lakes and the waterfalls. Jagged mountains patterned with snow and laced with waterfalls sprang up along the valley, creating smaller, deeper valleys and gorges, which funneled off into the distance into other panoramas of forests, lakes, and waterfalls.

      We glided down the face of the plateau and followed the Skeena for the rest of the day. There was almost no traffic. The birds, waterfalls, wind, and the river made the only sounds we could hear as we cycled through the grandeur and natural beauty.

      At the end of the day, we pushed our bikes into the forest and found a level area covered with pine needles next to a shallow stream. It was an ideal camping spot—or so we thought. The pines would protect us from the wind, and the stream would provide our drinking water, dishwater, and bath. While Larry started pitching the tent, I leaned my bike against a tree, rinsed my face and hands in the stream, then went off to pee.

      I’d just squatted down when they attacked. I thought I’d squatted onto a clump of stinging nettles. But soon a few made their way around and up to my face. Mosquitoes, I groaned. I looked down at my rear end: white skin buried in a dark cloud of insects busily sucking my warm blood. Immediately, I remembered what the man at the grocery store back in Prince Rupert had said.

      “The skeeters get pretty thick between here and Terrace,” he’d cautioned Larry and me. “Once you get past Terrace, you should be all right until you get up into the Rockies. But let me warn you. These aren’t your ordinary skeeters we’ve got up here in central B.C. They’re what you might call our genuine Royal Canadian Mounted Mosquitoes. They’re bigger and meaner than any you’ve met up with so far, and they fly in swarms as big as a house. Yessir, us Canadians like to consider our mosquito belt our first line of defense against any ground attack by the Soviets.”

      I grabbed up my shorts and fled, but the cloud stayed with me. I didn’t want to lead them back to our camping spot, so I ran to the road and back in an attempt to lose them. It was no use. These critters were not only bigger and meaner than any I’d ever encountered before, they were also one hell of a lot smarter. They stayed right behind me no matter where or how fast I ran. When I turned back to the stream, I found Larry battling a swarm of his own. He’d just finished pitching the tent, and the two of us dove inside. Within a few seconds, hundreds of mosquitoes were bouncing against the netting over the four tent windows, trying to plunge through the mesh.

      Both of us pulled on our long socks, our sweat pants and sweat shirts, and closed our hoods over our heads, so that only our faces and hands were exposed, and over them we smeared a thick layer of Cutter’s mosquito repellent. Then we went outside to cook our dinner. The smell of food instantly brought what must have been every living bloodsucker within a one-mile radius. The air was so hazy with hovering bodies that we could barely see to cook. While we ate, insects flew into our eyes and mouths and caught in our eyelashes and teeth.

      By morning, my behind had turned into a speckled mass of welts. It stung to bicycle on a butt full of itchy bites, but fortunately, just as the man in Prince Rupert told us, once we got past Terrace the mosquitoes thinned out. They never bothered us much after Terrace, except for a few times in the Rockies and again near the Idaho border.

      During our first four days on the Yellowhead, until we reached Houston, 260 miles past Prince Rupert, we were surrounded by timber, lakes, rivers, and mountains crowned by snow or glaciers. The road followed along the Skeena and Bulkley rivers, which made for easy pedaling. There were no steep climbs, and we had a tailwind the whole way. We covered around eighty miles each day, pedaling from ten in the morning to seven at night, and we stopped often to fill our water bottles in the icy streams and scout the waterfalls and Indian settlements in the forests. The few times we came to a town, we pulled into the local coffee shop for a milkshake and an earful of small-town gossip.

      There were a few minor mishaps during those four days. On our third day, during the ninety-mile stretch between Terrace and Hazelton, we overestimated our supplies and ran short of food. By the time we reached Hazelton, we’d both developed a bad case of the shakes from bicycling for seven hours without eating anything. After that experience, we kept an extra supply of peanut butter and bread and an extra box of macaroni and cheese on hand.

      The next day, when we pedaled out of Hazelton, the metal rack that supported Larry’s handlebar pack broke. Larry tied the pack and the damaged rack to his handlebars with one of the two nylon straps he used to secure his sleeping bag to his rear rack. The setup held together for twenty miles, until we reached Smithers, where he had the rack welded. Then that afternoon, exploring an unpaved side road, Larry lost control of his bike in a loose patch of gravel, slammed into a rock, and bent the rim of his front wheel.

      Yet, apart from those problems, the ride from Prince Rupert to Houston was ideal. The weather stayed hot and sunny, and the traffic kept to a trickle. Every evening, after having worked out for eighty miles, our muscles felt tired, but they didn’t hurt like they had when we first started out. We’d now come to crave that tired, fulfilled feeling we experienced after a long day of bicycling.

      Each night we set up camp in a forest near a river or a stream. Woodpeckers, gray jays, and Clark’s nutcrackers bounced along the boughs over our heads, while we pitched our tent on spongy mattresses of ferns, pine needles, and wildflowers. Once our tent was up, we would start dinner cooking and bathe together in the frigid water, which as often as not came from a nearby glacier. The smell of dinner cooking and the feel of the water cutting away the film of sweat that coated our bodies made a wonderful combination. And because darkness never set in until eleven o’clock, after our meal we’d stretch out in the ferns, dangle our feet in the water, and read a book or reminisce about the day. I always looked forward to the evenings those first four days on the Yellowhead; I treasured the special closeness Larry and I felt toward each other and the wilderness.

      Past Houston, the streams and waterfalls disappeared, the trees grew shorter and scruffier, and the mountains and valleys turned into monotonous, low rolling hills. It was near Houston too that we came upon Chris, a Canadian, and the only other bicycler we met on the Yellowhead. Chris was a tall, skinny fellow in his late twenties. He was on his way across Canada to Newfoundland; he had started out from Prince Rupert less than a week ago.

      “Looks like you two are headed to the Rockies too,” he smiled. “Mind if I tag along? I don’t much care for bicycling by myself. It gets pretty boring most of the time.”

      “Not a bit,” Larry nodded. “We’d be glad to have some company.”

      Chris rode and talked with us for only about an hour (explaining how he was taking the summer off from work to tour his country) before he determined that he couldn’t keep up with our pace and told us to go on.

      “Listen, you’re biking a lot faster than I’m able to, so why don’t

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