I am half packed for a bike tour I have been contemplating in rural Alberta, and am having second thoughts because of the fierce winds currently blowing.  The forecast for today has winds out of the west at 50 km/hr, gusting to 80.  The first day of my trip will be eastbound, so if it holds I will be laughing tomorrow, my planned departure day, but really that will just be luck.

When I first started bike touring, many years ago, 'wind luck' was a real thing; the Canadian prairies have always been windy, but we did not have the fierce winds we have now.  The idea of trying to ride into an 80 km/hr wind brings up a mental image of trying to ride into a wall.

At this point I am wondering if bike touring in this area has morphed from an activity of athletic endurance to one of simply luck: get the wind behind you and anyone can put in a hundred kilometre day; have that kind of wind in front of you and (almost) no one can.  Sadly, rural Alberta has become depopulated enough that lack of facilities means that shorter days are often not an option.

Maybe this is just me venting as I experience pre-trip jitters, and forgive me for ranting.  I welcome other people's comments., but if I do go, I likely won't respond for a while.

I think your feelings are normal. And 80 km/h winds are impossible to ignore on a bicycle. 

As I get older I often wonder about the changes I perceive. How much is the real world actually changing, and how much is my perception of reality changing as I get older? Bike touring gets more difficult as I age, even if the environment doesn't change.

For me, wildfire smoke seems to be the biggest thing that has changed since my first bike tour in 1988. It's a chronic problem now. 30 years ago wildfires were more rare and much smaller. Back then I never considered wildfires when planning tours. Now wildfires are easily the number one potential spoiler for most of the summer. Escaping smoke is a matter of luck, same as escaping 80 km/h headwinds. And now entire continents are sometimes blanketed in smoke. There is no escape.

Wayne,

I agree, re smoke.  I just postponed a little backpacking trip in California, in part, because of smoke and air quality.  It's definitely a thing now.  Sad.

Karen

"For me, wildfire smoke seems to be the biggest thing that has changed since my first bike tour in 1988."

Wholeheartedly agree.  While the problem mostly occurs in the western U.S., the rest of the country isn't immune to the smoke.  And there have been increasing fires in the national forests of the southern U.S. as well.

When I rode the Transam in 2015, the western wildfires at that time were noted to be the nation's #1 crisis/priority and it was considered to be a record wildfire year.  There were some 35,000 firefighters mobilized to fight these fires, and the magnitude of that effort was still a new enough phenomenon that folks were thinking it was a fluke.  But every year following has also been bad, and we now try to plan with consideration of the "wildfire season."   I rode in wildfire smoke for 16 days in 2015, and had some schedule changes and 1 long day (123 miles) in order to get through the worst of it.  I had hoped to avoid those kinds of problems when I rode the Northern Tier in 2021, but the fires in Washington had closed major highways (as you know, you and I were within 2 days of each other on tour), and I had to reroute to the south to reach Anacortes.  

The Rocky Mountains seem to be the dividing point for likely fire/smoke concerns.  Most places east of the eastern foothills of the Rockies are a lower risk for fires, while every place west of that is a higher risk. That encompasses some 1/3 of the continental land mass of the U.S., and most unfortunately it includes the area that I think is the best for bicycle touring.  

Crazy as it may seem, and embarrassing as it is, there are still a significant percentage of folks in the U.S. who doubt climate change and/or think it's a serious crisis;  Climate Change Ignorance and Complacency

I remember when our paths almost crossed in 2021. The Northern Tier route was closed at Loup Loup pass because of a fire. I didn't have to re-route, but I endured several periods of intense smoke.  Fires were burning in so many directions that I got smoke no matter which way the wind blew. I wanted to do my tour a week or two earlier to have a lower chance of smoke, but that period had extreme record breaking temperatures as high as 115F. Parts of Canada were even hotter.

From the Conclusion page of my Columbia Coulee Chelan Circuit tour journal:

No smoke on days 1 and 7.
Minor smoke for a short time in the afternoon on day 2.
Minor smoke early in the day on day 3.
Dense smoke during the morning of days 4 and 5.
Dense smoke at mid-day on days 6 and 8.

Is frequent smoke the new normal for summer bike tours?

Bob I don’t know Alberta but I do know outback Australia where wind and smoke are significant considerations for cycle touring.
Extreme weather events are more frequent nowadays and becoming more frequent, so need to be considered, however they aren’t yet showstoppers in my planning.

Wildfire smoke is a real health hazard. I didn’t take it seriously enough here when we had several months of thick smoke in the catastrophic 2018 fires. 

I cycle commuted throughout that awful time and as a consequence suffered lung damage which has taken several years to abate. 

With 20:20 hindsight, I should have worn a PS2 mask when outdoors when the smoke blew in. I foolishly thought we’d have a few days of smoky air. It kept on keeping on for several months. The fine airborne particles do a lot of damage over time.

Thankfully we’ve now had several years of respite from fires. Record breaking floods, hailstorms and the occasional tornado have arrived instead.

I am sorry for the health issues the smoke caused you, Graham, but I do appreciate the warning imbedded in your reply.  Like other commenters on this thread, we have air quality issues here as well, and like you I have been ignoring the air quality advisories that have been issued.  Thanks to Covid there are lots of good quality masks around, I just need to bite the bullet and start wearing one on smoky days.

Bob please do wear a good mask. What we call here a PS2. I think the name refers to the particle size which they are supposed to filter. 

The air pollution here from the unprecedented fires was extreme. For example smoke alarms inside air conditioned office buildings were going off. Our own home’s evaporative cooling stank like a cigarette ash tray. The filters became so blocked they were unusable. The far end of the 50 metre outdoor swimming pool looked foggy in the smoke, and eventually the outdoor pools were closed because the air quality was so bad.

The lung damage is gradual and incremental. Luckily I’m reasonably fit for my age so have mostly recovered. Others with chronic health conditions haven’t been so lucky. 

If we ever incur such severe fires and accompanying smoke again, I’d move elsewhere for the duration. The anticipation of the situation being short term like previous fires was my big mistake.