Cycle Adventures of an Edmontonian: Castor to Botha, Alberta

Today I resumed my cross-Alberta cycling that I began last summer.

As a reminder, I am working on connecting the Alberta/Saskatchewan border at Macklin, Saskatchewan with Saskatchewan River Crossing in Jasper National Park. Last year, over a handful of trips, I pieced together Red Deer to Saskatchewan River Crossing and the border to Castor, Alberta, which means all I have left for this year is Castor to Red Deer (140 kilometres).

This morning I drove from Edmonton to a village called Halkirk, which is roughly halfway between Castor and another small village called Botha. In other words, it made a good midway point to park the car, since I would be doing this route self-supported (i.e., without my dad dropping me off and picking me up!).

I began by cycling eastward to Castor around 11:30, and I did the 22 kilometres in 40 minutes, which I was pretty pleased with. I ate lunch at the Shangri-La, where I had eaten dinner after finishing up in Castor last year.

As last year, I found one of the most striking things about the Castor area was the wind turbines (you have to look closely in this picture to appreciate how many there are!).

It was almost 13:00 when I started back westward, and in just seconds I realized why:

a) this is such a good spot for those wind farms; and

b) why I had made such good time coming east!

The wind was bad news. It took me 65 minutes to get back to the car, and probably twice the effort, too. I did not bother stopping and kept on towards Botha, another 24 or so kilometres west down Highway 12.

I left the beautifully named Painted Earth County and entered Stettler.

Besides the wind, the sky was also darkening now, so I was worried about a storm. Anyway, did not much matter, because I was basically working as hard as I could and still moving really slow.

When I finally reached Botha, I had been riding for 130 minutes west since Castor--and the total time it took me to ride the same route east was only 90 minutes! Needless to say, riding one direction was much more enjoyable than the other!

Botha is a tiny place, but has an interesting story, and some neat old buildings. The story is about perhaps the first manned flight in Canada (1908!)--some farmers in the area had a "flying machine" that is memorialized on this highway sign and a mural on the arena. Who would have thought!