Branch Out Bike Tour 2014

Every year at this time, the Branch Out Foundation, which works towards finding a cure to the 600+ diseases of the nervous system, has a fundraising event in the Columbia Valley. It's called the Branch Out Bike Tour.

Participants leave Panorama Resort and ride their bicycles down the mountain to the valley town of Invermere, do a circuit of Lake Windermere, and ride back up to Panorama again! About 100km (62 miles) round trip. You'd be even more impressed if you could see all the uphills involved!

This spring's weather has been a bit, shall we say, dodgy. Yesterday, I went down the valley looking for shooting locations, and then crossed my fingers that it wouldn't rain on event day. Naturally, the forecast was for clear and sunny weather with temps in the mid-20Cs.

What did we wake up to? This:

Fog To The Deck

I got to my station and this is what the faster/early arrivals at my vantage point got for a background - at least the tops of the trees were free of fog:

The First Rider To Pass My Ditch Shooting Station - Click To Enlarge

And, happily for them, this is what the less speedy riders got:

The Last Shot I Took (But Not The Last Rider) - Click To Enlarge

The pro's in the race arrived about 30 minutes earlier than predicted, forcing me to grab my camera from the rear of the truck seconds after we arrived, and just rip off a few shots - happily, I'd already saved the camera's settings for just this eventuality, so I did manage to catch some of the lead group:

The Leaders At Halfway - Click To Enlarge

Over the next few days, I'll be working through the over-800 images I captured - I am uploading them in small batches, as soon as they're ready. Here's the link to the gallery on my website.