Oregon – Part 2

When I left off we were in Oregon sleeping through a quite rainy night and hoping that the next day would be a bit drier.

Jan’s phone had fallen victim to yesterday’s rain and wasn’t turning on anymore, so with surgical precision he put it in a bag of rice for the day.

It rained on and off throughout the day but fortunately let up by the evening when we made camp.

I realized I haven’t shown much what camp has looked like. Most of the nights we were able to find some sort of established site, but this night we just camped in a pull-off on the side of a forestry road.

This pull-off was also inhabited by a nighthawk which spent most of the evening and morning putting on a show for us as it hunted insects, flying high overhead then dramatically swooping down and making a wild woosh/vroom sound.

Tony’s many legs make it easy for him to hold onto things we found along the way.

The next morning we resupplied in Detroit Oregon and started a long long climb, mostly up quiet forestry roads (that don’t look like this picture haha). 

This was far and away our most beautiful camp spot (#5 from the map in the last post). We were able to bike most of the way to this summit but had to hike the last half mile due to the number of trees that had blown down across the trail.

This is the opposite view from above, I believe Mt. Hood is in the foreground and either Mt. St. Helens or Rainier is in the background.

The main attraction was staring at Mt. Jefferson.

The fire watch cabin at the summit was very pretty, although it was a bit moldy and some mice had already taken up residence.

We decided instead to cowgirl camp under the stars.

The view from our sleeping bags.

When we woke up the dew from the previous night had frozen into a surprisingly thick later of ice on our sleeping bags. Fortunately the sun quickly warmed and dried everything out.

Jan staging an emergency picnic

The first few miles of the day were gorgeous single track through a burn zone

…and the rest of the day was a long gravely decent.

Three more friends, Emmet, John and Tom, drove up from Portland (Oregon) to meet up with us for the last 3 days of the trip.

The forecast for the final few days was dry and progressively getting hotter and hotter, up to the 90s for our final day.

Emmet, Jan, Landis and I took a fun trail detour on the second to last day, which involved some very narrow singletrack trails with a steep drop off on one side, which was quite hard to capture on camera.

We did a fair bit of walking our bikes through the spookiest sections

The day ended with an incredible long paved decent down some paved switchbacks.

On the final morning we had a short, uphill road section and then a short trail section, and then that was it! We relaxed by the Clackamas river and then drove to Portland (Oregon).

Back in Portland (Oregon) I spent most of the week recovering from the big big bike trip and hanging out with friends.

We took a swim in the Willamette river and watched a guy reel in a 50lb sturgeon!

During this week in Portland I stayed with my good college buddy Emmett (two t’s, not pictured). He took a day off of work and we biked on a beautiful rail trail that went over this huge wooden trestle.

After an awesome nearly 3 weeks in Oregon I got back on train and headed down towards SF! Lots more pictures to come but that’s where I’ll leave it for now.

Except for this one extra pictures of another group of cyclists gearing up for their own adventure biking across Oregon.

….and a final shot out the back of the train.