The second choice
My grand plan for today was that I would wake up early in the morning, ride out to Ripplebrook, and figure out a good way to add the 4 miles I’d need to make it into an actual 200k loop. Unfortunately, I had trouble sleeping last night, and the alarm clock ended up magically being reset to 9am, and then I staggered around like a clubbed ox for the next three hours before heading out the door.
Leaving at noon is not a particularly good plan for riding a R200 if the idea is to get home before the sun sets. So I needed to do something else, and I realized that it had been a month since I last visited Zigzag. It’s 100 miles instead of 124, so it should be easier to do and get back before the sun went down, right?
Well, I did get back juuuuust barely before the sun went down, because the one feature of riding up to Zigzag that slows me way down is the tiny topological feature known as Devil’s Backbone, which tops out at over 1500 feet after 800 or so feet of climbing on Marmot Road. And if you run out of spare calories going up that ramp, it’s even slower (I hit one steep pitch and my speed dropped to nil. I stopped, took a swig of water, hopped back on the bike, and my speed dropped to nil again after about 75 feet, even though the grade had moderated considerably in that distance. A longish pause to cram mango slices down my gullet had amazing restorative powers, though not enough to get my climbing speed up to my traditional slug-like creep.)
The route is pretty simple; Springwater Trail out to Rugg Road, then Stone Ave out to Orient, then Bluff Road out to Pleasant Home, then south to Orient (again), east along Kelso Road to Bluff Road (again) and into Sandy and the traditional lengthy pause for soda and a dozen donuts (these days the staff at Joe’s Donuts sees me arrive outside and start loading up the dozen before I even get into the door) before plunging down Ten Eyck into the gorge, and then clawing my way up Marmot to the Barlow Road, and then into Zigzag. And for the return I detour off on Shipley for a rattly chipseal descent down to the area of Roslyn Fen, onward to Dodge Park where I can stop to refill water bottles, then up Lusted to Dodge Park Blvd, Orient, Burnside, Market/Mill/Harrison, and taking the Springwater Trail on a circuitous loop back into Sellwood which places me back at my front door almost exactly 100 miles (and 9 hours, ugh) after I staggered out the door at the crack of noon.
A little more than a mile of climbing (5400-ish feet), including some stupidly relentless sections of Marmot Road. Climbing is a lot easier when I go down to the bottom end of the alpine ring (34:32, which means I can s-l-o-w-l-y work my way up 20% pitches without needing to stand up and push) but it takes effing forever to work my way up a ramp when I don’t have the energy to push myself.
So why do I do this? The donuts are a big part of it, but being able to work my way towards Mount Hood and see the peak growing larger and more solid every step of the way (at least until I drop down into the Sandy River gorge, which does a very good job of hiding the local stratovolcano) is not to be sneered at, particularly on a day like today when the only clouds in the sky were a line of hazy heat clouds above the Columbia River gorge. (And I’m also sticking to the delusion that if I climb a lot of mountains I might be able to keep up with my randonneuring friends who can climb steep ramps approximately twice as fast as I can.)
And it’s really pretty once you get on the unpopulated side of the urban growth boundary, and very quiet. In Portland there are the usual swarms of bicyclists, but once I got past Orient I didn’t see anyone except for a fellow in a Team Beer jersey up on Marmot Road just this side of the signpost and a fit young couple who were riding their heavily loaded touring bikes up and down the Barlow Road (I presume as practice for a somewhat more ambitious loop; I encountered them at the west end of the Barlow Road when I was stopping to use a pit toilet just as they were leaving, and again at the east end when they were turning around and I was zipping on by to get into Zigzag for a little something before heading back into town.) But other than those three, the only road bikes I saw out there were dozens and dozens of motorcycles (there were a considerable collection of Mountain Bikes at the lower end of the Sandy Ridge road, but they were being loaded into cars) and one fellow crossing 26 on a BMX bike in Zigzag. Maybe all the long-distance bikey people are in Bend for some cyclocross event this weekend?