Crossing the Cascades

Dave and I were about to begin our third day of a month-long trek across the mountains from Seattle over to Wisconsin. The night before, we didn't get as much supper as we would have liked and at breakfast we tried to make up for the calorie deficit.

A gentleman noticed how much we were eating, assumed the bikes out front belonged to us, and asked how far we were going. We told him Wisconsin and his eyes grew as big as our stomachs. After some chatting about the route we wanted to take, he suggested a road that wasn't on our map. It would save us about 20 miles that day so we agreed to take his advice.

After about an hour of climbing, we started to realize this gentleman had never thought about elevation when he drove that shortcut. It was a nice road, recently paved and devoid of traffic, but we just kept going up and up and up. We had left camp at 1200 feet and didn't think we had any hills above 2000 feet, but it felt like we'd already done well over 800 feet of climbing.

The road was remote enough that we could hear the occasional logging truck for several minutes before it would pass us and then for several minutes after it passed. We would listen to the pitch of the engine to see if they would shift gears to signal they had reached the top of the hill. We never heard them shift.

After a few hours and most of the water, we came across a rest stop where we could refill water bottles and eat some snacks. Our mood was getting rather sour because it had been uphill, often steep, all the way.

Fortunately, shortly after we started back up the slope, we found a sign that told us we were passing through Wolf Gap. We were above 4700 feet.

It was downhill into the next town. As we joined up with the main highway, a retirement age gentleman calls to us from his Winnebago, "You guys biking?"

"No! We're sitting on lounge chairs in Florida."

We had been tent camping, but that night we treated ourselves to a hotel room.