elevation plot: go up, then down
This has to be one of my current favorite trails. It’s the hardest easiest ride. The longest, shortest, most complicated basic ride ever.
The uphill: you ride up the truck road under the power lines. After the first couple of switchbacks, you will see a view of the west end of Lake Whatcom with Bellingham in the rear distance. Then, basically, you crank out another 1500 or so feet of elevation gain in virtually a straight line. Unrelenting. Same scenery, just everything gets smaller and smaller and steeper and steeper. The pitch is just barely on the near edge of ride-a-bility. There’s so little weight on the front wheel that if your attention wavers and you wobble and turn the wheel, it’ll start shovelling gravel for you. Somewhere near the top, you come to a window south, with an excellent view of Cougar Ridge and Sudden Valley, it’s almost over soon.
The downhill: Steep and loamy. Straight down the fall line, for 2000 feet of descending. It’s steep enough that I sat on my back tire (luckily, in mid-air) at one rock drop. You start to feel like your bike’s parachute. This is like backcountry snowboarding, but the snow is loam and you can go uphill and sideways too. Again, nothing to it, as long as you keep on falling down exactly where the trail is. Got that? Exactly.
Nothing to it. Gorgeous.
Total time: 01:35:45