Canada | July 2023 |
First post in Canada! Seymour Arm is a great junket from Salmon Arm, a place I used to go to by boat as a kid. It's an amazing beach locale with a community of off-the-grid types. The standard route to Seymour Arm is via the north Shuswap past Celista, where the road becomes unpaved but still very good.
For this trip I didn't do the standard route, I decided to ride via Craigallachie on Forestry Service Roads (FSR). And then I nearly got lost.... Once I turned off the Trans Canada 97, it was straight onto a dirt road. For the next 1-hour or so I followed both the logical route, using visual orientation, using Google Maps (which I had not downloaded for offline use). North of Hunkwa Lake, I could not find the right route - lost my data signal so no more Google, and there were many forks in the roads where the ones that appeared to be the best quality and most used ended up being dead-enders at log landings. I was in the process of turning back when my data went back online and Google Maps guided me back towards what appeared to be an overgrown single-track path with grass growing down the middle. That took me onto a major route with power lines from Revelstoke or Mica dams, onwards to Seymour Arm.
Lesson learned: don't ride into mountains without a downloaded Google map / don't ride alone / learn how to use my Garmin Inreach and apps better / consider getting a Garmin Zumo or similar. Regardless it was a good ride and learning experience, and Seymour Arm was amazing as always.
On a seperate note: much of the lakefront south of Seymour Arm, from Scotch Creek to Celista, was burned by a major forest fire one month after, in August.
Ride: 325 km / 6 hrs
Stay: BC Campground $20 / 5/5
