An endeavour to gain first hand experience of all existing and proposed bicycle routes as identified in the Kamloops Transportation Master Plan for use in cycling infrastructure advocacy and to publicly promote cycling.

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March 20 – Brock to TRU

On this first day of Spring, our 23 km ride was a redo with a TRU twist ?.

We travelled a mixed bag of existing and proposed routes from Brock to TRU via St Paul St W along the Strathcona Park Trail (anyone know – is this part of the historic Nicola Wagon Rd?) which offers an excellent view of the confluence of the twin rivers and the Overlander Bridge. There’s a bench at the viewpoint if you want to linger for the view or a rest.

The climb continues up Lombard, Centre, and Dalgleish which accesses a little trail to the McGill/Summit intersection then across to TRU.  Climbing to this waypoint took about 45 min.

We looped around the campus on University Dr.  It was weird and sad seeing so little activity in our city’s education hub.  At the University/McGill intersection, there is, unfortunately, no existing bike route (but McGill is a proposed Multi-Use pathway!) so we made like skinny cars and road McGill Rd a few blocks until a wide sidewalk enticed us out of traffic. 

After crossing Columbia, McGill becomes a proposed shared route which is fairly pleasant cycling with little traffic.  At Bestwick, we went offroad taking the trail in Sahali Terrace Park keeping right (South) until descending down the single track to Xget’tem Trail (Note: you may not want to take a skinny tire road bike on this section.  It may be better to reroute up to Xget’tem or down to Columbia).

The final leg took us on our well-traveled route down 5th, across St Paul to 2nd into Riverside Park, over the bridge, and all the way home via Tranquille, Royal, and McArthur Island. 

I think this is a great route for an intermediate recreational ride, for training, or to access TRU or Lower Sahali.  The whole excursion took 1hr 50 mins with a short real estate detour and numerous photo stops.

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