Day 28 (June 11). North of Edmonton

From: Edmonton, AB

To: Athabasca, AB

Miles today: 108

Total miles: 6567

Four weeks on the road.  Now the adventurous part begins.

My new front tire, suitable for unpaved roads. "It just got real."

I continued my stay in Edmonton while Scona Cycle continued to tune up my bike, including putting on new tires that are a compromise between on-road and off-road.  For those who follow such things, they are Continental TKC 80 “Off Road Enduro” tires, which were recommended on one of the Internet sites that focuses on this sort of thing.  Well, now that the tires are physically on the cycle, I guess there is no turning back.  Once again, I move toward the unknown. 

The bike was ready at about 1 pm, and I went over to get it about an hour later. After signing everything and settling accounts, I went to climb on and drive away.  There was an old man, in his eighties, sitting out there waiting for me.  He wanted to chat about riding. He introduced himself as “Rudi,” and for someone with as poor a memory as I have, something pinged.  “Are you the owner?” I asked.  “Yes,” he responded – he is actually the founder – and then jumped back to discussing my machine. I had recognized his name from the business card the shop had given me; I don’t know why.  He was a big fan of the Honda NT700, which was never sold in Canada (and only in the US for two years), and knew all about it. He is still mad at Honda for this, and he is a Honda dealer.  When he saw it in the shop and then saw the tires that were being put on, he knew the owner must be “going north” and waited around to meet me. 

His name is Rudi Zacsko, and he has had one of the most interesting lives of anyone I have ever met.  He escaped Hungary as a young man in 1956, after the failed uprising against the Soviet Union. He has been involved with motorcycles all his life, and has ridden practically everywhere there is to ride.  He has done the ride I am about to do three times, I believe he said, and he has driven through Mexico, Central America, and South America, mostly off-road.  Multiple times. He said he was 87 years old now and still rides; he was in Arizona last winter. He apparently wanted to meet me because I did not drive a Gold Wing or some other super heavy bike, but the modest 700 cc NT, similar to the machines that he has ridden all his life.  He showed me some great maps and pictures taken from his long career; on the way out, I could see some of the guys who worked in the shop smiling at me.  It was a very cool experience.

The legendary Rudi Zacsko Sr., still riding.

Because of Edmonton’s sprawl, I decided to use the rest of the afternoon to get out of town so that I wouldn’t have to fight rush hour in the morning.  This proved to be a good idea; even at 3:30 the traffic was brutal, and the traffic lights even along the major roads went on for miles.  I finally broke out on AB 2, and took it the hundred or so miles to the town of Athabasca, which is on the river of the same name. A hundred miles is not a lot, but there was an important change.  As I mentioned earlier, the branches of the Saskatchewan River that flow through Edmonton and Saskatoon eventually dump their water into Hudson Bay and then the North Atlantic. The Athabasca River is a tributary to the Mackenzie, which empties into the Arctic.  I have changed watersheds.

I am also out of the prairie and almost into taiga, sometimes called boreal forest.  Taiga (pronounced like “tiger” only with the “r” replaced by “ah”) is actually one of the largest biomes on earth, in terms of square miles.  There are a few pieces of it in the US – in northern Minnesota, Michigan, New York, and Maine mostly.  Canada and Russia are dominated by it.  Taiga is composed of conifers, mostly pines, spruces, and larches. Despite its vast geographic extent, the biodiversity is quite low; you can go two thousand miles and see the same few species of tree, mammal, bird, and occasional insect.   As you might expect, the chief characteristic of this biome is the long, cold winter.  Also important is the extreme difference in average temperatures between winter and summer, which is in turn due in large part to the vastly different number of hours of sunlight between those seasons. I will be in taiga for a long time, breaking out into tundra only when I am north of the Arctic Circle. 

Left: regions of taiga.  Right: my current location (Athabasca), with the border between prairie and taiga visible from space.