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WILD SALMON CYCLE
Cycling Out of Inuvik, NWT With Only 10,000 Kilometres To Go
Stage 1 of The Wild Salmon Cycle
By the time I landed in the Arctic, to start riding my bicycle south — I was only about 2 months into first hatching the idea.
I decided to do this bike trip only about two and a half months previous in May. Initially, I had pondered walking, however, after looking at distances and calculating walking pace, I decided that several years on the road was neither the approach nor the time I wanted to take.
Yet, I have also never ridden a bike more than one hundred kilometres in one day, let alone over multiple days. I have never really ridden with more than a water bottle and a quarter in my pocket for emergency phone calls if anything happened while out riding.
Note: I did this bicycle trip starting in 2001. Cellular phones were in their very early days.
If you are just coming to this story — the first story in the series is here 👇
My bike?
I had just purchased it three weeks before landing in Inuvik — and that’s ‘purchased’ with borrowed money. When I landed in the Arctic, my bank account was also a little on the small side with about $900 left after raising some money, and spending my small amount of savings on gear required for the trip.
My initial grandiose vision before setting out is that I would have raised several thousand dollars and that donations would start flowing once I was actually underway. Over the two months between deciding to do the trip, planning, and preparing, I was able to secure some small sponsorship from various organizations and some donations from family, friends, and colleagues. It was not nearly as much as I had naively hoped.
I delayed the trip once pushing my departure back two weeks. Partially, because I had not been able to raise the money I had hoped, and I had only owned my bike for a week by the time my first…
