All night long the pitter patter of rain fell upon my tent. I didn’t want to get out of my sleeping bag in the morning. To put my already wet clothes back on and go out into the rain again was utterly unappealing. So I just lay there and listened to the rain until eventually it stopped. Relieved, I stuck my head out of the tent, only to discover that the reason that I could no longer hear the rain was because it had started to snow. I closed the tent and curled back up in my warmish sleeping bag.

Around 10:30 I finally forced myself to get up. The snow was light, but there was enough of it to have covered my tent and the surroundings in a thin layer of white. Quite beautiful it was. I had a look around, and noticed some fresh paw prints in the snow, and thought I should maybe not hang around too much longer.

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It was freezing cold, particularly as I was wearing wet clothes, but the worst of it came when I walked back to the road. I had to walk, because the ground was a mixture of sand and large pebbles and there was no way I could cycle. The last bit involved walking through some grass that was very wet and icy. It was awful. My feet, protected by nothing more than flimsy running shoes, got so wet and so cold from this that it was almost unbearable.

For the first hour I wished I’d stayed in bed. It began to rain again, harder now, and it was simply miserable. But by far the worst of it was my poor feet. They were so cold I was actually genuinely worried about getting frostbite. I considered stopping and trying to dry and warm them, but out in the open in the driving rain this seemed a hopeless task. My reprieve came with a sign telling me that Bragg Creek was only 12 kilometres away, and so I instead resolved to get there as determinedly as I could.

The small community of Bragg Creek appeared just as the rain once again turned to snow and what was essentially a full-on blizzard began to whir around me. I hurried into a gas station to dry my feet and change my socks in the washrooms, before settling into the Subway next door. Now I had somewhere warm and indoors, with food and wifi, and everything was looking much better. Apart from the weather of course, and the fact that all of my things were wet. I needed a plan, and I came up with one when I noticed a warmshowers host 40 kilometres south along the road. I wrote them an emergency request and went out to brave the elements once more.

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Luckily the elements had improved, with the rain easing and the wind actually helping me along now. It carried me along on a relatively good and flat road until I reached Millarville, the community were my prospective hosts lived. It had started to rain again by the time I got there, but that was okay so long as I had somewhere warm to sleep. I went to the library and sat outside under a sheltered alcove to access the wifi and my warmshowers account. I logged in hopefully and looked. ‘You have no new messages.’ My heart sank.

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I wrote again and told them I was at the library in Millarville but I would now continue and camp as I had not heard from them. The thought of another night with wet clothes in my tent was a sorry thing to contemplate, but I had little option. I stayed outside the library for a while longer, using the wifi, putting off having to cycle more. I even began to look to see if I could camp behind the library. But then a car pulled up and I decided it wasn’t a good idea. The woman in the car got out and spoke to me. “Are you Chris?” she asked. I smiled with relief – “I was hoping that might happen!”

So that evening I had my warm home, and my warm, dry bed for the night after all. I got to wash and dry all my clothes too, and take a shower, and eat nice, hot food. It was amazing! A miracle! I was so happy and so grateful. My host was a woman named Ingrid. Her parents were also visiting, so there were three generations in the same house because Ingrid had two young sons, Sam and Arno. They were good value entertainment and I felt really welcomed into their home. Like I said, it was amazing. Ingrid and her husband Murray (who was away working) had done a long bike trip about fifteen years ago and she had some good stories to tell, including a rather scary one about being robbed at gunpoint. But it was the stories about the local wildlife that had me most intrigued. Like how someone nearby had returned home to find a cougar in their garage eating their dog.

“Are there a lot of cougars around here?” I asked, remembering the paw prints outside my tent that morning in my river valley.

“Oh yes. Lots. Lots of bears too. But don’t worry, they mostly just hang out in the river valleys.”