There are, I’m sure, nice things to say about headwinds, but I don’t know what they’d be
I rode the Codename:UGB210 loop today, and discovered that if you get headwinds for approximately 70% of the loop (coincidentally the 70% that is moderately flat) it does horrible things to your loop timing. 131 miles (some bonus miles because I was using a untweaked bikeroutetoaster cuesheet, and bikeroutetoaster automatic cuesheets are terrible) in 12h01 (10 hours moving, 2 hours stopped at various coffee shops, bars, or grocery stores while we (Ed Groth rode – on his fixed-gear Bianchi – along with me) wedged food into our gullets so we could proceed to the next control without collapsing from food exhaustion.
The high points of the ride include
- Clackamas River Road and Bakers Ferry Road are much more scenic than the Springwater Trail (though I may be biased from riding on the Springwater Trail approximately 1000 times in the last 3.5 years.)
- If you go south of Upper Highland Road, Ridge Road goes closely by Highland Butte, which is one of the approximately 90 volcanos in the Boring Lava Field, and enough of the woodlands around it have been cleared so you can get nice views as you sail on by.
- Buckner Creek road is much easier to navigate from east to west than it is from west to east. (It is hideously chopped up on the descent down into the Buckner Creek watershed (I never noticed this going west to east, because 3mph is not fast enough to make the contents of your handlebar bag want to try and hurl themselves to the ground) so I can’t just take my hands off the brakes and let gravity have it’s rough way with me, though :-( )
- Sutton Road in Newberg is gravel!
- There’s a flock of Ibex at a farm along Flett Road.
- If you ignore the increasingly steep grades on Helvetia Road, going north from Cornelius to North Plains, then winding your way east towards Old Cornelius Pass Road, makes a much nicer loop than Evergreen Road.
- Saltzman Road is really nice if you ride through it when it’s still light. And it’s gravel as well.
The low points of the ride include
- Headwinds from Canby to the junction of Ribbon Ridge Road and North Valley Road
- Headwinds from the junction of Ribbon Ridge Road and North Valley Road to the turn onto Geiger Road
- Headwinds from Cornelius to North Plains
- Headwinds from North Plains to Old Cornelius Pass Road
- And the sneaking suspicion that the spiffy new Sram Apex cranks on the MLCM are too wide (147mm tread vs. 140mm on the old Sugino crankset that I replaced) and I may have to swap the cranks/bottom bracket from the Trek to the MLCM and visa-versa.
I’m going to have to tweak the loop a little bit before submitting it to RUSA as a permanent; I’m not getting rid of the gravel sections, of course, but I’m going to need to arrange a descent down Germantown Road as an alternative approach to Portland for riders who don’t make it to Skyline Blvd until dusk. And I’m going to make the ride into Portland be via St. Helens Road instead of crossing over to the waterfront and taking Front Ave through the industrial park there (because there’s a metric buttload of traffic along highway 30 and it’s much easier to turn right onto St. Helens instead of left onto Kittridge.)
I didn’t get very many pictures, alas, but here are the ones I took. And now I will eat a snack and hope that I will be able to move in the morning.