T+41: Final Part: A Tale of Towns and Passes

Mile 920: HOPE, IDAHO:  Having had our butts kicked by the two previous passes, Wes and I prepared for the worst heading up the third pass of this trip.  Wauconda.   There was a little town, near the summit, 24 miles along, which we considered might be our terminus for the night.  The summit was another few miles beyond.  Knowing that we had found both the Northern Cross and Loup Loup plenty challenging, we packed extra food and water and prepared for another siege. 

Getting out of town was rough, but it was well before dawn and the views were incredible.  At the tip of one hill, we could see the craggy peaks of the North Cascades.  We pushed/rode through a small desert canyon about five or six miles.  Then we cleared a lip, and all of a sudden, we were on the set of The Big Valley.  In a broad mountain valley, beneath forests of Ponderosa pine, we cycled easily past historic ranches.  There was little traffic amid hay fields, and little groupings of short-horn and Hereford cattle.  Little streams tumbled out of the hills.  Wes sang the theme song to The Big Valley, as we felt a kind of elation at the unexpected beauty and ease.

The riding continued much like this.  There would be short, tough climb through a glade, where we would follow a water course from a lower bench to a higher one.  Each bench became progressively smaller and wilder.  But the country was fertile and littered with old log cabins.  It felt like we had been transported to a different time.

At about mile 22, our pre-dawn coffee and granola had long since worn off, as had our road-side figs, and we were starting to flag.  A group of five bicyclists, obviously long-distance tourers by their loads, came the other direction.  I asked how they were doing, and they answered, “Great!  We just had breakfast!”  Without missing a pedal, I asked, “How long to breakfast?”  With the answer, “less than a mile”, my adrenalin surged to the visions of pancakes or an omelette.

There is a joke among bicycle tourists about the trip being a journey from one meal to the next.  Keeping the bike going, especially carrying a load, burns up enormous calories.  We are probably eating 5000-6000 calories a day and both of us are losing weight.  It is no joke to be out on the road, miles from the next stop, and out of energy, or even worse, out of water.   We have made both mistakes.  We try to carry at least some food at all times.  We have both added water bottles, and probably need to add another.  We will just need to cope with the added weight.

Wauconda cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be called a town.  It is a restaurant/gas station/store/bar and a sight for sore eyes.  The store owner was really happy to chat with us and had all sort of stories of bicyclists stopping at his self-described “one horse town”.  He said that more than 95 percent of bicyclists going up the pass stop, while about 90 percent of those going down the pass do.  Some stop and wolf down candy bars, while others stop and eat and lurk about (like we did).  There are cyclists making a hundred miles a day, which sounds like torture to us.  There are kids as young as 8 on the ride, lots of what the owner calls “grey-beards”.  What he says there isn’t…and we have noticed this as well…are mature women.   We see lots of men, both young and old, traveling alone or in pairs.  There are a few young couples.   We have seen one young woman biking alone.   We do not seen any women my age traveling by bike.

After breakfast, we fairly cruise over the last phase of the pass.  We take a nice ride down the side, stopping to read the historical markers that pepper this part of the country, which was one of first part of this state to be populated by European-Americans, who came looking for gold, but stayed for trees.  We cycle in and out of what feels like “hollers”—small valleys with a few houses.  There are no trophy houses around here.

We clear a corner, and all of a sudden cross a modern, fancy bridge, which deposits us, unexpectedly in the little mining town of Republic.  Perched on the side of the mountain, with roads that skew up and down steep hills and don’t necessarily connect.  We stop at Eich’s Mercantile, which sells milkshakes, coffee, garden supplies, violins, computer parts, shoes, and more.  It has been in business in this little town for nearly 100 years.  As we wander the streets of this town, we see it is everything that Winthrop is not.  Its 19^th century buildings house real business like title companies, plumbing stores, and mom and pop shops.  There is not a single chain anything in the town except a Bank of America, which we read in the local paper, is pulling out of Republic and selling the branch to a regional chain.  The grocery store, Anderson’s, has been in the same family for six generations.   The town was founded on gold mining in the 1860’s, and except for a four year period in the late 1990’s, there has always been at least one deep shaft gold mine near town.
The way out of town for us is the highest pass of the trip: Sherman Pass.  We are tired, and we like this authentic little town, so we decide to take our first day off of the trip.  We climb the hill to a small motel called the Klondike, and are greeted graciously by our host, a young Sikh named Behel, who was babysitting his niece and nephew and told us he was the proud father of an eight month old boy.   We wonder how Behel and his brother came from Northern India to this isolated mining town in Washington, but we don’t ask and regret it later. 

We wander the town, visit the local brewery and have a long visit with two young Canadians from Vancouver who are riding motorcycles all around the American West.  They are pleased when we tell them how much we Detroiters like living next to a “civilized country.”  They surprise us by telling us how much they appreciate the number of choices available in the US.

Back at our room, we gorge our desire for media by watching two Harry Potter movies.  The next morning we climb up to the Catholic Church perched on a retaining wall high above the main town.    The church is lovely but the average age of congregation is probably 75 years old.  The priest is a remarkably fresh-faced and handsome young man of about 40.  He is brand new to the town and the congregation.  He apologizes for not knowing anyone’s names.  When we say we are from Detroit as we leaving, he whistles and says, “I bet you have some culture shock.”  It sounds like the voice of experience.   At the coffee hour after church, Wes blatantly asks about the age of the congregation.  We find out that their priest of more than 40 years died at the age of 85 just a few months ago, and they have not had any catechism or youth groups for as long as any of them could remember.  The question hanging in the air was whether this congregation could survive.

At and around the Laundromat, we again see the now familiar type of skinny, stringy-haired, burning eyed young person.   Again, the newspaper has stories of methamphetamine arrests and problems.  It is obvious that this scourge is rampant in these northern towns of Washington.  By the end of the day, we have walked up and down the streets of the town, where most of the shops are closed on this Sunday.  We are rested and ready for the next push.  We know the push over Sherman will take all day and a ton of energy.

The next day we are on the road by 6am.  We are traveling without the map, and are pleased to find a bike trail that parallels the logging truck packed highway….until it doesn’t.  Instead of heading east, we find we are going north and have to backtrack a few miles to get back on the right road.  It doesn’t take long before we realize the Sherman’s reputation is well deserved.  Not only is it the highest pass in the state, it is unrelenting.   We ride quite a few miles, but have to push our bikes most of the last 8 miles over the top.

About ¾ way up, while we stop for a break in the shade, a small car pulls up, and out jumps a slight brown-skinned man, who asks if we need any help.  We say we don’t, and end up talking for 30 minutes with this modern Native American, who was on his way to a nearby town to get supplies for his new farm on the Columbia River. He said he had always wanted to be “an old, dumb farmer” and for years, he was only able to get the first two elements right.  He offers to ferry us to the top, which we decline.  Not only would it take at least 4 trips to get bikes, BOBs and us into his little Ford Fiesta type car, we want to do it ourselves.  He shakes his head at our folly.  When we ask how far it is to the top, he answers, “Quite a ways.”

We think we are near the top, but our adviser was right.  This was a tricky pass, with lots of detours to side canyons, and a few false tops.  Near one false summit, we stop for lunch at a Forest Service display site, where two middle aged blonde women soon come eat their lunch as well.    They see us eating out cheese without benefit of bread, and offer, with heavily accented English and some pity, the rest of their freshly baked baguette.  They are two Swiss women on holiday, driving from Minneapolis to Seattle, visiting sites like Yellowstone and Teton National Parks.  They remark on the huge difference in wealth they see in America, how some places are so poor and some places so rich.  They find it shocking, but say, ruefully, that Switzerland is becoming more like this each day, too.

The ride down Sherman was great.  We are getting to be old hands at these 15 mile downhills.  We follow a little stream down, which all of a sudden opens to a chasm of 300 feet.  We peer over the edge and give ourselves a fright.  At the bottom of the ride, we see the Columbia River, which is still mighty big, even though it is many hundreds of miles upstream.  We ride parallel to it and catch glimpses of it through the trees.  There are huge lumber mills up and down its banks.  Right when we think we will zoom down and cross this big river, we have to climb a big hill, where logging truck after logging truck passes us by. 

Wes wants to film our crossing of the river, but mostly succeeds in capturing how scary it can be to ride in close quarters with cars and trucks.  When we clear the bridge, we are super disappointed to realize that the town of Kettle Falls, which used to be on the river at site of the now buried falls, has been moved up the bench, far from the river.  We are hot and tired; we have come 49 miles.  We were looking forward to re-connecting with the river.   A youngish couple in a station wagon stops when they see up peering up at the daunting hill.  They congratulate us for making it over the pass, but shake their heads in sorrow, when we ask if there were any other way to get to Kettle Falls.

So up the hill we go, in heavy traffic, at the end of our ropes.  Near the top, another car pulls over and asks if we need help.  By this time, we are wondering what about us looks so pitiful.  He directs to a camping spot and promises to buy us a beer at a nearby tavern.  We don’t find the tavern, but do find the camping spot:  a community park just off the highway, down the street from the 24 hour Boise Cascade lumber mill, with deep, soft grass.  We make a nice meal and sleep like rocks.