Lazy morning. Up at 8:00am, breakfast and out the door about 9:00am. Drive to Snoqualmie Pass is about 45 minutes. There was and annular solar eclipse happening as we drove. Tabitha had it live on her phone. In our area it was a partial eclipse and we could see the sun through the broken clouds enough to see a big chunk taken out of it by the moon.
It took us a little bit of exploring to find the Hyak parking lot for the trail. We saddled up the bikes, said goodbye to Tabitha and rode west to the Snoqualmie Tunnel. It is 2.25 miles long!! We rode to the western terminus, then turned around and rode back. Headlamps are a must as it is totally dark in the tunnel. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but at 2.25 miles distant it offers no lighting in the immediate area around the bikes.
Once back on the east side we immediately started down the trail. It is slightly downhill, about 1% grade, but the surface is loose rock and gravel. This creates a lot of friction so coasting is not at all possible. You have to peddle the bike every foot of the way. Unfortunately, the route parallels Interstate 90 so there is a constant background roar of traffic, but it is not too bad. The trail starts out in the trees but as you pass Easton and then get to Cle Elum the trees begin to thin out. It is amazing that they were able to survey a route that is continuously uphill at about 1 to 2 % all the way from Ellensburg to Snoqualmie Tunnel. It weaves around hills and generally follows the Yakima River the whole way.
We skipped stopping in Easton. We stopped there when we did this ride in 2020 but found the town depressing with few services. We rode on to Cle Elum. We arrived about 2:00pm and were both very hungry, having held off eating lunch until we arrived. We rode about 1 mile off route into the town and had lunch at “Stella’s”. Sandwich, salad and a pumpkin, chocolate chip, coconut muffin to die for.
We rode back to the trail and the final 7 miles east of town to the Ponderosa Campground, accessible only by this trail. There were two other tents there when we arrived about 4:30pm. We found the easterly most tent site still available. I took our water bottles to the river and filled them, then purified the water with Aqua Mira, after which we set up the tent. We did my Yoga routine. This helped a lot because we were both fatiqued from 40 miles of continuous peddling over nearly 7 hours. We were both pretty stuffed from the late lunch, but we enjoyed our pumpkin muffin. I cooked up a mountain house dinner, but Andy said he was good. It started to rain, so we crawled into the tent and relaxed on our inflatable pads, reading the news and emails and listening to the rain hit the tarp. We watched a episode of Stranger Things, season 4 and then flipped off the phones and headlamps and went to sleep about 9:30pm.
No comments:
Post a Comment