This trip has been set up by a committee of riders with trip planning starting in January of this year. I'm not sure of the exact number of volunteers, but it must of been a dozen with Kevin as the "Chief Cat Herder". A team of took care of the hotels, another team took care of the dinner and breakfast, one person for the ferries and I took care of the daily ride routing.
When I laid out the ride to Hurricane Ridge, from Port Angeles to the top of a local mountain, it didn't seem to be anything special. Only 40 miles out and back. A nice climbing ride, but nothing special. When you are routing the ride, sometimes you miss details. The detail I missed was it had over 5,000 feet of climbing 20 miles. A very substantial climb in a short amount of miles.
We started from the Super 8 Motel at about 8:30 AM following the route, that on paper didn't look too intimidating, but in short order, we rode through residential neighborhood started with some very steep inclines just to get to the start of the Hurricane Ridge access road. Typical steep roads are about 6%, but in no time, the Garmin GPS started to report 9% then 10% until we were a couple of miles up the road, we were facing 15% inclines. Peer pressure is a powerful incentive. You look around, everyone is still moving forward and some riders are even starting to pull away. So you reach down and find the energy. You start to find your pace, trying to find a speed that you can maintain. In the back of your mind, you know that they don't build roads that are 15% and that the road is gotta level out at some point. If you can just hang in there for a while maybe it will all work out. You know that several miles up, there is an entrance gate. Maybe you'll finally bail on the ride at that point. At least that would be a some good showing and you keep moving on. By this point, your jersey is dripping in sweat as you over heat, then a cool morning breeze brushes against you and chills you to bone only to the the cycle repeat.
You keep looking at your cycle computer. You know at the start of the climb, it's 17 miles from the start. Maybe 1/2 way is good enough for today. Maybe, 1/2 others will have turned back. Maybe, by the 1/2 point and it will flatten out and slowly, ever so slowly, you reach the entrance gate. The ranger asked if I'm with the cycle group, if so the group rate has already been paid.
In another mile or so, our support vehicle being driven Kristin and Rick pulls up besides us, they will meet us up the road a bit with snacks and water. Can't turn around now, there is some snacks ahead.
We caught up the them with 8 more miles to the top. Filled up with water and more snacks and were off. The ride was really wearing my down at this point and I figured that if I would bike a mile and take a break, sip some water, take a couple of bites from a cliff bar and resume, the I could break the ride into 8 stops. To break each mile down into bit size chunks, I resorted to a game that Jim and Lauri Young would play at the end of a long ride. We would imagine the last ten miles of a favorite ride and think of what we where we would be at those mile points as we counted down to the destination. I this case, I have the last mile to my house memorized and I imagined what cross street I would be at each tenth of a mile; crossing Huntington Drive, crossing Cynthia St, crossing McLean St, crossing Almansor St, crossing Grand Ave and finally turning into my home. Stop, drink some water, take a couple of bites to eat and start the cycle again. After 8 cycles, I would be at the top. What was the Yogi Berra's quote; Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical. Well today I was playing the mental part of the equation and it got me to the top.
After a bit of a celebration at the top of the hill with the riders who made it to the top before us it was time for the descent. Adrienne, Leigh and myself started down the winding hill and the air was pretty chilly as we started to pick up speed. The road surface was in great condition. No significant bumps as we continued to pick up speed. It was pretty neat to see on the 17 mile descent, the distance between the riders stretching out on the straight sections then compressing as we entered curves then stretching out again on the next straight section. I would glance down at my cycle computer occasionally as my speed was ever increasing. Always hoping that I had not missed any defects in my tires this morning because having a blowout at these speeds would be very very painful.
Having a high speed downhill ride of 17 miles is just unbelievable! Holding on to the brakes through the turns will cause your hands to cramp up and you try to relax them on the straights and move the fingers a bit to get the blood flowing for the next turn. But before you are ready, you are approaching town and need to ease back on the speed.
It was 4 hours up and only 40 minutes or so on the way down and it was a blast of a lifetime.
A very exciting day indeed.
Happy Biking
Brian
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