The very first blog entry has a little more background, but here’s a brief orientation.
When I decided on a bicycle tour as a means to celebrate my retirement from Positive Energy, my recovery from cancer 2 1/2 years ago, and simply being alive and in good health, I needed a planned ride and route to serve as a focus for planning. Through Adventure Cycling magazine I learned about the new Idaho Hot Springs Mountain Bike Route (IHSMBR), and it became my default – that is, from the start the idea was that this would be the heart of the trip I planned to take, unless there became a good reason to change or abandon this plan in favor of another. The IHSMBR has served well this purpose to date.
As the trip pilans developed, the plan naturally evolved into three segments:
First was the preamble of taking the train from Lamy to Martinez, in the Bay Area of California, for a family reunion of my wife Johanna’s family, both there and in Yosemite. I didn’t write anything about this portion, mainly because I hadn’t yet figured how to blog. Following this was a four-day hitchhiking and riding trip up the Oregon’s Willamette Valley which began this blog.
The first section of the journey, then, was to ride across Oregon with my old friend Don Yoder, whom I knew when I lived here between around 1977-82. Don and I just completed this trip; he left with wife Kelly and son Micah after diner Saturday night.
The second section was to be all or most of the IHSMBR. More on that below.
The third part was to be what followed; the journey back home. This section remained formless for the time being, as I knew a plan would evolve once underway.
There was one growing small nagging issue that became a more substantial concern in the last couple of days: the summer heat. This is no time to be climbing mountains in lower elevations in Idaho. Eastern Oregon and southern Idaho are high desert, in some ways like New Mexico. The hot season is much shorter, being farther north, but July and August are typically quite hot and dry.
I had picked up a number of warning signals: The IHSMBR maps advise plan for a mountain bike tour is “that sweet spot after the snow has melted up high, but before wildfire season starts.”
All of the responses to my post on the Adventure Cycling website and in their magazine were for mid – late June departures, and when my start date was pushed back a month to allow the reunion and trip with Don to happen, I no longer had any companions for the “best not to go alone” sections.
I got a couple of “Are you sure?” looks when I described this plan, with cautions about the heat and season. One rider I met yesterday spoke of his climb out of the Snake River canyon at Oxbow Dam: “It was about 100 degrees and no wind on a long climb. I could have also just stayed at home with the TV on and flogged myself with whips and chains, and it would have been as much fun as that climb out of the canyon.”
All of this began to become apparent during the climb up to Ochoco Pass yesterday, and more so up the climb to Dixie Pass this afternoon, our last climb and highest summit of our trip. It was my toughest climb, due simply to the heat. With no wind, at 3-4 climbing mph there’s no cooling breeze. I made the top in good order, but it brought home that some sort of reassessment of the route is in order.
I’m at Bates State Park, near Austin Junction in eastern Oregon. I’m taking a Sunday to rest and revise my plans in a major way. I see that riding the entire IHSMBR is not a good idea for me – in short, it’s the too-hottest time of the year, I’m not well enough set up with bike and gear, and I’m not sure that I’m physically up to the challenge, especially the singletracks and especially alone. So I’ve been studying maps since yesterday.
I have no physical destination on this journey. Don and I did this past week, and rightly so: this was planned as a ride across Oregon. Now, rather, what I have is a period of a couple of months to tour by bicycle. The travel is its own adventure; the destination is secondary.
My bike has performed poorly the way I have set it up. I will only use the trailer, which can carry plenty of weight and bulk, on the roads; using a bike trailer is strongly discouraged off road as way too heavy and awkward. And my smaller gray bags will only fit on the rear rack, not the front. So I have the largest bags weighing down the front wheel and making the bike very sluggish and dangerously slow to maneuver. So I’ll have to leave the bags where they are, but carry bulk in the front and weight in the rear.
All of this was my own ignorance, having not tried to tour on my (or any) mountain bike before. It’s taken me the week with Don to adapt to the awkward balance of my bike, such that I can check over my shoulder and still maintain my balance and ride a straight path. Now I’m sorting through my gear, paring down to the minimum, and will balance the load over front and back as well as I can.
Right now a new plan is emerging: ride to Baker City (~50 miles); hopefully find a Warmshowers host to leave my trailer and 1/2 my gear. Hitchhike to Boise; get a bit of bike repair (coupla worn cogs) and a bit of gear at REI. Ride the western portion of the IHSMBR, heading north (more or less Idaho City/Cascade/McCall) with some off-road and singletrack options. Then leave the route, heading west by bike or thumb back to Baker City. That would give me a portion of the route, including less-gnarly singletrack and high country, and several options to continue if I find that I’m up to it.
Then one way or another, I should get to a cooler riding environment. Don’s recommendation was the San Juan Islands, Olympic Peninsula and Oregon Coast. This would be retracing miles from past tours when I was hardly older than you are now, dear reader – OP and Pacific Coast in 1974, San Juans in 1980. This has the added benefit of eventually heading me south and back toward home.
I could see visiting a few of the key inverter and PV hardware manufacturers in the Seattle area – sounds wacky, but it’s something I have dreamed of for years.
A few stats from our trip: 320 miles ridden together over seven days. No riding accidents or injuries, and by far mostly courteous drivers. The majority of our route is the original Transamerica trail, the coast-to-coast route pioneered by BikeCentennial in 1976, and the route I rode that year. So we traversed a route well traveled by long distance cyclists over nearly four decades, and decidedly friendly.