Winter wayfarer pedals over plains, plateaus to raise awareness of overdose crisis
I just decided ... there's something that needs to be changed: Iliajah Pidskalny.
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Combine compassion, conscience and quest, and you get Iliajah Pidskalny, an award-winning geology grad riding his bike 1,600 kilometres from Saskatoon to Vancouver in the middle of winter to increase awareness of Canada’s drug-overdose crisis and to raise money for harm reduction.
“I think the war on drugs misses a huge point that would save a tonne of people’s lives and improve the quality of life of so many other people,” Pidskalny said. “So many people frown upon drugs completely or look at people who use drugs as bad people, that it’s their fault.
“I just decided … there’s something that needs to be changed. The culture needs to be changed, be more open-minded, compassionate, empathetic. Too often in the past I’ve been cynical and decided to leave it to somebody else.
“I thought it was time to start to get involved.”
The weather has been as balmy as January gets in the Prairies, although those chinook winds that pump up the mercury also mean he faces a headwind of 50 km/h at times, slowing his progress.
For Pidskalny there is nostalgia as well as a cause: He and a buddy had done the same ride in 2013 as 18-year-olds, but in summer.
“That was the first journey I’d ever done on a bike and I fell in love with it,” the 25-year-old said. “Ever since then I’ve gone somewhere every year, I just can’t stop.”
He’s got good gear. For those concerned about him staying warm, “you should be more concerned for the tens-of-thousands of homeless people without good gear.”
Geologist Pidskalny thrives on remote digs, from Spain to the Northwest Territories. A natural-born outdoorsman, he loves hiking, camping, rock-climbing. It’s that poetic love of the outdoors that drew him to “learn the language of the Earth’s crust.”
“I don’t know what it is,” he said by phone from his tent Wednesday. “There’s this element of trueness, a realness I can’t escape. It’s easy to get lost in our own heads or thoughts without realizing what’s around us.”
Whether it’s getting eaten by bugs or bathing in a cold lake on a geological expedition, or something like this — hard labour, being out in the cold — you can’t ignore, Pidskalny said, just cannot ignore how real the world is, how important food is, how important human interactions are, how valuable a warm sleeping bag is.
“All these things, I start to realize how grateful I am for them. It’s a humbling sensation for me, and I suppose very meditative. So many people live outside and don’t have a choice. So I decided to do the ride one more time, we can try to draw some attention to bigger issues this way.”
Pidskalny made it to Hanna, Alta., on Thursday, 117 km pedalled with no headwind. He can’t wait to be in the mountains, he hopes to be in Vancouver by mid-February. Coyotes howled outside his tent as we spoke.
“A lot of people think of me as a cyclist because of all the trips I’ve done,” he said. “I don’t really identify as a cyclist. I consider myself a traveller, a vagabond who happens to move by bicycle.”
You can follow his journey on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
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