Avoiding that pesky ride to the start of the brevet (300km edition)
The only problem with riding a 300k brevet or permanent in this neck of the woods is that even the ones that allegedly start in Portland don’t start in Portland. Now, there’s something to be said for starting in Sandy, Newberg, Wilsonville, or Forest Grove – if you start way out at the edge of the (thankfully UGB-limited) suburban sprawl there’s not much sprawl you have to go through before you fall off the edge of the city and into the country. But there are several things against starting way out near the edge of the UGB.
- Services are more limited than they are in the city. If, for example, a Forest Grove brevet is scheduled at the same time as Pacific University holds its graduation, the limited number of hotel rooms out there get hoovered up just like that, which means that…
- it’s a fairly long haul, at an ung-dly hour of the morning, from Portland proper out to the start of the loop. And if the ride starts at 6am, you (and by “you”, I mean “me” – the fast boys can probably crank out the 25.5 miles from Sellwood to Forest Grove in a hour and 15 minutes. But I’m not one of them) need to get on the road by 4am if you want to get there with enough time to catch your breath before the ride starts. And if you (and by “you”, I mean “me” – I am not one of those randonneuring deities who laughs at snow+rain+hail+sleet, but instead am a delicate and whiny flower when it comes to doing ferry moves in the rain) wake up at 3:30am and hear the pitter-patter of rain on your roof, it tends to make the whole business of starting much more difficult.
So, to solve that problem, I should just make a ride that starts 100 meters away from my front door. The UGB200k.bis solves that problem for 200km, and this loop will (hopefully after I’ve done a checkride to verify that it’s all passible) solve that problem for 300km.
I blame Michael Wolfe for this one. His Barlow Trail 300km was an extraordinarily pleasant ride from Sandy to Maupin and (allegedly; I blew up at Government Camp, and thus missed a nice middle of the night plunge down the west side of Mount Hood) back, but it started in Sandy, which is 25 miles away from my front door.
Well, that’s easy enough to fix, if you don’t mind transiting a city as part of your R300.
You start at Milwaukie & Bybee, then proceed south (via Milwaukie, River Road, various Oregon City streets, and Central Point Road) down to New Era and Canby, then across to Estacada via various backroads (and a little bit of OR211), where, after stocking up in preparation for 90 uphill miles without any services, you wind up OR224 to the end of the highway just east of Ripplebrook, where you switch onto forest service roads to climb up and up the mountain to Timothy Lake, then Clackamas Lake (or at least the ranger station), then along Oregon Skyline Road to NFD 48, which takes you up to OR35 (and Barlow Pass), US26, and a late lunch (if you’re fast)/dinnertime control in Government Camp, followed by a plunge down from the mountain to Sandy, where you jump onto Bluff Road and proceed along various sideroads into Troutdale, where McMenemin’s Edgefield and the end of this sentence are encountered. And after Edgefield, it’s back into the city, crossing to the southside of Gresham, hopping briefly onto the Springwater Trail, then taking Foster Road and Woodstock back into Sellwood, where the ride comes to an end just in time for bed.
I figure that it would take me about 12 hours to get up to the Government Camp, then 6 hours to get back. Though I’ll probably replace the 48-tooth crankring on the MLCM with a 46-toothed one to give me a little bit more breathing room on the more tedious parts of NFD57.
(And if I wanted to make this into a 400, I could just add a branch down to Maupin or Hood River. Maupin would be nicer in the fall, but Hood River would be nicer in the summer. But that’s a bridge I will burn later.)