Orford bike ride? Rain? Plans B is a Mont Orford Hike

Friday's next big bike adventure finds the sky full of rain as we drive along the Eastern Townships autoroute. Our destination was a ride around Parc Mont Orford but the rain does not make this an appealing idea.

Quick, we need a plan B!

How about hiking the newly rebuilt Sentier des Cretes along the top of the Mont Orford massif? Hmm, sounds good, ok, we turn at the exit and park at the salle communitaire at the stukely sector of the park. The nonstop heavy rain had stopped, but we had paid for the people and the car to enter the park, and we were sticking with the new hiking plan. Until the rain decided to end our fun, which we were sure would happen in about ten minutes.

It never rained again this day...

Which was good because this was a long trail! At the three-hour point we reached the last peak before the ski-hill summit of Mont Orford itself. Time was running out and we turned around here (we should work on the crack-of-noon departures!) and came back down.

This rebuilt hiking trail is a good one, in a truly great location, and the amount of effort put in to this new trail is major: thousands of large stones and huge rocks were moved to build a long-term durable trail. We were very impressed. We had always avoided this trail, but now it is a leader-of-the-pack and worth the trip.

And to top it off when we got back to the car the depanneur in the salle communitaire in the campgrond where we parked was now open, and it sold cold beer. It doesn't take an advance degree in nutrition to determine that after a 5 hour hard hike that beer will taste great!