Project for the year
My plan is to ride two permanent SRs this year (maybe 3, but it I did that I’d have to duplicate some routes):
| (P)SR# | Routes |
|---|---|
| 1 | One Big Hill (200k), Scio-Woodburn (300k, not submitted yet), Nestucca/Nestucca (400k, not submitted), Grawp! (700k) |
| 2 | P-R-P (200k), High Rock 300 (300k), Hot Springs-Covered Bridges (400k), Portland-Portland-Portland (600k) – this one includes three alpine loops, so it’s not going to happen until the passes clear (May? June?) |
I can probably do #2 solo – none of those loops end up with an out-of-town overnight (and one of the hard things about Portland-Portland-Portland is that my overnight control is at my house, which will make it really hard to drag myself back onto the bicycle for the 240k loop up to Birkenfeld after however much time I’ve got free for a nap) – but will most likely need to rope some suckers in for #1 (at least the 400 and 700 parts of it.)
If I was going to do a third one, I think I’d do something like Sellwood-Birkenfeld-Sellwood, Sellwood to Hood & Back, Nestucca/Nestucca again, and maybe Kevin Brightbill’s threatened alpine 600k with 10km of climbing (I’ve routed one, too, but it’s 600k on alpine forest roads with /no/ services, so might not be a particularly good plan without a SPOT transmitter and an emergency support team on motorcycles (which would, of course, dnf me on the spot if I called for them, but in the grand scheme of things a brevet-aborting rescue mission is better than a brevet-aborting death)) or another run at Portland-Portland-Portland.
I’d like to ride a 1000/1200 this year, too, but I don’t know if it’s even slightly possible to carve out the 4 (for a Portland-based permanent loop, like the Olympic Peninsula Death March) or 6 (for basically anything else, assuming that I could get into a 1/1.2 Mm randonnée based on riding the fuck out of my bicycle on permanents) days necessary to do such a thing (yes, yes, if I could do 60-70% times on a 1200 it would only take me 2.5 days, but that’s not going to happen in this lifetime – maintaining a 21km/h brevet average for longer than two days seems, um, unlikely at this point in my life) so I’ll not even put it into consideration.
But it’d be lovely to ride Kevin’s Grawp! again, and lovelier still to ride it in the summer so that my forward progress would not be slowed by hail, sideways rain, and freezing downpours on 1500 foot descents.