Well, Washington’s got desert too. Mostly we’re not talking about the same kind of wide open range beckoning to be bicycled, but there are places to ride if you know where to look. And it’s no further away than the places I like to ride in the Oregon desert.
John Wayne Trail
My first destination is the John Wayne Trail, a rail-trail that extends from the Columbia River towards Ellensburg 20 miles away, and continues as the Iron Horse trail almost all the way to Seattle.This section of the trail traverses the US Army’s Yakima Firing Range. I’d ridden it back in 1995 on a weekday, and was treated to the constant rumble of large explosions and occasional machine-gun fire (!) coming from the other side of the Saddle Mountains, but this time it’s a weekend and it’s quiet. Riding on military land is great (and legal outside the designated Impact Zone) because it’s been left in a really natural state.
Unfortunately the weather isn’t terribly friendly, though it’s better than Oregon’s. Here comes the rain:
And check out the thin layer of snow the storm has left near the summit of the Saddle Mountains, at barely 3000 feet elevation, while the lupine blooms below:
Fortunately the rain doesn’t last too long, and treats me to a nice rainbow as it departs:
East of here, the state has purchased the old rail bed all the way to the Idaho border, though they haven’t opened that part to public use yet. This is the old Milwaukee Road line, and it went all the way to Wisconsin. In case you’re wondering, mile markers along the line remind you how far you are from Milwaukee:
A few miles in I really upset this hawk. As soon as I get close, he takes off from his tree and circles overhead, screaming, until I go away:
Now the good thing about rail-trails for adventure bikers is that they are long and allow you to cover a lot of ground, usually passing through fantastic scenery. The bad thing is the riding itself can be pretty monotonous. Although this trail passes through BIG rolling hills, the diligent railroad engineers of yore did their job well, cutting through hills and building up the low places in order to maintain a steady 3% grade. Which I’m now riding uphill, into a raging wind. Finally, 14 miles in, I reach my destination: the Boylston Tunnel.
The tunnel is 2000 feet long. There’s an even longer tunnel – 2 miles long! - on this same trail, west of here where it crosses under Snoqualmie Pass. I’ve ridden that one too, and it’s really creepy being in the middle. Anyway, even this tunnel is long enough to be very dark in the middle, and the bright light at the end makes it impossible for your eyes to adjust to the darkness. I’ve brought a headlight along just so I can ride through it.
Now that I’ve reached my “destination”, I have time to dawdle on the side roads on the way back to the car. I head up a gravel road into the Saddle Mountains. The road is absurdly wide and well-maintained for such an empty place, but I’m reminded of why when I notice tank tracks along the edge. I head up a road that heads over the crest of the Saddle Mountains. Here’s the view to the other side, from the crest:
My plan is to ride from here along a dirt track that traverses the crest for a few miles, and drop down towards the rail-trail on a powerline road. The snow has melted out now, but that’s actually a bad thing. I get a few hundred yards before my tires start to pack up with mud and rocks. Uh-oh. Desert gumbo. I turn around and enjoy a spectacular rock shower coming off my tires as I head back to the haul road for a screaming descent. Back at the rail-trail, I feel like I’ve just ridden out of a Rivendell catalog:
Yep, pretty cool stuff.
Sun Lakes
Sunday! Time for another adventure. Now I’m about an hour’s drive north, at Sun Lakes State Park in the lower Grand Coulee. It’s hard to find good places to ride in eastern Washington that aren’t wheat fields or closed to the public, but there’s a 30 square mile chunk of lightly-grazed state land just east of the state park that is really choice. First, though, I cruise around the park roads, which are lined with enough goat heads to pop Shiggy’s whole tire collection:
But the scenery is great:
What’s that, you say? I accidentally slipped in a picture from my trip to Monument Valley? Nope, this really is in Washington. This is called Dry Falls, although no water flows over it now. Here’s a view from the top I took later in the day from the car:
Unlike similar-looking landforms in the Southwest, this landscape wasn’t created by millennia of erosion ... although 80 years ago that’s what everyone thought. Then this geologist named J. Harlan Bretz had a different idea after a plane ride over the area. Much of eastern Washington is known as the Channeled Scablands, with hundreds of parallel ridges and rimrocks oriented northeast to southwest. There was debate about what had caused these landforms, but it was at least agreed that they took place over many thousands of years, because that was the conventional geological wisdom.
After years gathering evidence on the ground, Bretz revealed his theory: at the end of each of the last several ice ages, as the ice started melting out, a gigantic lake formed at the end of the last ice age, covering much of eastern Washington, northern Idaho and western Montana, and equal to 1/3 the volume of Lake Michigan. The water was dammed up by glaciers in Washington that hadn’t melted ... yet. Of course they eventually did melt, releasing a flood of biblical proportions and empting glacial Lake Missoula in a matter of weeks. His theory explained the Channeled Scablands, Dry Falls (which was for a while the largest waterfall in the world) and the fact that giant glacial rocks have been deposited 100 miles south of the Columbia River, in the Willamette Valley.
And no one believed him. For decades he was ridiculed, but he never backed down. Eventually, as other research began to jibe with his conclusions, the scientific community accepted his theory. Fortunately, dude was still alive to see himself vindicated, and the floods that created this landscape are now known as the Bretz Floods. There’s a plaque at the state park in his honor:
Hey, wasn’t I supposed to be on a bike ride or something? OK, OK, but I love the story of J. Harlan Bretz. Anyway, I climb a few hundred feet up out of the coulee, and then it’s endless rolling basins like this one:
You ride over a low ridge, a few hundred yards across a basin, over the next ridge and into another basin. There must be dozens of these scattered across this chunk of land.
It goes on like this for miles. I must be riding in heaven. Even more so riding across this field of lupine. The smell was indescribable:
And time to ride back to the car:
All in all, 60 miles of adventure riding for the two days. Not a bad weekend!
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