beaverdell mines and goat mountain lookout. and a bit of driving

Sunday.  what to do...  how about pester louie until he agrees to go on a random drive far away to a place that we don't even know for sure exists and certainly don;t know how to get there.

sounds good.  I had been to the mines at beaverdell before, but there is also the rumor of a sweet old fire lookout on goat mountain.  off louie and i go to find it, and check out some mines as well.  we also brought a bbq.

It was raining a bit as we headed out of kelowna, but soon it wasn't.  it stopped raining as soon as we left the pavement.  obviously a sign.

our first stop was this mine.  we went in.  alllll the way in.  tons of old railway tracks inside.  pretty cool.  we came to what was to us, a dead end, but could have been further explored with coveralls and better flashlights, but some common sense stopped us from climbing through a small hole in a tunnel that was 80% caved in.  we could see through and could have climbed through, but we didn't.  it was too early in the day to get that muddy on the 1st stop.

pretty cool

7 summits, oh yea, i forgot the best part

so, back to the rossland riding story for a second...

on the way back, after the rain had stopped and we had bbq'd once again, we were headed towards beaverdell, which has a population of about 200 or so and DOES have a sign for a gas station. this was important because the fuel guage was on "e" although the gas light wasn't on yet. We searched the town for said gas station, but found only what might be a gas station, but apparently wasn't. what could we do but drive and cross our fingers? just on the outskirts of this non-thriving non-metropolis, a big blue sign reminded us to check our fuel, next service 79 km. after checking it, it was still low. very low. unless "e" means enough, but i don't think it does. The gas light came on about 15km past the sign. i remembered watching a show about gas mileage testing, and they said they lancer had traveled 70km with the gas light on. i hoped my car was the one used in the test, but i don't remember anyone borrowing it. also, we were in the mountains, and figured that would change the result. if we could make it to big white turn off, it was 95%downhill from there. driving 90 for the next 45 minutes in the silent glow of the small orange light of the gas meter, we planned what we could do. i figured my caa membership might come in handy, until i realized that we were out of cell phone range. We didn't really want to have to ride our bikes away from an abandoned car, but that would have been our best option. it turns out... we made it. lots of coasting in neutral might have helped. sorry for the quick wrap up, but thats the end


our camp spot near rossland