Chilko Challenge Day 1

The Chilko Challenge is a mountain bike adventure with 50 of our closest friends that we had never met before. It took place in the Northern Chilcotin mountains on the at Tatlayoko lake and on the Potato Range. The event was 3 days, 140 km and thousands of vertical metres of bike riding and hike-a-bike. It took incredible vision, guts and effort by 2 local riders to make this event happen.

The trip almost started with disaster, my partner had some family issues he had to deal with wo I was left solo. In this event no partner means no riding. Lucky enough the group from Steed Cycles was riding as a threesome and I hooked up with them. I actually even ran into them in the Tim Hortons in Williams Lake.

Day 1 started with the group of almost 50 raring to go, until we hit the first climb. The first 10 km had riders climb and hike a bike 1100 metres. We had glimpses of Tatlayoko Lake to show how high we had climbed.







We finally got to the open meadows for some sweet single track. The meadows took us to a ranching cabin where we grabbed some food. From here it was going to be 25 km of mostly down hill riding, well at least when there was a trail to follow.





We followed a ridge line down and the views were epic. This section was super fast and flowy, definetly worth the climb to get up here.






Day 1 ended 5.5 hours later at the Chilko River Lodge, where all our gear, a warm fire and great food waited. Oh yeah, and lots of beer.