Royal Basin
The valley to the south of Royal Basin has no name, no trails. There were no people there that I could see. As soon as I started running down the other side of the ridge, I was out of sight from the hikers in the basin, and in a land of my own.
Each footfall sent small avalanches of busted shale crumbling down the slope in front of me. I ran like I was downhill skiing, knees bent, weight over the feet, eyes fixed on the fall line. When I did skid over backwards, the slope was steep enough that I could push off, pop right back up and continue into the slide.
I reached the bottom in minutes. Looking back up the crumble slope, I could trace my reckless decent in the piles of upended rock. I figured it would take at least a half-hour of tough climbing to get back on top of the ridge. I had truly isolated myself now. If I screwed up, there would be no hope of signaling to hikers in the next valley and it wouldn’t be an easy self-rescue. I was my own responsibility.
I wondered if I really had any business taking on the gothic rock slopes of the next mountain. I studied the geometry for a while, but couldn’t find any way up that didn’t involve one or two dubious sections. I told myself I would back down if I encountered any dangerous stuff with a sheer drop — but I would try for the summit.
I bushwhacked through the sedges along the river bottom and pushed my way through huckleberry thickets toward the first terraces of the climb.
The nature of rock in the Olympic Mountains is decay. Everything is loose, ready to fall. The rock is sharp and angular, like pieces of a shattered windshield. Mountain decay is in fact in equilibrium with mountain rise, I’m told. Even as subduction pushes the peaks up, erosion topples them down just as fast, similar to a standing wave in a river.
The erosive properties of the mountain almost kept me in stasis too. I would put one foot down and have it slide halfway down slope on scree, which had itself fallen from higher up. The backsliding, easily doubled the amount of time it took to go up.
Difficult as the scree was to deal with, it wasn’t nearly as worrisome as the jagged slab rock that it has fallen away from. Here, the risk was not little scree avalanches, but television-sized rocks coming lose suddenly and ruining your day. This is what you encounter on the higher mountains, and it is the reason why even experienced climbers with ropes and anchors are wary of the high peaks in the park.
My peak was high enough to have plenty of this slab rock, but still well-groomed compared to any one of the high peaks nearby, which jutted up like rows of shark’s teeth.
Every time I grabbed a handhold, I would give it a firm wiggle before committing weight. I would find rocks the size of mini-fridges that were ready to fall away. Minutes would go by as I listened to one falling rock fall into another and another, booming down the slopes below.
Walking on the snowfields was only slightly more reassuring. The month’s old snow was compressed down into hard firn — predecessor to glacial ice. Without crampons or axe, I kicked hard to get any kind of foothold, sunk my fingers into the half-melted surface snow for purchase. I weaved away from areas that were still in shadow. Here, the snow would be rock hard, and far more difficult to climb.
Yet, being in the center of the snowfield was unnerving too, because I knew that the snow would be hollowed out here. Each snowfield I’ve encountered in the high mountains in summer has had a stream of meltwater running down the center, often carving out caverns that would be tall enough to walk through. I knew the firn snow was tough, but it was still unnerving to imagine that I was actually walking on top of a roof that was steadily melting away beneath the hot sun.
The sun was on me like an interrogation lamp. Sharp light from the snow stung back into my unprotected eyeballs. I squinted less when I got back onto the rock, but then, of course, I had to deal with the rock again.
Finally, I topped out at a ridge right next to the summit. The last 30 feet of climbing were sketchiest of all. There were ugly drops on all sides. To top it all, some flying ant species was having its annual convention on on the summit rocks.
I took my pack off and worked my way gingerly over the rock I didn’t trust. Ants landed on my shirt, on my hair and eyebrows. Finally I slapped the highest rock. I took a second looking around — especially at the hundreds of feet that dropped off to the glacier between me and the next mountain. Then I started to work my way, carefully, carefully, back down. The ants flew back to their summit.
I got back to my pack and released my breath.
Adventure Route/Pyramid Peak
The sun was just beginning to touch the top of the power lines by the time that I left my ninja camp. I didn’t make breakfast — no water — and pedaled thirsty on the logging road up toward Lake Crescent.
I made it through the railroad tunnel and stopped at the shallow stream that crossed the trail. Here, I filled up my hydration bladder and chowed down on soaked oatmeal flakes in cold water. The sugary dehydrated peanut butter I mixed in made it true trail-delicacy. I stashed some of my gear in the woods here to make the going faster on the technical trail ahead of me.
It was a few miles of mountain biking from here to the base of the Pyramid Peak trail. I had to concentrate hard on the aggressive roots in the trail, coupled with rocks that had fallen onto the path from the cliffs above. It was discouraging having to dismount after trying to weave through stones going down a hill, but it was also profoundly satisfying to pull it off.
This is one of the only places where mountain biking is allowed on a national park trail. Periodically, politicians will contend that mountain bikes should be allowed on all park trails. One argument is that we already let horses into the park, so why should bikers get the shaft? I get the argument, but I disagree.
If the Parks Service made the exemption, there would be a lot more mountain bikes on the trail then there are horses now. On narrow trails, people would be constantly on guard for mountain bikes zooming up on them.
Even biking a few miles in the park showed me how many conflict opportunities there were. I had to (mostly) politely inform hikers that I was coming through so they would step off the path. Some of them gave me the stink-eye. Plenty of them leaped like spooked horses as I wheeled down on them.
On the one hand I felt a little guilty disrupting their quieter, bipedal appreciation of Lake Crescent’s beauty. To be fair though, there were plenty of other park trails where they could go hiking without worrying about bikes.
I was not the only one biking either. There were several other riders coming through rigged up with panniers and bike racks full of gear. Several of the travelers were on long distance journeys, including one couple that was headed back to Sequim after biking all the way to Neah Bay at the west end of the Peninsula.
The large number of multi-day riders I saw on this trail, and on the Adventure Route, testifies to the growing number of people who are coming to the Olympic Peninsula for bike tourism which pays dividends on all the money that went into trail construction. The quality of life enhancement that the trail brings to residents like me is what is truly priceless.
The trail became smooth dirt, and then pavement further up. I pedaled for a couple miles down the lake until I came to the Pyramid Peak trailhead. It would be about three and a half miles and close to 2,500 feet of gain.
At this point, I was still nursing an achy knee from my last marathon but decided to try myself out.
The climb had me sweating, but I felt a great deal more energy than I expected. Further up, the trail cut across an area where a large landslide had fallen off the mountain. Footing was tricky on the loose substrate. A missed step could have meant a long slide.
Back in the woods, I cut up along the switchbacks. With each one, I felt stronger and more confident as a runner. The knee wasn’t hurting yet.
After about an hour, I emerged from the trees at a small cabin — an eagle’s nest, jutting on the corner of tall cliffs.
Morning mist partly obscured the view to Lake Crescent down below. The sun made a circle of golden light upon the blue water. Leaves burned translucent green in the morning sun. The sharp ridges all around and the dense, wet forests reminded me of my visit to Machu Picchu many years ago.
The summit was where I turned the doorstep adventure around. Ahead of me, I had the trail run, the Spruce Railroad Trail to bike and the 26.2 miles of the Olympic Adventure Trail, before I pedaled the rest of the way to Port Angeles.
I wrapped my knee in an ace bandage for the descent, swung into the flow of the downhill, hitching a ride with gravity along the journey back to home.
This was July. In a couple months, I was back on the Adventure Route, to run the Great Olympic Adventure Trail Marathon — the GOAT run.
I took second place with a time of 3:11. The run had me pretty well beat and the beer at the end was well needed. Having biked the trail, I had a nice leg up on the competition.
Elwha
There was hardly any weight on my back when I left Chicago Camp for my third day of exploration in the Elwha Valley: Water, a med kit, a windbreaker a Clif bar, an energy gel and vegan jerky. I didn’t bring much food so that I wouldn’t be tempted to spend half the day up in the mountains. I would still have a 14-mile run back to Elkhorn Camp at the end of the day and I didn’t want to start late in the day. Hunger was supposed to motivate me to get back to camp earlier.
It was a nice attempt at self-control, but in the hours to come, I undermined myself by picking berries along the trail and using the extra calories to go much further than I’d planned.
The run began with a fallen tree that I used to cross the river. I felt sluggish starting out, and walked some of the uphill sections as the trail began its climb to Low Divide. Maybe I was ready to turn back early after all.
As I climbed into higher country, I felt the machinery warming up and decided that I had the energy after all.
There was a string of mountain lakes, nestled in the pines. The snowfields of Mount Seattle caught the morning light behind them. I was at around 3,500 feet here, lower than the startling turquoise lakes of Royal Basin. The lakes were murkier, more tannic as the waters stewed pine needles. Lily pads floated out in the water. Tiny wavelets lapped against the rocky shorelines. The contemplative beauty of them reminded me of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters.
The trail was lined with huckleberry plants. Several different varieties grew here including fat pale blues, others dark enough to be almost black (these were also fat and were the sweetest), along with the smallest, least sweet reds, which were still delicious and which I picked compulsively. The berries were large enough that I could accumulate a handful pretty quickly. It was hard to move up the trail without stopping. Every turn brought me to another bush sagging with delicious berries and I couldn’t help myself.
Not far above the lakes I came to a sign for the Low Divide, which marked the boundary between the Elwha Valley and the Quinault to its south.
There was more water on the trail, and the growth was thicker here. I had crossed the rain shadow. Here, the moist Pacific air dumped the most moisture, and created a rainforest environment that was far more lush than the Elwha.
The lush forest turned out to be a significant obstacle when I tried to go off trail and climb Mount Seattle.
I couldn’t even make it to the flanks of the mountain before I was beaten back by the thick growth of stinging nettle and the the barb covered devil’s club (oplopanax horridus.) Stung and bleeding, I decided that I had already gotten my fill of bushwhacking for the trip the day before.
“I could go on, but I choose not too,” I announced.
Instead, I ran back to a spur trail near the divide to go check out some more alpine lakes around Martin’s Park. The trail followed a deep gully cut through bedrock, then popped out at a mountain meadow at the base of an enormous snowfield clinging to a mountain ridge. I thought about leaving the trail to explore this, but decided to press on toward the lakes.
I dipped down into the next valley, and a truly monumental view of another mountain range emerged. I was so taken by the background that I almost missed one extremely important foreground detail.
This detail was black, close to 400 pounds, and busy bending huckleberry bushes with its claws.
“Whoa!”
The bear was on a hill about 50 yards away, barely off the trail. It was utterly absorbed in what it was doing — moving from one huckleberry bush to another and eating every berry that it could put into its maw. It had zero reaction to the fact that I was standing right below it, watching it move.
The movements of the bear were fascinating — like watching a dance as it grasped each new shrub, tangoed for a minute and then moved on to a new partner. The bear was incredibly efficient manipulating the branches and its own maw so that it could consume the maximum amount of calories in the minimum amount of time.
Repetition surely accounted for much of the bear’s finesse Even the plump berries growing here would only be a small portion of its body weight. It would have to eat many of them to put on the pounds before winter. No doubt, this feeding would be an all-day affair.
I thought about my course of action. I was standing downwind; the bear still hadn’t noticed me. If I wanted to go on, I would have to shout the bear off the trail. I picked up a couple rocks to help reinforce my message, if necessary. It probably wasn’t going to be thrilled about me interrupting its meal.
I stopped. What the hell was I doing? No one said that I had to go and bother this massive animal that was more than twice my weight.
Would it step aside? Probably. Other bears I’ve encountered have moved, sometimes reluctantly. I could mess you up, Kid, but it wouldn’t be worth the paperwork.
Regardless, there was something that seemed wrong about yelling threats an animal that was guilty of nothing more than trying to survive in its natural habitat. If I went on to the lakes and the bear was still around when I came back, I would have to yell at it all over again. It didn’t feel right. The bear needed to be busy eating before winter arrived. I didn’t need to go any further.
I put the rocks down.
Fifteen minutes later, I was wandering off trail again, this time approaching the large snowfield along its icy outflow.
I didn’t see the frog until my foot came down right next to it and it leaped into the stream. I watched transfixed as it weaved its way through a narrow series of drops. Its webbed feet pumped expertly in time so that it missed the rocks — precision a river boater would envy.
The frog sighting, like the bear, exemplified excellence in nature. I felt privileged to bear witness.
The wonders continued upstream where the meltwater flowed out from beneath the snowfield. Here was a cavern tall enough to walk inside. The heat of the day vanished instantly as my eyes adjusted to the soft blue light. The sound of dripping water was everywhere and omnipresent. The ceiling was webbed out into an ornate series of groin vaults that would be the envy of a medieval cathedral. Droplets formed at the intersections and fell away into the dark water below. Each droplet, I realized, was headed for the Elwha’s mouth miles north of here. Because Port Angeles draws its water from the Elwha, I’m sure that I have drank from this snowfield a thousand times unknowing.
The blue firn continued upstream as a darkening tube, receding toward unseen mysteries above.
It would have been easy enough just to keep walking through the cavern. In a hundred yards or so, I would have popped up on the other side where the stream came in. Still, the thought of a cave-in was terrifying.
Indeed, I later found a series of large slabs that had fallen off the top side of the tube — which had received more sunlight and was therefore more unstable than the bottom end where I was exploring.
The steep walls of the rock gully made the fallen slabs impossible to avoid as I climbed upward. Getting over them meant crawling over them on my belly, then sliding down to the loose rock on the other side. Progress was slow.
After crossing the fallen slabs, I had to take on a steep rock slope before I topped out on the ridge. As carefully as I tried to step, I still managed to trigger a few long rock falls before I topped out on the ridge.
I took a breath.
The immensity of the glacier in front of me was overwhelming.
There were square miles of ice, sloped out on the mountain. Beneath the dirty, brown surface, the crevasses sank away into sapphire blue depths.
This was Mount Christy, a mountain named for the leader of the Press Expedition of 1889 and 1890, the first documented group to cross the Olympic Mountains. In Robert Wood’s account of their journey, it took the group several months to hack through the wilderness between Port Angeles and Low Divide.
As a doorstep journey (aided by the roads and trails that Christy’s expedition helped establish) I’d reached the same place in just over two days.
A brown lake of glacial meltwater ran down into a mountain river toward the Quinault River. I could see to where the mountains fell to lowlands in the west, and a dark blue area that I reckoned to be the Pacific Ocean.
Beneath the root of a gnarled pine, I found something that looked out of place. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was the handle of a large hunting knife. The steel blade was spotted, but still keen. I used it to hack off a dead branch and sharpen its end to a point — a makeshift ice axe for my descent on the snowfield.
I dragged the branch through the snow as I ran, skidded and fell down the slope. It took me a couple hours to run back to camp. By the time I had everything packed and started back on the trail, it was four p.m..
The fourteen miles of trail ahead of me were a slog. Just as it was getting dark enough to turn on my headlamp, I saw the familiar antlers nailed to a tree. I’d arrived back at Elkhorn Camp. The lean-to where I’d slept the night before was empty. Indeed, the only person I saw in camp was the caretaker, who was already going to bed.
Bed sounded very appealing to my tired body and mind, but first I needed water for dinner. I shambled down the bank to the Elwha River. My headlamp caught a glint of something by a rock and I realized that it was a can of beer. The can was full. Trail magic.
The smooth, dark IPA was luxurious as I squatted by the flames of my tiny cook fire. I listened to the crackle of the flames, the shush of the river flowing over rocks. The orange firelight danced up among the needles of the cedars. Here, on my third night in the woods, I had my own tiny civilization along the trail. The next day, I would return to the city.
Though I had literally reached the highpoint of my journey, there was still one more surprise to come.
I awoke for an 11- mile run back to the trailhead. The temperature got hotter and hotter as the sun rose. I found myself taking multiple breaks to walk up out of valleys. In one worthwhile detour, I walked off the trail to get to the edge of the Grand Canyon of the Elwha, where I could look at the river at the bottom of a thousand-foot sloping walls.
I started running into day hikers as I approached the road, including a crowd of whitewater kayakers who had rigged their boats into backpacks so that they could hike up the trail and take on the Class V whitewater in the canyon.
Finally, I popped out at the parking lot and unlocked my bike. There was still a long ride to Port Angeles, including a three mile hill climb that would be brutal in the full sun.
I took a seat on a picnic bench to relax and ended up in a conversation with a fisherman who was coming back from a short day hike. It turned out that he had found a pool full of salmon downstream of Whiskey Bend Road.
They were mostly Chinook salmon at this point, he said, though the Coho would be starting their run soon too. The pool would be a little out of my way, but I decided that it was worth it to include it in the journey.
The five-mile ride down Whiskey Bend Road was exhilarating as I took on the hairpin turns in my bike. I took a detour on the paved Olympic Hot Springs road to the bridge at Altair Campground. The fish were gathered in a large eddy. Some of them must have been close to twenty pounds. The most recent arrivals from the ocean were still silvery, whereas others had turned pinkish in preparation to climb further up river to spawn. Their mouths would become more beaklike too, so that they could use their jaws to fight other fish for mates.
My friend that I’d met at the trailhead pulled up in his Subaru for another look. It was likely that some of these fish would be in the pool for several days or weeks as their bodies changed in preparation for spawning, he said.
He’d been watching the spawning fish in the Elwha with interest. The river is still off limits to fishing however, as the salmon begin to come back into their old habitat.
It was extraordinary to think that only a couple years ago, the pool that was now full of fish would have been empty. The Lower Elwha Dam had locked off this section of river for over a century. Now that the dams have come down, the fish have begun returning to the upper reaches of their old habitat.
The stronger ones would fight their way upriver to many of the same places where I’d stopped on my doorstep adventure. They would not return from their journey, though — they hoped — their progeny would. Their carcasses would feed bears, eagles and raccoons; they would fertilize the roots of trees. Some adventure.
Elk Mountain
I ended my day on top of Elk Mountain with a snow sliding adventure off the north face. I found a ridge of broken rock to climb down that led to a snowfield. With a good running start, I was able to slide on my shoes down to the bottom of the valley where the snow melted into a stream. The water here was headed for Morse Creek, which crossed the Discovery Trail near Port Angeles. I wondered what it be like to put on a pair of waders and try to follow the stream the rest of the way down to the Strait — probably impossible, but certainly an interesting thing to attempt.
The lightweight ice axe attached to my hiking pole finally came in handy when I started climbing back up the snowfield. I could feel the snow becoming harder and more consolidated as the sun went down. I struck a rhythm in kicking my feet and sinking the axe. If I fell out of time, I tended to slip backwards. It became meditative and a pleasure to concentrate on my movements and draw on energy reserves that only showed themselves in the face of challenge.
I got back to my camp at Roaring Winds. Thankfully, the place did not live up to its name that night. It was quite calm. I slept warm beneath my tarp.
The next morning, I packed up and began my journey back to Port Angeles I would have spent more time in the hills, but there was an Olympic Climate Action meeting in town that afternoon that I wanted to get to.
I got to my bike in a couple hours and started the 5,000-foot descent back to sea level. Exhilaration met fear as I rolled down the tight curves along the edge of the mountain. My back-busting effort the day before gave way to effortless speed; the labor of a thousand pedal strokes was spent out in a couple of breaths.
Meanwhile, there were vehicles to watch out for. I like to think that for as much as I suffered more than they did on the way up, I had more fun on the way down. Biking downhill is exciting, whereas driving anywhere feels like responsibility. I had a jeep a hundred yards behind me for the last mile of dirt road.
Did I slow down to let it pass? Nah. I touched the brakes as little as possible and flew through the turns. I managed to stay ahead of it until the end of the park.
Royal Basin
I didn’t know the name of the mountain I had just climbed until I pulled out the map near the summit: Hal Foss Peak. 7,191 feet. It was the first 7,000-foot mountain that I’d climbed in the Olympics.
To the west, I could see the headwaters of the Dungeness River and then over the peaks of the Buckhorn Wilderness to the Hood Canal, the suburbs of Seattle and the Cascades.
Beautiful as the view was, I had some trepidation about getting back down the steep, crumbly mountain in one piece. I decided to descend a different route than what I’d come up, hoping for something more gradual. There were more snowfields this way, which I was worried about at first, but turned out to be a major asset.
The snow, which had been rock hard as I started my climb, was softening up under the hot sun and was easier to grip into. I tried sliding in places where there were backstops to break my fall and I found that I had more control than I had thought. I picked up a long slab of shale to use as a primitive ice axe, dragging it like a handbrake behind me as I scooted on my rear.
I also found a couple of tubes to explore, though, as in the Elwha Valley, I couldn’t find the nerve to walk all the way through.
The heat was becoming incredible. I had foolishly left my hat at home, but McGivered a brim out of a bus schedule I was carrying and a piece parachute cord. The glacial lakes at the bottom of the valley offered another source of relief.
Between Hal Foss and the even taller Mount Mystery, there lay a long frozen finger. I walked up it for a ways using another sharp piece of rock as an axe. I peered into a narrow crevasse where I could see the hard blue ice going down.
This was no snowfield, but true glacial ice. It was the first glacier I had walked out onto on the Olympic Peninsula. Cloistered in the cold shadows of the twin peaks, the ice that I was looking at had likely been frozen there for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. I hope it will make it for the next hundred, but who knows?
The glacier had melted into a series of lakes, along the moraine. Some were brown with sediment, some icy blue with glacial flour — rock dust pulverized off the mountain beneath the weight of the ice. I chose one of the blue pools, where I could literally see the glacier sloping down into the water.
I stripped down and jumped in. The cold seized me immediately and shrunk my breath down to nothing. I opened my eyes for a half-second view of the blue lake world, and thrashed my way to the surface. I lurched with dumb muscles back onto the rocks, shivering in 85 degree heat.
As my temperature stabilized, I felt completely wonderful, invigorated feeling the heat leaving through my capillaries. I decided to hike for a while before I put my clothes back on (boots were still necessary for the razor sharp rocks, I draped a shirt over my shoulders to ward off burn.) It was the most breathable hiking outfit that I had tried, with no chafing. Highly recommended. The whole valley was empty, from the glacier, to the peaks of Hal Foss, Mystery and Deception. It was the best place in the world.
The only place I might have encountered someone was at the top of the pass I had climbed earlier the day — still a mile off and an unlikely climb for most of the day hikers in Royal Basin. I’m glad that no one was there to see me hiking au natural in boots and with a brimmed hat made from a bus schedule.
The climb up the ridge back toward Royal Basin turned out to be far more difficult than I had imagined.
Sure I had run down the side of it in a matter of minutes. However, the scree was so loose that I was doing well if I slid halfway back with every step I took. It was as bad as powder snow. Little bits of rock would break away above where I put my foot down and flow over my shoe to my ankle.
The shale layers here were offset at a 45 degree slant, remnants of the ancient sea bed, hoisted up and tilted as a result of tectonic subduction. It was easy to climb between two layers and brace off of the protruding ribs, but doing so meant meandering away from the point on the ridge that I where I needed to be to get safely down on the other side. Crossing from one tectonic layer to another required fancy footwork and grabbing at small handholds in the rock ribs, which were only marginally more reliable than the loose scree between them.
The rock was so sharp that I could feel the edges, even beneath the thick soles of my trail running shoes. By the end of the day, the bottoms were so cut up that I deemed them retired from any more mountain adventures.
My shoulders and biceps were as tired as my legs by the time that I topped the ridge. I put clothes back on because I now had a better chance of encountering other hikers. First, I got to run/slide down the other side of the slope, remarkably easy compared to the effort of going up, and an absolute blast staying on the knife edge between control and chaos.
I didn’t encounter an humans until I got back to the trail.
“Excuse me,” I called cheerfully.
“Can it wait a second?” a backpacker called, voice tense, clearly uneasy with the mildly uneven trail and the small drop alongside. I walked slowly behind them until they let me run pass. No love there.
They probably thought I was some kind of show-off or yahoo. Maybe they were right.
Still, as someone who has always considered himself a hiker, my summer of doorstep adventures has left me feeling strangely alienated from this group. I thought of the woman who had chastised me for seeing me with a mountain bike on the trail (though I wasn’t pedaling it.) I don’t think many of the traditional hikers understand what I am doing. Many of them might think that I am just running up from my car for a quick selfie on a mountain ridge. They don’t realize that I actually started my adventure from Port Angeles.
I reached my camp at Royal Lake by mid afternoon, packed up, and then started jogging the seven miles back to the trailhead under full pack. At this point, I felt fatigue catching up to me. Several times I caught myself walking when I knew I should be using the momentum to run. There was no way I was getting home until well after dark, that was for sure. I focused on each new change in the environment that I detected as I lost elevation. Here was the first thimbleberry plant, here was the first Douglass Fir, the first salal shrubs growing trailside. I guessed at how long it would take until I saw my first red cedar, the first maple. The goals helped keep me focused on keeping moving. The sun was already getting low by the time I reached my bike, and I still had almost 40 miles to get back to Port Angeles.
This started out with a mile long climb on the dirt road, followed by a long descent to the Gray Wolf River and another two miles of hard climbing.
As many challenges as there were, I found it easy to mindlessly follow the road back home. There were no decisions to make, no questions about the proper route, all I needed to do was point myself in the right direction and persevere. I could deal with the fatigue the next day.
By the time that I popped out on the pavement, it was dark. I flicked on my headlamp and tail light for my bike. Shifting gears going downhill, I somehow managed to bust my derailleur again, which meant that I would have to pump mightily to climb the hills of the Discovery Trail on the way back to Port Angeles.
I made a quick stop at a gas station to buy snack food, then pedaled onto the 16 winding, unlit miles back to Port Angeles. I pedaled past the farms, in and out of creek valleys and along the sea shore. The adventure ended with the two mile climb from sea level to my apartment at 300 feet. The bells in the courthouse rang eleven times as I pedaled up Lincoln Street, ushering my return. A car went past.
It’s possible that the occupants might have noted, briefly the lone pedaler out on the streets at night with his enormous backpack. He probably slept the night in the woods somewhere last night.
Damn right I did. And I’ve been on the mountains above you. I’ve stood on a glacier, walked beneath snow and swum in a lake you’ll never see in your lifetime. If I explained how I did it, you would probably smile and shake your head. It might be difficult for you to relate.
You’ll see that I’m a fanatic, I’m impractical and I’m out of touch. You’re completely right. I’ll own that hardship.