It’s always a good day to ride up to Ripplebrook Ranger Station
Last month, one of my friends volunteered to help staff the Brewpub populaire and when I caught up with her at the end of the loop I suggested that she ride Sellwood-Birkenfeld-Sellwood with me the following weekend so we could get in some companionable miles before the spring 200 and the flèche. She thought this was a splendid idea, so we roped her stupidly fast notofficiallyaboyfriend and another friend to ride the loop with us. Alas, at the last minute she came down sick and the friend got swamped with work, so I spent most of the day trying frantically to stick to a much faster wheel, and which ended up with staggering back home feeling as if I’d been whacked repeatedly by a mallet after the climb up to Skyline road.
A couple of weeks later, while we were riding the flèche (at around 3:30am, when we were chatting to keep ourselves from falling asleep) she and I scheduled a rain date for the ride, but this time on a somewhat flatter loop because the flèche looked like it might have too many soul-nibbling climbs for either of us to want to repeat the next weekend. So we arranged to fill the gap between the flèche and the spring 300 by riding my Portland-Ripplebrook-Portland loop, which seems to be about as flat as I can make a loop these days. Once again, the notofficiallyaboyfriend was invited along, but this time no illnesses struck anyone down so everybody invited actually showed up.
The weather was forecast to be pretty nice, but when I woke up in the morning it was still pretty cold (36°F) and overcast. So instead of bringing a pair of light gloves I brought along my midweight wool ones and wore a pair of my thicker and more sedate stripy socks, which may have been practical, but did not have nearly the optical impact of my lighter stockings.
After a few minutes of doing the necessary paperwork, we got onto our bicycles and headed out towards the Springwater Trail. It was just a little after 7am, so the streets were pretty much empty as we wound our way through inner NE/SE Portland, and, aside from a few early morning joggers and riders coming into town, so was the trail.
It was sunny in town, but there was still a bank of clouds piled up next to the Cascades, so as we headed east the clouds built up above us and made the morning fairly dark and gloomy. We tried to stop at Linneman Junction to use the toilets in the depot there, but for some reason the city of Gresham has taken to locking those toilets up at night, so we had to go all the way out to the control in Boring to use the facilities there.
Everyone else was moving slowly, but I was feeling a little bit extra speedy, so I spent a good deal of the morning zooming out ahead of the two of them. I gapped them by a fairly good distance dropping down Amisegger Road (the handlebars on the mlcm are working their way lower as I get more flexible, and they’ve finally gotten down to the level where I can get into something resembling an aero tuck) and so was able to make it about half of the way up the Judd Road ramp before being overrun. And then, after plunging down the cliff-face on Van Curren Road, I managed to gap them coming up out of the Eagle Creek basin and sailed all the way into Estacada before they caught up to me.
We didn’t bother to stop in Estacada, but continued onto OR 224 and headed south into the mountains. It was still cloudy when we jumped off OR 224 and took Faraday Road along the PG&E reservoirs, but the clouds had started to break up before we’d gone another 10 miles up the Clackamas and we did the majority of the rest of the ride under sunny and increasingly warm skies.
The second big ramp (the one up to Ripplebrook proper) saw, as expected, me being dropped by the both of them, but not embarrassingly so. And then we shot along the ledge the last two miles up to the Ripplebrook Ranger Station, where we paused to refill our water bottles, get some coffee (well, I got some coffee; I’m not nearly as picky about coffee as any of my friends are) and had a brief snack before heading back north.
The wind had picked up a bit and was blowing at ~10mph up into the mountains, but that didn’t stop us from going about 18mph into the teeth of it while we chatted and took pictures of the scenery and each other. And almost before we knew it we were first back on Faraday Road and then popping out of the gorge into the flat(ter) lands north of Estacada.
As we approached Barton, the idea of bathroom breaks and/or a little something started wandering through our minds, so we stopped at the Barton store for a while to get a few goodies and use their (apparently very nice; I didn’t use them, but Asta said very nice things about the new interior bathrooms that took the place of the porta-potty that used to be there) facilities.
We spent about half an hour there (enough time for our legs to start freezing up on us, whoops) but still made it out of the store and across the Bakers Ferry bridge before the 8 hour mark. And then we were on increasingly familiar ground, so the miles just flew by as we sailed towards the penultimate control at Oregon City. There was a little bit of traffic on Bakers Ferry Road, Springwater Road, and Clackamas River Road, but not nearly as much as I’d seen on afternoon returns in the past, so I could just open up and fly along without worrying about needing to squeeze myself up next to the edge of the shoulderless road as I went.
We made it into Oregon City (mp 112) with 8h40 minutes on the clock, so that gave us 80 minutes to go 13.5(ish) miles to do a <10h loop (I managed to briefly scare everyone by saying “well, we’ve got 80 minutes to finish the loop now” without first qualifying it with “if we’re going to do the loop in less than 10 hours …”) And then it was an increasingly faster run up to Portland; I started to fade a little bit on River Road (there’s one steepish ramp at the southern edge of Milwaukie where I fell about 100 feet behind Theo and Asta, who were moving along in a tight fast pack) but managed to keep up with them even after reaching Portland proper and the mass of stoplights on 12th Ave between Powell and Burnside (we were stopped at every single stoplight there, so it was a festival of everyone zooming away from the stop, me grinding away and slowly catching up, only to then be stopped by the next stoplight. Ugh. I was very happy when the light at Couch didn’t stop us and I was able to, for the last time of the day, overrun them and make it into the ultimate control at 14:51, approximately 2 seconds ahead of them :-)
And then, to reward ourselves for a loop well done, we retired to the Los Gorditos at Division & 12th (I’ve been by there approximately 500 times, but never been into the restaurant until yesterday) to have a little snack and hang out for a while before we needed to go our separate ways.
It was only then that I realized that I’d gotten my first sunburn of the year during the return trip from Ripplebrook. I think I need to root around in the basement and see if I have a set of thin full-finger gloves I can hack the fingers off, so I can keep the backs of my hands unfried while not having to deal with the horrible padding that most bicycling gloves have in them.
We did the loop in 9h51 minutes (actually a a bit less, because we didn’t pull out of the starting control until a couple of minutes after 7am), and the only thing I noticed going wrong, despite this being the third-fastest I’d ever finished a ~200k loop, was the balls of my feet cramping up every time I got off the bicycle in the last third of the loop. My existing shoes are starting to disintegrate, so for the replacements I will probably experiment with more traditional clipless bicycle shoes to see if that solves the problem of more foot stress when moving faster.
For what it’s worth, all of the pictures I took can be found on Flickr.