A good ride on new roads!

Today I started in Bingen, WA and rode to Lyle, Centerville, Goldendale, Glenwood, Husom, and back to Bingen. 111 miles today, in the mid 6000's feet of climbing, and some significant headwinds. Oh, and a couple of unexpected stretches of gravel too!
338 miles for the week.


I started out from Bingen today and rode along Hwy 14 to Lyle then followed familiar roads. Today my riding partner and I enjoyed a brisk tailwind as we pedaled eastward.  I was pedaling along in the mid 20's with out much effort at all.  But of course, I knew what that meant since we'd have to change directions when we got to Goldendale, but for the time being it was fun!

We arrived in Goldendale and stopped to resupply food and water.  We figured, correctly, that this was likely our last chance for 60 miles to add to our on bike supplies. From Goldendale we turned back west, into the wind and pedaled a few more miles of familiar roads before turning slightly NW and toward The upper stretches of the Klickitat Canyon are quite remarkable. It reminded me of the Grand Canyon, but on a much smaller scale of course.

We continued to climb and started seeing patches of snow roadside. We dropped into tributary canyon and then climbed even a bit higher to get over the divide into the White Salmon River drainage. There was quite a bit of snow as we crossed over that divide, but the road was dry and clear.  Just on the edge of Glenwood we turned south.  The road was scenic with many views of Mt Adams.

I had "street viewed" both ends of this road and saw pavement but we  found a 1.8 mile section of freshly graded gravel in the middle of the run.  It was a bit dicey, but we managed to keep upright while picking our way along.  We were glad to see a return of pavement.

We cruised along our descending route at a pretty good pace, then our mapped route had us take a left turn that climbed over a small ridge rather than follow the White Salmon River down. I had remembered my map showed we were going to travel pretty much straight south at this point back to Bingen. Still, it was a bit hard to ride up hill, when we were pretty sure we could have kept going down on the main road.  We felt even more sure that next time we'll stay on the main road when  all of a sudden our route turns to gravel again!  This time for 3.7 miles, and at least this was better packed.

We stopped part way down as we came across some turkey hunters preparing to leave. They were amazed to see road bikes on this gravel road.  So were we!  They told us we likely had about 4 more miles before pavement returned.  Luckily they were wrong, we had less than two miles left.  We returned to pavement right near Husom Falls on the White Salmon River.

We continued down the canyon, and were soon back in Bingen.  It was a long ride made a bit tougher with long climbs and significant headwinds in the late miles.  Chalk it up to training, and a great day on a bike!

.........road bike.......rollers.........mtb.....lifecycle.....total
Today.......111..............0.............0..........0..........111
Jan.........105.............34.............0..........0..........139
Feb.........428............108.............0.........24..........536
March.......809..............0.............0.........22..........831
April.......549..............0.............0..........0..........539
YTD........1791............142.............0.........46.........1979