Per the last post, D. and The Logging Road Cyclist had some unfinished business around Laurel Mountain. D. and TLRC are as one in this sort of thing: There was no doubt that they would go back and close the loop left open by the last weekend’s shenanigans. The plan this time was to head straight to Boulder Pass, then approach the endpoint of their last attempt from the other side. Thus, with a quick passage around  le massif, and a known (ahem) point to head for, success would be assured.

As he pulled up to D’s suburban manse, he saw a strange bike on the rack on D’s truck. A new rider! If D. got another one beyond this, and they each got 2,… why, in only 4 generations, there would be 18 to ride together. TLRC’s lonely vigils would be a thing of the past. On the other hand, 18 is rather an unwieldy number, logistically speaking, and TLRC would no longer be TLRC, but merely ALRC. This, he thought, might be too much of a good thing.

Walking up the driveway, he noticed the bike. Two chairings, flat pedals. TLRC sniffed contemplatively. Just then, D. introduced the new rider to TLRC. A yoot, definitely class sub-forty, maybe the age of an imaginary TLRC son? TLRC pondered this. Yoot, two chaingrings, flats. Was this a Callow Yoot, over-geared, under-pedaled, over-enthusiastic, or a Machine Yoot, one who would levitate away  from TLRC up the steep grades, leaving him gasping in self-recrimination at the vicissitudes of age and too soft of a life? After all the Machine People (cf. Columbia -Stanislaus Loop) had rigs like this, they were of the same “certain age” as TLRC, and this is what happened on rides with them. This pleasant young man certainly seemed to inhabit the “Machine” category.

Loaded up, off they went. It was a beautiful day. Low 40’s, maybe colder, not a cloud in the sky. Reaching the gate at the start of the ride, ice abounded. As all donned their gear, a startling discovery: Da Yoot had brought his cleated shoes, which, as a few seconds of experimenting showed, would simply not work on da flats. Da Yoot had forgotten to change pedals from his town flats to (more appropriate) clipless ones! Here was where TLRC felt his affection towards Da Yoot start to grow. Nonplussed, DY simply pulled out the bathroom slippers he had worn on the trip up, and with a little conjuring with some of the contents of TLRC’s ever handy emergency kit (the use of which tickled TLRC to no end), he (DY) had a set of handily Teva’d  Croc-slipper-things (later augmented by nifty and re-useable duct tape anti chafing pads):

 Off they went, up the wintry road.

Two companions!!!

As the first steep miles began, it became clear the Da Yoot was indeed a Machine Yoot. Off he levitated leaving TLRC and poor D. gasping in his wake. TLRC muttered something about how they must not try to maintain this pace or woe is they. D. gasped back “Well, you know, he has to go faster with that big ring.” to which TLRC muttered back: “For the love of god D: a) TLRC is perfectly aware of that, and b) D. is missing the point, it being that it isn’t that he has to go that fast, it’s that he can!” “Well,” a suitably chastened D. replied, “it’s good for us.”

Away they went, the 22 toothed TLRC and D, following the 34 of DY, who the former would occasionally see silhouetted  against the bright blue sky, track-standing while patiently awaiting his companions until the high ground behind Riley Peak, whence the trio whooshed around behind Laurel to the Boulder Pass nexus.

Here, TLRC, Dallas and Valsetz quadrangle in hand, snooped around for his limestone, leaving navigation to D. TLRC soon realized he’d need an afternoon and a rock hammer and/or shovel to find any real rocks in all the ground cover and alluvium. Loath to keep his companions waiting (TLRC is widely considered to have impeccable manners, having been brought up that way), he returned and described his circumstance. D. suggested a Bobcat might be useful on the next trip.

The next leg was off into the unknown. Having armed the group with a Google Earth image, the better to navigate-by-clearcut, the immediate choice was clear, up the godawful steep road through the giant clearcut above and E of the pass. Struggling up the loose, steep mess, TLRC spotted some white rock spattered about the surface. Dismounting, he climbed up the bank and found rock that clearly did not match any of the prevailing Siletz, Yamhill or gabbroic intrusives. Surely, TLRC had stumbled upon the Rickreal Limestone outcrop lying above Boulder Pass described in one of the 1950’s Oregon Geology publications he had dug up one way or another (just goes to show, TLRC thought, there’s no such thing as too much trivia). Here is what he brought home, the result of his struggles over the last year:

After much jubilation (by TLRC, at any rate), the ride continued and the road worsened.

“Road” heading E above Boulder Pass

Another couple of hundred yards of this nonsense brought the trio to a major (if loose) gravel road, the one D.had pointed out a while before as a possible route, which TLRC dismissed out of hand as not being the “route” since he was determined on Boulder Pass and this “route”. Besides, had they taken D.’s suggestion, not only no hike, no limestone.

Now on the Plateau proper, The Installation was clearly seen

JSS ARSR-4/FPR-130 Facility on Laurel Mtn.

Now navigation was strictly by Google Earth. Since TLRC could not be bothered to put his readers off and on, D. took over and guided them clearcut by clearcut along a series of low-gradient, but high woody-debris roads. It was rare to ride more than 100 feet. Finally they reached the point where the road of last week joined a main road the group had found themselves on. A faint trace led into the woods. “Give it 100 yds?” asked TLRC. His companions agreed and off they carried their bikes. In a short way, a section marker was spotted. After a bit of discussion, they realized that the nail marking their location exactly  coincided with the “road” on the map that they were shooting for. Another few hundred yards and they found the terrible ditch near where D. and TLRC had stopped last week. Back out of the forest on the fast gravel towards home, D. and TLRC were busily congratulating themselves on a Loop Well Closed when DMY observed, “So, if you quit this ride because the road was so bad, why exactly did you come back here the next weekend to find it again?”

Da Don and Sancho.

As diehard fans of the website know, The Logging Road Cyclist likes to ride on the Laurel Mountain massif . He has, in fact long had his eye on a circumnavigation of Laurel Mountain via the prominent plateau, or rim, that surrounds the Mountain proper. On all the maps, there is a pretty clear route around that has, at either end (as visually determined by TLRC himself), really big roads. One was lead to believe then, that the road all the way around was big too. As will be seen, one was wrong.

As a sweetener for this proposed ride, at the far northern end of the loop, where various roads form the nexus at Boulder pass, there is some fine geology to look for. TLRC recently found a wonderful website that contains all the published geological maps in the country. Here, he found the geological map of the Dallas and Valsetz quadrangles, and there, he found that at Boulder Pass, not only is there delineated the long-sought Rickreal Limestone Member of the Yamhill Formation, but a dip-slip fault juxtaposing it, the ubiquitous gabbro of the high peaks and the Siletz Volcanics! Truly a place deserving of some nosing around.

Thus Saturday found TLRC and his stalwart Sancho Panza , Big D., heading off into a day that looked pretty wintery, but still held some possibility for the optimist.

Rather than follow the main 8-7-6, 8-7-6.2 route shown on all the maps, TLRC  (having spied on the maps a road that followed an elegantly curving creek up to a high point on the circumnavigational rim) persuaded D. that this was the Way. In his mind’s eye, TLRC saw a pretty, forested ride, not the actual vicious clearcut that really was there. But there was hope. After a false start, they found the true road and started up the creek. The road had serious decommissioning ditches every 50-100 feet, but TLRC was persuaded (somehow) that once they got into the forest, this nonsense would stop. On and off the bikes they went, and forest or no, the ditches were constant. Of course, after putting in a half an hour or so on this, the pair was too committed to retreat, and so continued up to the final forest wall below the ridge where the road ended in a tangle of saplings, blackberry and downed logs.

Crossing a ditch early on the trip up Windmill Cr.

Reversing the process wasn’t much more fun, but the silliness of the whole thing was keeping D. and TLRC pretty happy. Finally obtaining the main road, off they went,  so exhilarated by the sense of speed that the cold wind and hail was hardly noticed.

View roughly S from the 8-7-6 showing part of the plateau.

Just past the point where the last picture was taken, the “main” road plunged off to the E, while the “correct” road got suddenly a lot smaller and headed off into the woods, which were quite pretty. The road steadily shrank and got worse, with lots of derailleur-grabbing sticks, logs to jump and and logs to walk around.  Finally it minimized itself to an 8-foot wide ditch. Even so, once in the forest, with the winter conditions howling about outside, this was a wonderful place to “ride”. At this point, TLRC and D. agreed they were on the losing end of the deal and probably should cut their losses for the day. Good thing: later GPS analysis showed they were about  1/3 of the way around, with a lot more obscure sections to push through.

Where the 8-7-6 still looks like a highway. Note rhododendrons thriving in the 120 in. of rain per year.

Once again they struggled back through sticks and logs (but at least no ditches) to where sustained riding was possible. They day had turned cold, and back at K-Junction where they stopped to button up for the long descent back to Black Rock, TLRC took a big swig from his bottle and suffered an esophageal ice cream headache, not realizing how cold it actually was, and what that had done to his water. Once he could stand up straight again, off they went, and the rest of the ride passed without incident, except for that the rear brake pad on D.’s (handmade by himself!) bike wore down to metal and sounded like a knife being sharpened on a wheel all the way down.

Sooooo, they will have to go back, next time straight through to Boulder Pass, where  geologizing in moderation can occur, the better to save time to make it all the way around. At least they have a known point to shoot for.

TLRC did come away with a valuable lesson: Don’t use Vibram 5 fingers on rainy, muddy days. They are impossible to put on over wet feet, and if one is trying this as a preliminary to standing up in the mud to finish pulling his Carharts all the way up, it can present a rather unappetizing aspect to one’s companion…

The Logging Road Cyclist wishes that this could pass without comment, but for those, who, unlike TLRC, do not have their fingers on the pulse of shooting’, think: steel railroad track, ricochet.

In his relentless effort to be a good father to his daught…um, dogs, The Logging Road Cyclist took a break from his demanding riding schedule to take Good Dog and Devil Puppy for long walk up McCulloch Peak a couple of weeks ago. They climbed up to the base of the top pitch of the South Ridge trail and gloried in the new, huge clearcut on the adjacent Starker land, you know, the one where the University used to have a sign asking mountain bikers not to use the trail because it went through a “sensitive meadow area”. On the other hand, outcrops of the gabbro that prop up the Peak are now well exposed on the west side of the trail, and the views to the south and west are simply spectacular.

Pausing at the summit to bask in the warm October sun, our trio kept to the trails as much as possible on their descent. This lead eventually to Innuendo, on foot a pleasant stroll.

About 100 feet up from the junction with Uproute and Extendo is a little 2 or 3 foot drop, no big deal. TLRC planted his left foot firmly in a convenient little scoop near the top and was elegantly extending his right foot to a little platform halfway down the drop when BANG, he found himself gasping in pain, stretched out, left lateral recumbent on the hard ground below the drop. His first instinct was to get his glasses which had come off. Found, they had a squashed nosepiece. Next was a personal assessment. TLRC was lying with his left arm tucked tight against his side, curled around to the front, fist to solar plexus. Clearly, his years of intensive Martial Arts training had left residual Ninja skills: Rather than reaching out to break his fall, and his wrist along with it, in a flash he had instinctively protected his delicate left shoulder (careful readers of TLRC will recall that in his left shoulder is a titanium/cobalt steel implant, the result of many careless years of paddling and The Unfortunate Events of ’08-’09).

The dogs, as usual, were snorting around, generally ignoring TLRC, who got up and, first thing checked to see if his shoulder still worked (it did), and where the blood coming down the side of his face was coming from. He strode home, brimming with self recrimination and doubt.

How had this happened to TLRC, that bastion of balance? Could there have been a foot-trapping root, a misjudgment?

A few days later, TRLC had a crescent of  great, rib-bruised pain, the kind where every breath hurts. It extended all the way from his spine around to his solar plexus. He, The Long-Suffering Girlfriend and all the dogs went for a walk, and TLRC steered them all to the scene of The Incident.  There was nothing at all that could have caused TLRC to plummet from this little step, as he proved by gingerly climbing up and down it 4-5 times (an act that he considered showed considerable bravery). TLSG, noting how Devil Puppy was, as usual racing around like an insane thing, pointed out that perhaps she (DP) had smacked into TLRC, knocking him sprawling. Was she being kind?

A detailed, on-site, Post-Incident Analysis revealed that she wasn’t. Had TLRC been responsible for this, i.e. slipped on is own account, he would have landed on his ass, not sprawled face down several feet from the base of the drop. Not to mention the fact that a slip allows for at least a fraction of a second of awareness that it has happened, whereas here, TLRC was standing, then down, with nothing intervening.  While TLRC understands how a disinterested reader might consider this a self-serving, face-saving Analysis done by an interested party, he can live with it.

Thus it occurred that TLRC slept drugged in his recliner for a week, unable to lie down from the pain. Each breath brought a stabbing pain to his left side. Meanwhile, Devil Puppy continued her spoiled, oblivious life….

Meantime, The Good Dog continues to provide comfort and companionship:

Well the site is just over a year old, and a lot of happy times together we have had, eh?

On a sad note Lou Reed passed away the other day.

Good    Bye   Lou and One More……and thanks for inspiring rides in the Forest.

The Logging Road Cyclist would like to apologize to all his loyal fans for the lengthy gap between both posts and new ride descriptions. At the same time, TLRC wants to thank the many dozens of you who have written, some in a high state of anxiety, about the whereabouts of TLRC and if malady, tragedy, or simple boredom had caused him to desert the site. While not caring to delve into the reasons, TLRC will let it suffice to say that a couple of minor, run-of-the-mill orthopedic problems has held TLRC away from his usual pastime. No pastime, no posts.

Not that TLRC has done nothing, far from it. He has had, on the whole, a pretty fun summer. First he drug out the Old Faithful Steed:

Old Faithful Steed

Yes, TLRC has one of these, originally purchased during an earlier period of minor orthopedic restrictions. OFS has seen TLRC through two MOR’s, two shoulder surgeries, and a lot of fun. It is hard to beat a long cruise through the Valley on a beautiful Spring day or a hot Summer’s day on a recumbent. A century without any pain is a remarkable thing. TLRC does it right: Hat under the helmet, floppy shorts and 2000SPF button-down collar shirt, vintage 70’s style Vuarnet’s (blocking 100% UV and 80% visible, special order, from a high-end store in Palo Alto in the early ’80s). He looks like any number of over-the-hill Corvallis recumbent riders.

It is amazing how many roadies simply ignore even the friendliest of waves from a recumbent rider. One is simply beneath notice for The Lords of The Roads. Sort of like when a gentleman of a Certain Age encounters a young hottie. She sees some uninteresting geeze like a (non-lecherous) friend of her father, or simply a translucent figure, who, like a bathroom window is sort of seen through; there, but not so much so as to really bear notice.

Some good hiking was done out East with The Long Suffering Girlfriend and Devil Puppy, including the first known ascent of Strawberry Peak by a show-grade English Springer Spaniel:

Devil Puppy sitting on summit andesite, Strawberry Peak (9042′).
Canyon Mountain with it’s famous complete ophiolite sequence in the background.

Then there was the solo Rogue River Trail hike TLRC undertook, where, besides a couple bears stirred up, he encountered Mr. Snake eating lunch:

Mr. Snake at lunch. Note tail of Mr. Mouse, whom Mr. Snake is consuming, and Mr. Snake’s rattling tail.

TLRC also experimented with ultralight backpacking, in which one does things like using a “multipurpose poncho”!, i.e., when it is raining (which it did) and one wants to get warm and dry, one removes the poncho that is being worn as protection from the “elements”, and then stands around in the “elements” while setting it up as a tarp to wriggle beneath to get out of said “elements”. Does anyone besides TLRC see the flaw in this plan?

“Is that a real poncho, or a Sears poncho?” A damp morning at Solitude Bar, Rogue River.

Enough of the summer camp report and back to business.

Back in “the day”, before the Unfortunate Events of 2008 (the ones involving a failed left shoulder SLAP surgery, and the subsequent repair, comprising a titanium rod with a stainless steel mushroom cap jammed into the upper end of The Logging Road Cyclist’s humerus),  TLRC was a pretty spiffy (if quaint) whitewater kayaker, and a mediocre (if enthusiastic) mountain biker. The latter activity thus resulted in lots of spills and thrills. The former, which TLRC had been pursing since the age of eighteen, was correspondingly more sedate, since, through long practice, he was in better control of himself.

UE2008 precipitated a major change in TLRC’s lifestyle. Orthopedic surgeons strongly hinted that if boating was to be done, it must be done in a sedate, stately  manner. TLRC was not a sedate and stately boater: his joy was to work the river for every ounce of fun to be had. Ultimately he decided just to quit. The prospect of further shoulder damage while not having a lot of fun was more than he could bear.  Mountain biking too, seemed a poor choice, given how TLRC took some pretty good tumbles trying various fall-line routes out in the forest, and some close calls trying to get past other trail obstacles. Poof! The Superlight was put on the auction block and quickly sold. The trusty DeSalvo came on line as the ride of choice. TLRC’s style of riding summarized by the website’s motto, “personalis augmentum per miseriam electiva“, became a substitute of sorts for the riverine adventures of earlier years.

In retrospect, this turn to logging road riding seems atavistic. In his far distant youth, TLRC’s parents chose to send him to Catholic school. TLRC is ambivalent about their decision. While the 3R’s were pounded into him by intimidating nuns, friendly yet calmly threatening clergy and God, with the parents rooting them all on from the sidelines, a lot of other residual “baggage,” as the pop-psy folks say, was left in the TLRC psyche as well. The 3R’s proved immensely useful in later life. The other stuff, well….

Consider personalis augmentum per miseriam electiva. How stupid is that, really? Does one really grow through misery? The fact is that every day during his impressionable early years, TLRC was told that any suffering at all should be “offered up for grace”, i.e. put into sort of a karma bank that could be called upon when the chips were down, like when you died unexpectedly without confessing your sins, or just in case you needed a leg up with old God up there for whatever reason. TLRC grew up being told by every adult in authority that, basically, to get ahead, you had to suffer. Why shouldn’t personalis augmentum per miseriam electiva be true?

Indulge TLRC in a heuristic analysis. Let M(t) be the amount of suffering, or misery one has accumulated during one’s life up to age t. Since we all die, there is some point (death) at which misery will stop being accumulated. Thus, we will say that M(t) is a number between 0 and 100%. Note that besides the usual amount of misery that accrues in any life, one is also as free as a bird to add as much misery to the total as desired. This assumes that M(0)=0, rather a tricky point, but for the purposes of this discussion we will assume that everyone gets baptized and this effectively starts “the clock” at 0 ( all you New Atheists out there just shut up, TLRC is trying to keep this simple).

Now the goal is, for the religious, to get to heaven, and for everyone else to attain Nibbanha , or at least be happy. TLRC will refer to either state as attaining enlightenment. The trick is to get qualified for heaven, or get to  Nibbanha (depending on your school of thought) before you die. So how can this happen?

According to the nuns et al. we might postulate a function E, the enlightenment function, that tells us how far towards enlightenment we are, given a present cumulative misery, M(t). They would tell us (and here is the critical assumption) that this function is monotonically increasing, that is, for each increment of misery, one creeps a little closer to enlightenment. Furthermore, TLRC would like to postulate that each individual has a specific function: E[M(t):I], where E and M are as before, and the parameter I indexes which specific individual is under consideration. We also demand that the range of E is the interval [0,1], where 0 is no enlightenment and 1 is enlightened, so we may refer to E as the fractional enlightenment. 

To clarify these concepts, consider the following figure:

Here, TLRC has plotted E[M;I]  for three individuals (for present purposes the dependence of M, and hence, E on t has been dropped). Look at Mr. Green. He labors away at life, each increment of suffering adding exactly  the same amount to his fractional enlightenment. He gets closer with each of life’s little disappointments, but he isn’t going to make it, is he? You see, here E is a linear function of M, E=aM, say, and the slope, a,  is just too small for Mr Green. He needs to do something to increase a, say quit drinking, smoking or gambling, maybe do something nice for someone or stop his criminal career, or he’s sunk.

Now look at Ms. Blue. She started out slow, didn’t she? Maybe a little wild in high school, or at OSU? But then something changed. Maybe she took a yoga class, or started working at REI and fell  in love with the out of doors. At any rate, as her life goes on, each little increment of misery adds more and more towards her enlightenment, faster and fast. She’s gonna make it, no doubt.

Finally, a sad case, Mr. Red. He started out gangbusters. Every time he was miserable he took a big leap forward, enlightenment-wise. Just look at how steep that curve is! But then something happened. Somewhere around halfway through his life’s quotient of misery, progress stopped. It seemed like no matter how much he suffered, nothing improved. He seems destined to accumulate the other half of the misery that is surely coming his way, and have to settle with 2/3 enlightenment. Even if Mr. Red massively increases the total misery in his life, say through engaging in elective misery, he’s stuck.

Readers often ask:”TLRC, what do you think about while you’re endlessly grinding away in freezing wet or blazing hot weather, always climbing and grinding away, only to get back to where you started?” TLRC has always thought this to be a very pertinent and perceptive question whose answer is: This kind of stuff. More to the point, why is it that TLRC, generally agreed to be a fairly sensible (not to say insightful) individual actually enjoys doing this sort of thing (ie. logging road cycling) anyway? He now feels near to understanding. TLRC was raised to enjoy making himself miserable. In this context, “enjoy” means “experiencing a spurious sensation of enjoyment  because TLRC is  actually miserable and that is good”, cf. the preceding analysis, and the monotonicity of E.

Another common question is:”TLRC, you seem to spend a lot of time doing rides whose whole point is, well, not to be unkind, mostly a lot of work, not to say electively miserable. Surely you must have experienced an awesome amount of personal growth by now?” This is a touchy point for TLRC. Certainly he has indulged himself in a massive amount of elective misery, recently and hitherto. Even so, TLRC, who is scrupulously honest with himself, has to admit that he isn’t as high on the fractional enlightenment  as might be wished, especially since he is “of a certain age” as they say, which TLRC generally interprets to mean the time when one has forgotten how long ago he started receiving those unsolicited AARP cards in the mail. He suspects he might be a Mr. Red, and no matter how much misery he adds, he won’t get much farther up the old y-axis.

On the other hand, there is a sort of freedom available to Mr. Reds that others don’t enjoy. Why suffer it it’s not going to get you anywhere? They never talked about that at St. Elizabeth’s or St. Rose’s, did they now? Might as well party down, eh?

Thus it is that these and related contemplations coincided with the Sugarloaf Mtn. and latest Prairie Mtn. rides. Not to disparage them, but slogging up a cleared off drainage in the rain, and clawing one’s way up 4 miles of loose, big rock, again in the rain, when it’s supposed to start being like summer, and this has been going on all winter (as usual)…, well, TLRC hates it when he starts to sound hysterical, but can’t something just be fun?

Well, as it happens, yes: A new El Mariachi on the Alpine Trail.

TLRC won’t add to the volumes online about this ride except to say one climbs about 3500′ in 15 miles or so (about 13 of which is road) and then bombs (mostly) down for about 12 miles of single track.  A couple of views:

Three Sisters and Bachelor from the climb up the 1910 Road.

Sourgrass Meadow.

Taking care of his various ailments, TLRC rode the single track slowly and cautiously, walking the tricky bits. He was so glad to be back that it didn’t even bother him when a 12-year old used a front wheelie to pivot around a hairpin turn that he (TLRC) had just stumped around! Happy happy!

The Logging Road Cyclist has not been feeling quite his usual perky self lately, so he thought he’d try some nutrition and riding tips out locally. What better ride than that vicious little Mac-Dunn Misery Whip? Well, this time it was a spectacular day, and the ride wasn’t quite so miserable. TLRC even tried out a caffeine depth charge he devised: 1 heaping tsp  of Megdalia D’Oro instant espresso, same quantity instant hot chololate mix. Put into a very small Nalgene bottle. When required (like when eating more food stops working) add a small amount of water, shake and quaff. Wow! Works like a champ, except after the ride, when The Long Suffering Girlfriend gets sick of cranky chatter…..

Also the Sugarloaf Mountain ride in the Laurel Mountain Massif has been logged and posted.

Even more exciting than all of this: TLRC has gone interstate!

Check out “Pontifications” for a pic of the new Pope, and some TLRC thoughts on staying safe!

Weekend before last, The Logging Road Cyclist went up and completed the ride up to Condenser Peak. Last Friday, on a spectacular warm Spring day, he went out to Five Rivers to do a loop-de-loop he had spied on the Siuslaw Forest map. TLRC intended to park on the Cape Perpetua road a mile or so west of Madera’s grave at the 58-37 junction, and then head down Cummins Ridge to Tenmile Cr, go back up Tenmile Cr. to the 58, head south and loop down the ridge north of Big Cr to Hwy 101, thence back up Big Cr to the 58 and back to the car. He only got the first loop done, and a bit of exploring.

The Cummins Ridge-Tenmile Cr. loop by itself is one of the best Coast Range rides, in TLRC’s humble opinion. Going down Cummins Ridge, one skirts the Cummins Cr. Wilderness. Between the trees, there are impressive views of untouched forest in the wilderness area. TLRC has no pictures to show, since none of the views would have made a good shot because of all the trees. Get the picture? Bad views=trees=no clear cuts. A good thing, right? Go see it yourself!

The ride up Tenmile is quite pretty with some bottom areas with huge old maples. Tenmile itself is a surprisingly large creek, and if TLRC was still in that phase of his life, he’d go back next winter and paddle it.

By the time he got up to the 58 at the top of the Tenmile Cr. road  (the 56), TLRC knew he was running short of time and wouldn’t be able to complete both loops. As a consolation, he rode down to the start of the Big Cr. ridge road (the 1055 on the Forest map), just to find it, and since he was a bit bewildered, he wandered around a bit on the north side of Saddle Mtn, just looking for something…

Back at the car, TLRC had gone about 35 miles and 5000 ft, not a trivial ride. No wonder he felt tired- he had pushed a lot of it in his middle ring, thinking there wasn’t much climbing going on!