Across Washington on the John Wayne Pioneer Trail

Several years ago I started riding the John Wayne Pioneer Trail in the Ironhorse State Park between Snoqualmie Pass and North Bend, it was a good way to get in mileage, either by mountain bike or cross bike, without having to constantly battle the automobile.  One day I started wondering: how far does this thing go?  A quick internet search showed that the JWPT extended from Rattlesnake Lake to the Columbia River, well that sounds like a good start, but about east of the Columbia?

Before I continue, a little history is in order.  The final train on the Chicago Milwaukee St. Paul and Pacific Railroad (commonly known as the Milwaukee Road) steamed, or should I say dieseled, through Washington State in the spring of 1980 – we actually met the engineer who piloted that final locomotive in a Subway in Othello.  After the Milwaukee Road was decommissioned the rails were torn up and the right of way between the Idaho border and Rattlesnake Lake was acquired by the State of Washington, it is known as the John Wayne Pioneer Trail (JWPT).  The JWPT has two sections: the developed portion, and the undeveloped portion.  The developed portion is the Iron Horse State Park, which spans Rattlesnake Lake and the western bank of the Columbia River – slightly over one hundred miles.  The undeveloped portion runs from the eastern bank of the Columbia to the Idaho border.

The developed portion of the JWPT poses virtually no logistics problems whatsoever (though we did manage to find one), but the undeveloped portion, well that’s a different story.  Information on the JWPT east of the Columbia is sparse at best.  To our knowledge only two other cycling groups have made the entire journey, thanks to them for their blogging info.  I should also note that any group using the JWPT east of the Columbia must be in possession of a permit which can be obtained from the Washington State Department of Natural Resources.

As I had mentioned I had this small thought of riding from Puget Sound to the Idaho border, Eastern Washington is kind of a gold mine for exploration, and the best exploration tool is the bike.  Somehow, some way some day I was yapping about riding from Seattle to Spokane when I was overheard by my friend and cycling teammate Paul Boivin.

“Larry and I are going to ride to Tekoa on the John Wayne Pioneer Trail this September,” the Larry in question is Larry, AKA FastLarry, Boyer.

“But that trail only goes to the Columbia.”  I replied before adding “What is Tekoa?”

“Tekoa is a town just shy of the Idaho border, we can take the trail all the way from Rattlesnake Lake to Tekoa.”  Paul hesitated before adding “I think.”

“What about the Columbia?” I asked.

“I don’t know about that.”

“Can I come?”

“You bet.”                              

And with that I was now scheduled to ride my bike across the state – sometime in September, still five months away.

Another teammate, Trevor “One Gear” Hall caught wind of our escapade and we were now a team of four.

es·ca·pade [ éskə pàyd ]   

1.     Brash adventure: something exciting or adventurous that somebody does or is involved in, especially something showing recklessness or disregard for authority.

Paul was our logistics man, he secured the permits, mapped our route, and even pre-rode a couple of dicey sections - he was the invaluable one: the man with the plan.  We figured that the trip would take anywhere from four to six days, so we cleared our schedules from September 19^th through the 24^th hoping that the unusually warm summer would extend into mid-September.

We decided early on that each man would bring his own tent, but that we would use communal stoves.  Larry and Trevor had each bought new stoves and were eager to use them; why I threw my old stove, pot and two canisters of fuel into my panniers is still a mystery.

Now many would think that when embarking on a major escapade such as this one would have their act together weeks in advance, but this has never proven a reality for me.  The day before any expedition has been, for me, a rush of last minute trips to the grocery store, the outdoor store and the hardware store.  I didn’t have my bike fully loaded and packed until 6:30 the night before we were scheduled to leave.  As I pushed that overweight thing out of my house I honestly felt like I was pushing a motorcycle.  My test ride was wobbly at best, and my rear tire, which was inflated to 40psi, was pushed to the rim due to the excessive weight on the back of the bike.  I started to question the strength of my lightweight carbon racing rims; too late now.

My son Sam was just leaving for high school when Kris, my ride to Rattlesnake Lake, rolled up.  I loaded my gear and my bike, gave my daughter Sophia strict instructions not to miss the bus then climbed aboard, it was half past eight on a wonderful blue sky Seattle morning.  Kris and I arrived at the trailhead thirty minutes later, the place was deserted.  After about ten minutes of wondering around looking for the boys Trevor rolled up chauffeured by his daughter.  Where were Paul and Larry?

Kris and I decided to drive down the road to see if Larry and Paul were waiting somewhere down near North Bend; three miles down the Cedar Falls road we spotted the duo chugging up the hill.  Vicky, Paul’s wife, had dropped them in North Bend so they had ridden ten miles before we had even started.

We re-grouped at the trailhead took a few photos and were off; it was somewhere around 9:30.

The riding conditions were perfect - clear, cool, no wind – as we made the 18 mile climb up to the Snoqualmie Tunnel.  The nice thing about riding a railroad grade is that even the highest elevations are graded at such a low angle as to be barely noticeable.  The western edge of the JWPT is fairly well used and consequently the road bed is well-packed and the riding was fairly easy.  My right thigh was sore almost from the first pedal stroke, hmmm, I thought to myself, I wonder how long this is going to last.  Not long as it turned out.

We weren’t 10 miles into the trip when Paul noticed that he’d broken a spoke in his rear wheel.  The wheel was wonky but still turning, so we pulled out a smartphone found a bike shop in Cle Elum and hoped that the wheel would hold for another forty miles.  Whenever I go out on a big trip with folks I don’t know super well I fret about being the guy whose shit ain’t together.  The guys who forgets his sleeping bag or the dude whose stuff is continually falling apart.  Basically you want to prove to your partners that they didn’t screw up when they invited you along.  I could sense that Paul was silently chiding himself in this same overly harsh fashion.  I, on the other hand, was now even more worried about the durability of my own lightweight wheel set-up.  Maybe I should have thought this through a bit better (this certainly isn’t the first time I’ve had that thought).

I’ve been through the 2.3 mile long Snoqualmie Tunnel a number of times, but never have I gone into the heart of darkness with a respectable light.  Larry and Paul must have each raided a lighthouse because the beacons they had lit that abyss top to bottom side to side, I turned off my little headlamp as it contributed nothing to the candlepower of my partners.

Our plan was to make it Ellensburg the first day, at 80 miles it was a sporty but worthy goal given ideal conditions, but Paul’s wonky wheel had now put us into “we do the best we can” mode.  We rolled into Cle Elum to find that the bike shop we had looked up on the phone was not only closed but that the entire operation was up for sale.  The lady at the Chamber of Commerce informed us that the owner had recently been diagnosed with cancer.  She also informed us that there are no rental car services in town, but that maybe Paul could hitch a ride with a Hope Link bus heading east.  Larry and I spotted the Hope Link center, it was closed, and the two severely drunk people out front were of minimal help.  They did however mention that a shuttle occasionally stops at the local Shell station.  We had a difficult time finding out any specifics regarding the shuttle, apparently the only way they can transport a bike is to have it boxed first and the driver only stops when he feels like it; the story was far from straight and meanwhile Paul had broken another spoke riding through town.

“Okay I’ll just hitchhike” Paul finally says.

Larry, Trevor and I were against this idea – we need to keep the band together – but without a better idea we left Paul on the corner with his thumb extended and rode back to the trail and pointed our wheels east.  When we arrived at the Thorp fruit stand I pulled out my phone to find the following email from Paul:

Hitchhiking a bad idea, I’m following you.

I immediately rang up Paul to discover that he’d made it to within five miles of the fruit stand but that he’d now broken his fourth spoke and was now dragging the bike along the trial.  Several phone calls and much discussion later it was decided that Paul would push on to the fruit stand where he would await his wife Vicki who would bring him a new wheel while the three of us would continue to Ellensburg.

Larry, Trevor and I rolled into Ellensburg at around 6:30 to find that the KOA is nearly across the street from a Perkins.

“Score baby, we’re eating large tonight,” I said pointing to the big oval Perkins sign.

“I’m cooking tonight,” Larry replied, “I need to shed some of this weight.”

“Huh?  But it’s a Perkins.  Right there.”

“I’m cooking.”

Dang, I was that close to a big ole fat boy dinner.  Now it’s dehydrated rice and beans.

The KOA was unusually busy for a Thursday night, but we were assigned a nice semi quiet spot near the Yakima River.  Larry and I had our solo tents up and running within minutes, while Trevor had a bit more of an origami project with respect to his ultra-lightweight tarp.  Trevor was definitely the lightweight champ; I, with my two-man tent and dated gear, was more on the other end of the poundage spectrum.  Larry’s new stove boiled water with nearly unbelievable speed and I was seriously bummed that I’d brought my old stove, pot and two canisters of fuel.  My bike was seriously overweight and I hatched a plan to visit the post office in Ellensburg in the morning in order to send some extraneous gear, including the stove, home.  Larry’s awesome stove only made my crappy dehydrated rice and beans sooner rather than later; Perkins man, Perkins.

Paul called at around eight; he had made it to the AM/PM next to the Thorpe fruit stand and was busy making friends while he awaited the much anticipated arrival of his wife.  Paul would spend the evening with his wife in a hotel room, whereas I was sleeping alone on the ground, but I didn’t envy him one bit.  He’d had a horrible first day and he deserved that warm bed.

The next morning Larry and I crawled out of our comfy tents to find what would become a familiar sight: Trevor awake, showered and dressed.  Trevor’s minimalist bag and tarp made for a cold night and I think he was shivering awaiting that sunrise so that he could get out and get going.  Good thing that he’s tough.

We met Paul and Vicki for a much anticipated breakfast at Perkins.  Paul confessed to a mental breakdown the night before, but that now he was back on track and good to go.  Vicki was amazingly supportive, which was cool to see.  Over mountains of eggs, pancakes, bacon, ham and sausage we decided that we needed to bring spare spokes.  ReCycle Bike in Ellensburg - the only bike shop short of a WalMart in Othello between us and Spokane - didn’t open for another two hours; we had some waiting to do.

The boys at ReCycle opened the doors half an hour early after seeing the four guys loitering about out front.  My spokes are straight pull – no luck they had none – but they were able to cut spare J-spokes for the other guys.  We didn’t get on the trail till eleven thirty.

We rolled through the Kittitas Valley under cool sunny skies, the trail was good and we were making good time.  Things were looking up.  About ten miles east of Ellensburg a dramatic wooden trestle spans I-90, it’s a landmark to anyone who travels the interstate and I was looking forward to crossing it.  We climbed an easy grade up to the trestle only to find it devoid of decking and blocked off.  To the left was a rudimentary road; it was a steep climb but it was a road so we took it.  Within half a mile the road petered out and Paul made a right and started going free form overland.  After a bumpy downhill ride we came to a swift flowing irrigation canal.  Paul spotted a fenced off twelve inch wide foot bridge and suggested that this is an appropriate crossing point.  Neither Larry, Trevor, nor I were too happy to jump onto that plan. 

“The road up there continues on, it must go somewhere,” Larry said.

The vote was three to one: we would push our bikes back up the hill and try the road.

Yes the road did lead to somewhere: a junkyard out behind a partially burned-out mobile home.  Coming from Iowa I have severe apprehension when it comes to crossing private property.  Who knows what kind of odd dudes doing odd things exist out here.  We quickly rode past the char grilled mobile home hoping not to wake the sleeping dogs only to arrive at a locked gate; we were on the wrong side of a locked entrance gate.  We hastily hefted our bikes, two guys on either side of the gate as the local cows all crowded around mooing for their dinner.  Two hundred yards down the road we crossed the canal via a public bridge and hit legitimate tarmac – bullet one dodged.  We later figured out that we’d missed an important detour, oh well, we were alive and rolling eastward.

The next twenty miles pass through the Yakima Training Center – military training that is.  We filled out the required permit at the entrance kiosk, and headed out into the soft tire-sucking sand.  The grade was slightly uphill and the trail surface varied from soft sand to golf ball-sized ballast, good thing that we had moderate temperatures as this section would be brutal underneath a July sun.  After a few rough detours we hit the top of the hill and started the ten mile descent into the Columbia gorge.  Climbing this hill into the typical headwind would be brutal, good thing we chose to go west to east.

The railroad grade intersects the Columbia at a perfectly usable bridge leading across the river to the town of Beverly.  Perfectly usable if it weren’t for the chain link and razor wire.  About a mile upriver is the Wanapum Dam, I had petitioned for permission to cross the dam earlier in the summer but was rebuffed due to security concerns.  Our only option was to ride six miles north to the town of Vantage and to cross the Columbia via the extraordinarily bike unfriendly I-90 bridge.  The Interstate 90 Bridge over the Columbia River is four lanes wide with zero shoulder.  It’s located in the trough of two very long and very steep hills; cars and trucks can easily hit ninety miles per hour on the bridge deck, despite the near constant side wind that roars down the Columbia Gorge.  It’s sobering in a car, but on a bike, it seemed, shall we say, reckless.  Reckless but necessary.

We decided to camp in Vantage and to cross the bridge early the next morning in hopes of light Saturday traffic.  Vantage has two gas stations, a campground, a grocery store – closed – and a hamburger joint – where they served what was touted as the best hamburger in Vantage.  After a dinner of burgers and fries we pitched our tents and were in bed soon after the beer was consumed.  We’d only traveled forty miles, but I was tired enough to fall asleep before the sun had fully descended behind the western horizon.

Crossing the Columbia weighed heavily on our minds and we all woke up a little jittery.  Everyone was eager to get on the road, but I was packed and ready to go first, so I rolled over to the local gas station hoping to find something a little more meaty than my watery Starbucks Via.  The gal behind the counter had sold us our beer thirteen hours earlier – she’d been behind the counter all night, that’s one tough way to make a living.  I didn’t fill my paper cup, so she said that she didn’t feel good about charging me more than a dollar.

“Fair enough, this is all I need,” I said handing over the dollar.

I hung around talking a bit, telling her about our plans to ride to Idaho.

“I sure wouldn’t want to cross that bridge on a bike,” was all that she said.

The weather was definitely taking a turn for the worse: gray skies and long sleeve temperatures.

Soon Larry, Paul and Trevor rolled up.  I tossed my coffee cup into the trash can and rolled over the overpass and onto the freeway entrance ramp.  Half of the Columbia crossing isn’t even on a bridge, but instead the interstate has been built atop what I figure must be a manmade jetty.  This portion was no problem as it has a wide smooth shoulder.  As we approached the bridge deck Paul stopped to light off two of his three flares.  Now I’ll admit to being more than a little skeptical regarding the efficacy of these road flares, but as soon as Paul lit the first one off I could see the oncoming traffic starting to move over to the right lane.  I suddenly became very thankful for Paul’s flares.

Paul lit a second flare just as two side-by-side tractor trailers came screaming by.  I waited till after a semi hauling a massively overhanging “Oversize Load” blew past and then yelled at Trevor, who was in front of me “go!”

Have I mentioned yet that Trevor was on a single speed?  I was eight inches off of his wheel, and he was spinning like mad.  We were going from a dead stop, uphill on seventy pound bikes and according to my bike computer we hit twenty seven miles an hour.  It was heads down all out all the way across.  Once over Trevor and I pulled onto the blessed shoulder and rolled to a stop.  Evidently Larry and Paul hadn’t heeded my scream of “go” and were still out on the bridge deck.  A few moments later they pulled in behind us and we all celebrated our continued status as living creatures with some whoops and fist pumps.  Now it was up and over a big hump en route to the town, well it turned out to be sort of a town, of Beverly where we’d connect with the Eastern “undeveloped” portion of the trail.

Beverly is an odd sort of partially occupied modern day ghost town made up mostly of crooked buildings and even more crooked mobile homes.  We rolled through silently hoping to go unnoticed, for being noticed would surely be a bad thing.

The main difference between the developed portion of the trail west of the Columbia and the undeveloped portion east of it are the cattle gates.  Any time the undeveloped portion crosses a road there is a gate.  The gates can be either locked or unlocked, seemingly without any pattern.  Paul had obtained the combination for the gate lock and that worked for the first – westernmost – gate, it didn’t, however, open the nine others.  A locked gate meant situating two guys on either side of the six foot high cattle gate and clean and jerking each seventy pound bike up and over.  It wasn’t as easy as it sounds.

As we approached the three farm homes known collectively as Smyrna – named incidentally after the Turkish city Smyrna – I heard Trevor, who was behind me at this point, mention something about thorns.  I looked down to see that both of my tires were literally impregnated with goat head thorns.  Goat heads, also known as puncture weed, hell weed, shit weed, the worst thing on God’s green earth weed, are pellet-sized balls spiked with iron hard thorns.  My Mr. Tuffy’s were probably ninety percent effective, which left me with anywhere between six and ten puncture wounds per tube.  Larry flatted as well.  Paul’s Slime Tubes kept him inflated, and somehow Trevor’s Mr. Tuffy’s saved his bacon.  I spent the next twenty minutes carefully examining my tires and attacking the goat heads with a Leatherman tool.  As I worked Trevor’s frame pump a local guy rolled up a dented blue Escort.

“So you found our puncture weed,’ he said in a knowing voice.

“Yeah these suck,” I said as I kept pumping.

“He just don’t get after it,” the local said pointing to the run down house behind us.  I could tell there was some history in that comment.

The guy turned out to be really cool and he verified what we already knew: that we had to exit the trail here in order to detour around a section of the railroad grade that still had rails and ties.

After a few miles of gravel road riding, during which I was paying very close attention to the pressure in my tires, hoping that I’d extracted every last one of those thorns, Paul pulled over under a rare tree to examine his bike.  The two seat stay-to-rack connectors had broken.  Time for some creative use if zip ties.  Paul had engineered a fairly good fix; it would certainly hold until we could rig up something better in Othello.

After a short foray onto State Highway 26 we turned onto Danielson Road and were riding along at a content pace when suddenly a car flew past and pulled over about a hundred yards down the road.  “This can’t be good,” I thought to myself.  An enthusiastic guy of maybe fifty five jumped out and held up Paul’s lock “Hey you guys are hard to catch” he shouted.

Not more than ten minutes earlier Paul had noticed that he’d lost the cable lock that he’d strapped to the deck of his rear rack.  It turned out that the guy had lived in the area his entire life and could remember trains running on the Milwaukee Road.  He pointed up the hill to an old brick building “the line was electrified through here, that’s one of the old sub stations.”  We ended up talking for about ten minutes, he was chock full of railroad history, and, as it turned out, was planning a trip from Hayak to Rattlesnake Lake with some buddies.  He was a good guy and we could have talked for hours but we were Othello bound, I was hankering for some lunch.

Bench Road, which leads into Othello, is smooth as twenty year old scotch and lined with some of the finest lawns this side of Clyde Hill.  “They must have some kind of best lawn competition going on here” Larry commented as we passed yet another well-irrigated putting green.

Othello rises out of the Eastern Washington plain like the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, except it’s brown and not green and the road is black not yellow, but other than that exactly the same.  As we turned into town I immediately started scanning the parking lots for taco trucks.

“How about Subway” someone said.

“Sounds good” somebody replied.  No tacos today.

I put down a twelve inch BMT in about four minutes and while I was polishing off my Venom “energy” drink – Black Mamba flavor – a trio of old dudes asked what we were up to.  I said that we were riding the John Wayne Pioneer Trail.

It turned out that one of the guys had been an engineer on the Milwaukee Road and that he had piloted the final train through Washington in 1980.  They asked how far we planned to go.

“Tekoa” I said.

“Tekoa, what the hell is in Tekoa?”  Tekoa, by the way, is pronounced Tee-Co.

“Our ride home.”

We laughed and said good bye, it was time for us to find a hardware store and engineer a fix for Paul’s broken rack.

Paul sent the two ladies at the Ace Hardware out on a mission to find a “bar strap.”  After a long search of the shelves one of the ladies pointed to an insulated conduit tie down – which is what I had used to attach my panniers to my new Thule Pack n Pedal rack.  “Yes that’s it.” I pronounced.

“Now I know what a bar strap is,” she said.

“Hell he just made that word up,” I said with a smile.

Larry and Trevor ducked into the neighboring WalMart and emerged with a bottle of Pendleton Whiskey.  Our goal was to camp at an RV park three miles outside of the town of Warden, three miles past our turn, so six miles roundtrip out of our way.  A massive tail wind pushed us northward on paved roads to an unexpected RV park just shy of Warden.  “Score” I yelled as we turned onto the mile long frontage road leading to our resting spot.

“Double score!”  The pro shop for the neighboring golf course was still open – with beer on tap.

“Triple score!”  In addition to showers the place also had a laundromat.

Another cold night for Trevor, he was awake, showered, fed and nearly packed by the time us tent dwellers had crawled out of our fabric cocoons. 

The weather was definitely on the downswing: the sky looked fair to the east but some nasty black clouds were moving in fast out of the west.

We followed a trail of dropped onions, many of which were the size of softballs, into the farming hub of Warden, Washington.  The streets were deserted on this Sunday morning; luckily we found the grocery store open.  I went in hoping to find coffee, stove fuel (we were running low) and Alka Seltzer cold medicine (I had a massive head cold and this is the only stuff that clears me up), but they only had one out of three – the Alka Seltzer.

We found the JWPT at the edge of town.  The road riding had been easy on the body and a good way to pack in some miles, but it was good to be back on the rhythm of the trail: eight miles per hour, no cars, free and easy.  For me the key to enjoying these long trips is the company I keep.  Trevor, Larry and Paul were the finest company.  We rode, talked, laughed; I was having a great time.

We approached the town of Lind – home of the combine demolition derby – it was noon and I was once again thinking Mexican food.  We rolled down the middle of Main Street in a town utterly devoid of a human presence.  No cars, no people, nothing except clean wide, empty streets.  We were looking for something, anything that looked like a restaurant when a beat-up F250 King Cab rolled alongside Paul.  The rest of us had found a grocery store that was closing in half an hour and were going in when Paul caught up and said, “hey that was Slim, he owns Slim’s Tavern right here.  He said he’d open up for us so we can have some lunch.”

We turned around and parked in front of the silhouetted cowboy that marked the entrance to Slim’s Tavern.

Sometimes things just don’t feel right, and I could tell I wasn’t alone in having this feeling as we entered the hazy bar.  We were just pulling out chairs when Slim, who Larry described as a cross between a tug boat captain and a serial killer, emerged from the rear of the bar, “back here boys.”

In the back Slim and a friend were drinking beer and watching some weird forty year-old documentary on hand-painted dinnerware.  “Whatta have?” Slim asked as he slid behind the bar.

 We were all kind of confused, but Paul finally spoke up, “uh we wouldn’t mind taking a look at a menu.”

“No we ain’t got no food,” Slim said, “just beer.”

Now I needed a beer like I needed a saddle sore, but I was willing to put one down in order to keep peace in the valley, but thankfully Larry spoke up.  “I’d love a beer but we got like forty miles to ride yet, so I’m going to have to pass.”

“Me too.”

“Me too.”

“Yeah me too.”

We slowly backed out of the bar and made a hasty run over to the grocery store as it was closing in less than five minutes.  Trevor and I snatched the last two hot dogs out of the plexiglass warming box, Paul found a sandwich and Larry, noticing the onsite microwave, got himself a frozen burrito.  Larry had been throwing back Pringles, which he had nicknamed “Rocketfuel,” throughout the trip, so Trevor, Paul and I each showed up at the cash register with a tube of salty goodness.  Trevor also emerged from the store with a flat of Oreos, which he bungied to his rear rack.

East of Lind the JWPT passes through some impressively desolate country.  We wouldn’t see another town until Rosalia, eighty miles to the east.  By mid-afternoon the storm wasn’t a question of if, but when.  An increasing side wind blew a dust storm over the trail, which we rode through with shirts tied over our faces, and rolling black clouds blanketed the sky.  Luckily Paul had also surveyed this portion of the ride and he knew about what I like to call the Ralston Oasis.  Ralston, named after the Ralston-Purina Company, is a one-house town with grassy tree-lined memorial park, and in that park is a water tap.  This is the only water for fifty miles.  Sadly Ralston is too close to Warden and too far from Tekoa to warrant an overnight stay, otherwise it would have an ideal location to pitch camp.  We rode out of Ralston under darkening skies.

The rain was falling at a steady rate as we approached Cow Creek, the last great problem of our ride.  The rail trestle that had once spanned the half mile wide chasm of Cow Creek is now nothing more than two parallel lines of concrete footings along the verdant valley floor.  The DNR representative had warned Paul about an unreasonable rancher and strongly advised that we take a twenty mile detour up through Ritzville, and well let’s just say that’s what we did.

We knew that the final day into Tekoa would be a long one so we pushed eastward until dusk and then started looking for a descent campsite.  We found nothing that would qualify as descent.  Finally we had to accept our fate and set up camp in the rocky ditch beside the railroad grade.  The hardest rain of the day was reserved for the period of time we spent setting up our tents and cooking our respective dehydrated dinners.  Just as I was finishing off the last of my beef stew the rain stopped and clouds parted.  Time for bed.

That night I dreamt that I was on this trip but that I’d forgotten my sleeping bag so I had to go home to get it but by the time I got back everyone had left and I didn’t know where to go so I went one way but maybe that was the wrong way.  I woke up and spent the next few minutes trying to parse fact from fantasy.

Trevor was up unusually early - before daylight.  Now I’m an early riser but I sure could have used another hour in my warm bag, but duty called.  Breakfast was quick: oatmeal and instant coffee, we were now extremely efficient on the pack-up, and we managed to get on the trail by seven thirty.  We needed water and we hoped that a spot on the map marked as Ewan would have a tap.  Ewan turned out to be a nice little place – four houses and a church tucked in at the base of Rock Lake.  We were filling up our bottles at the church when a local drove up on his four wheeler.  He was a shade tree mechanic who lived across the road, and he informed us that one of the tunnels along Rock Lake was blocked with fallen debris.  We had suspected that there would be a hike a bike portion along the lake, but now it sounded worse than we had anticipated.  Larry looked at me and quietly said “I’ve broken a spoke.”

After a few minutes of consultation we all agreed that it would be better to take the ten mile gravel road detour than to risk riding five miles up the JWPT along Rock Lake only to find out that we’d have to turn around and come back.  The difference between riding roads and railroad grade is that the railroad engineers cut through hills and bridged valleys whereas the road engineers just followed the flow of the land.  In other words, the RR grade is pool table flat whereas roads are up and down.

I was, at first, a bit disappointed that we were missing one of the more scenic portions of the JWPT but this was tempered by the beautiful rolling scenery of the Palouse.  To make matters even better, the gravel road had been meticulously maintained despite the fact that we saw not one vehicle for the entire ten mile portion.  We intercepted the trail at Pine City and rode along a beautiful tree-lined portion of the route to Malden.  Malden had a massive, abandoned, rail yard, which at one time contained the largest locomotive roundhouse in the world, and a really nice half mile long bike path.  There was also a post office.  We were in need of food so pushed on to Rosalia.

We made the small climb into Rosalia, and I was once again thinking Mexican food, even though lunchtime had came and went several hours earlier.

No such luck, and once again we dined on grocery store fare.  We ate across the street under the shade of a vintage green and white gas station.  We were now getting close to the end and it was time to ride hard in order to meet Tammi, who was scheduled to join us in Tekoa at five thirty.

East of Rosalia I started spotting wild apple trees laden with hundreds, of small, sweet green and red delights.  By now we were all tired of the candy, the potato chips, the energy bars/gels and beef jerky and were ready for some real food.  After the third tree I had to quit stopping – we needed to get to where we were going.  At one point the trail passed through an overgrown swampy area and the further we went forward the higher and thicker the grass and surrounding underbrush became.  Soon I was plowing through head high grass with no idea what was before me or below me.  I braced for the seemingly inevitable front wheel plunge over the handlebars rodeo ride, but it never came; I just kept the bike in low gear and pedaled on.  After about two miles of jungle-whacking we emerged back on civilized trail. 

If we’d known that the Tekoa grain elevator is three miles outside of Tekoa we wouldn’t have celebrated the end of our ride twice.  We were right on time when we crested the hill and saw the relatively sizable town of Tekoa, nested in the rolling hills.  The trail ended at the abandoned trestle that still spans the town below.  Larry, Paul and I were staring at the graffiti laden steel wall that blocked the trail, pondering how to access the town that was so close yet so far when we heard Trevor yell “this way.”

So we went that way, and once again let’s just say that we managed to find a way into town.

The pizza place was open, it was no burrito, but it would do, and as we parked our bike out front Larry asked “what kind of car does Tammi drive?”

“A blue Forerunner,” I said.

“Like that one.”  I waved Tammi over to the curb.

We were done, and I had loved every minute of it.  To have the resources, the physical ability, the companions, the knowledge and the time to do something like this is no ordinary thing.

Midweek Climb - Artist Point

Mike and Steve on the final switchbacks

I managed to talk Steve B and Mike R into taking a mid-week day off from work and join me on a ride up to Artist Point – the end of Highway 542, above the Mt. Baker Ski area.  The three days following the Autumnal equinox were predicted sunny and so we set of on the morning of Sept 23rd driving to the tiny town of Maple Falls, just six miles south of the US/Canada border.

Mt Shuksan and Price Glacier

On these rides oftentimes the biggest logistics problem is simply finding a suitable place to leave the car, but on this occasion we had no such trouble as the super nice lady manning the Maple Falls Visitor Center invited us to park in their lot.  Problem solved.

The weather was sunny but the temperatures were crisp; arm warmers, full finger gloves and, for Steve and myself, knee warmers were in order.  The route from Maple Falls to Artist Point is literally a no-brainer: stay on the road, ride to the end, turn around and come back.

After about twenty miles of shady rolling terrain we hit the steady eleven mile uphill portion.  I’d just finished reading the latest issue of Bicycle Quarterly and one thing that Jan is really good at in his articles is reminding me to enjoy the ride, the physical motions, the scenery, the scent of the clean air, the silence, the warmth of the sun, but while I was busy enjoying all of this bounty, Steve and Mike were well on their way to Artist Point.  As John Wayne once said: “a man’s gotta know his limitations,” luckily I know mine, so I just settled into my locomotive pace and rolled steady onwards and upwards.

Mike M nearing the top

 I was on a dead-end road on a weekday in late September, so traffic was light; the few cars/motorcycles that did pass gave me plenty of space and some even flashed an encouraging wave.

The gradient was never too steep (four to six percent) the road surface was surprisingly well-maintained the sun was warm the air cool, all seemed right with the world.  As I neared the Mt. Baker Ski Area Mt. Shuksan and its formidable Price Glacier came into view.  One of the most photographed peaks in North America Shuksan is ruggedly beautiful, especially in the fall, but it’s a daring climb – from any side – and one that I never attempted.

Steve ripping the descent

Above the ski area the road makes some gutsy switchbacks, the engineers who surveyed this must have been inspired by those crazy roads that serpentine through the Alps and Dolomites.  Peddling through the hairpins was a lot of fun and soon I could see Steve and Mike waiting for me at the end of the road parking lot.

The descent promised to be chilling so Mike and I donned vests while Steve opted for the full sleeved jacket.  With his mountain bike handling skills Mike dropped in first railing the corners.  Steve descended with me as I took the curves cautiously – this was my first big descent on carbon rims and I wasn’t one hundred percent trusting.

Two for four bucks

We made quick work out of the return trip and after fueling up at the local gas station we decided to tack on an eighteen mile loop that Martha W has suggested.  The fifteen minute stop combined with a tall can of Full Throttle left my stomach sloshing and my legs dead.  “So this is going to be a conversational pace?” I asked hopefully.  The road was rolling chipseal with practically no traffic and for much of the first eight miles we rode three abreast at a relaxing pace.  At Highway 547 we turned left and motored down a steady descent into the microscopic town of Kendall.  From there we climbed the final few miles back to Maple Falls and the car, where a cooler of Rainier beer was patiently waiting

Pizza in Mt Vernon and a no traffic post-rush hour drive home finished out a wonderful day of riding bikes with a couple of friends.  For more photos go to: https://greenliteheavyindustries.smugmug.com/Artist-Point-2015/

A little Rainier never hurts

Bipolar at Steilacoom

Good people watching at cross races

 The course for the 2015 MFG #2 cross race at Fort Steilacoom was, in a word, bipolar.  Big sweeping turns on groomed grass led to a field-separating uphill, which yielded a long snakey (is that a word) downhill.  So much for the manic, now onto the depression.  The dark half of the course was through a pair of insanely rutted, thickly-grassed fields.  Imagine those cattle guards that ranchers put at the end of service roads, now imagine two hundred yards of that, now imagine doing it five or six times.  Soul-crushing.

Dave S in the 55+ Race

Due to the fact that Terry B didn’t seem to know that Specialized makes shoes (an insider joke), and since I’m a born rule follower I ended up last row at the start.  Fifty racers started Masters Cat 3 45+ field and despite some serious effort I was only able to move up about six places during the initial paved sprint.

We Fraternize

The first time up the hill I managed to move around a half dozen other riders, one guy was pretty angry about me passing him in the tall dry grass.  I’m not really sure why, he was on the nice gravel path, I was out in the rough.  He yelled “Really man!  Really.”  Hey if you’re talking you ain’t racing.

Chris M. and I had a nice slug fest going on for a while, but that all ended when on the third lap I was pushed into a tree on a little narrow single-track section and conked my head.  Some dude tried to pass me and smashed into me from the back, which sent me headfirst into this sturdy tree.  The timing chip on my helmet was knocked off, so I picked it up and put it in my jersey pocket, gathered up my wits and set off to finish the race.  I had no fight left in the old fight tank.  I finished but that was about it.

Back at the tent I took off my helmet and realized that one side was smashed in.  My shoulder hurt more than my head, but Mike M. escorted me over to the medical tent where all of my marbles were pronounced in place.

Broke it good

My apologies to Rodney and Erik who were out racing the Masters 1/2 race when I broke down the tent (hey where’d that tent go).  The half rack of Rainier is now in my son’s fridge, I’ll bring what’s left to Arlington.  Thanks be to Dennis, Paul, Dave and Mike for helping me to break down the tent and carry all of my crap back to my car.

Check out a few more photos of the action at: https://greenliteheavyindustries.smugmug.com/2015-MFG-2-Fort-Steilacoom/