Yes, I’m going to have to try to make this into a permanent
I prerode the Sellwood-Devil’s Backbone populaire today, and aside from tiny details like the autogenerated cue sheet being hilariously wrong in a couple of places (and there being a couple of honkingly vertical ramps at about mp 18) it’s a lovely almost-direct route from home to Devil’s Backbone and back (“back” meaning “via Voodoo Too” for people who don’t get their donuts from Joe’s.) If I plunk an open control in Sandy, one in Pleasant Home (there’s a convenience store and a bar there,) and one in the ballpark of Voodoo Too, then set up an info control out at the end of the loop on Devil’s Backbone that will give a fairly well serviced, but climby enough to satisfy the suicidal, short loop for an afternoon’s riding.
I, however, stretched the loop out to the east end of Marmot, which converted the whole loop from a 65 mile one to 80 miles, including a couple of miles of climbing up the east side of Devil’s Backbone (much more doable in the 30" gear I’ve got on the mlcm now, but still unpleasant enough to remember for a while.) It ended up being exactly 7 hours to ride 129.5 km, which, even though it’s not by any means fast is at least fast enough to keep within brevet minimums.
Oddly, there were very few other bicyclists out after I got away from the Portland Metro area; I ran into one of the framebuilders who frequents Tarckbike while I was climbing Marmot (we chatted for a while until we reached the last uphill pitch, and then he drifted ahead of me, never to be seen again) and three riders went by downhill while I was winding uphill out of the Sandy River gorge, but that was it. Odd, for such a sunny warm day.
And I wasted a lot of time taking pictures of the newly scenic parts of the loop, too.