OBDR Day Nine

Sunday, July 17, 2011 (or see the previous day, or start from the very beginning)

50 miles to Walla Walla. A gravel superhighway up ahead. Easy, right? Not a freakin’ chance.

The previous night’s frantic dash to find some camp — any camp — left us just a few miles outside of Tollgate. Tollgate’s claims to fame are a lake that has fish in it, a small resort and lodge, and a bigfoot sighting in 1986.

At Tollgate, we left the pavement for Skyline Road. Skyline steadily climbed higher in elevation as it followed a ridge, and offered views of a vast expanse of trees, mountains, and sky. The road was in decent shape, but the numbers of fallen saplings across the road showed that it hadn’t had a lot of traffic yet this season. It was also tricky enough that paying attention to the ride was a prudent idea.

Up around 6000 feet, the road left the ridgeline and entered the forest, where it turned into mud, and snow.

This wasn’t a complete surprise, as the riders we’d encountered way back on Day Two had warned us about impassable snow on Skyline. We placed our bets on a week of heat melting the drifts down to something manageable, and that’s exactly what happened.

The first side-effect of melting snow is mud. The mud was several inches deep in places and rather tricky, but I managed to ride through without dumping my bike. This was most excellent because stopping at any time left one open for the second side-effect of melting snow: mosquitoes.

Between stopping to take the photo above, and stopping to ride carefully through a snowdrift deeper than my footpegs, a couple of minutes at most, I ended up with over 20 fresh mosquito bites. And I was doing so well with only a few bites — until today.

As we cleared snowdrifts and mudholes and more snowdrifts, I worried that the next drift would be too high or the next mudhole too deep to pass. With the prospect of having to be at work the next morning looming like a shadow over the festivities, turning back meant going home without reaching the goal.

But that didn’t happen, because we began to descend and we passed the last of the snow and mud and we finally, finally reached the gravel superhighway that everyone had told us the OBDR was all about, all the way to Walla Walla.

“700 miles of gravel.” More like a thousand miles of dirt and rocks.

A group that started with four, then three, then two.

After grabbing a bite to eat in Walla Walla, we turned our wheels for home 360 paved miles away, through some of the finest twisties Eastern Oregon had to offer.

It was boring.

Daren said a ride like this would ruin me for street riding. He was right.

We began the day with temperatures in the 50s, then in the mid-90s in Walla Walla, and after riding from 9am to 9pm, we rolled through Madras with rain looming over the Cascades and temperatures dropping fast.

I had nothing left when we reached Sisters. I had to stop. But Daren had to be back home before morning, so he continued on, riding over the mountains in the freezing rain.

It was a minor miracle that the hotel room had a whirlpool tub, and I enjoyed a damn fine soak as a reward for 9 long, full, difficult, amazing, rewarding days and a thousand miles on the Oregon Backcountry Discovery Route.

The end.

Thanks for reading, and for your patience with me all these weeks as I struggled to put together a tale far too long in the telling.

• Total Distance: 45.63 miles
• Uphill Distance: 13.26 miles
• Downhill Distance: 32.42 miles
• Maximum Speed: 57 mph
• Average Moving Speed: 30 mph
• Average Speed: 20 mph
• Total Time: 02:15:59
• Total Elevation Gain: 3737 ft
• Total Elevation Loss: 6808 ft
• Maximum Elevation: 5876 ft
• Minimum Elevation: 2047 ft