So we left off at Aunt Michelle's in Keizer. Cory had tuned our bikes and had also told us about a side route around 22 that would take us through little towns on little town roads like Aumsville, and Stayton, Lyons, Mill City, Mehama, and Gates. We went past the state penitentiary, past the state corrections institute, past the safety training academy, past the animal recovery center, etc...We were on the back roads the good part of the morning enjoying little traffic and nice scenery. We stopped off at the house of a retired fire captain along the way, he had a little pack of Alaska Malamutes that I told Emily in my very strong man conviction, "those are friggin wild wolves, I promise." The captain assured us they were not in fact wild but would nip us, almost for sure. He told us stories about having his road sled rippin down these back country roads with 9 dogs leading the way...pretty cool, but he wouldn't rent us one for the trip, (bummer huh?) He brought out the Oregon recreation map and showed us the big hills coming up, "yeah, this one's a goodie, a real gut buster." We thanked him for his time and story and left him alone with his wild wolves.
hmmm... that was Kiel's input but now he is off fixing my tire (yep... blew out a new tire the other day... you wouldn't believe how well we are going to know each and every bike mechanic from here until Iowa...)
After visiting the captain with the wolves we were back on the road and feeling pretty good. We had a goal of making it to Detroit, OR so we tried to keep a pretty steady cruise. It felt great to be on the back roads -- in the silence of the country and able to check out the scenes. It's farm country out here... one might have thought we had already made it to Iowa (in fact we were jumping the borders of Linn and Marion County... for those of you who know my Iowa home you know that it is in Marion, Iowa which is in Linn County... how serendipitous). Reality hit though when we started to hit the hills. Mountains mocking us in the distance. This was not the Iowa I knew.
The towns we cruised through were tiny and run down... there was one town in particular that felt strangely like some of the towns we had visited during our trip to Peru (maybe even a little more run down than that)... everything was shut down and boarded up. We were definitely the only tourists within miles. People would stare us down and sometimes ask us questions and let out a little chuckle if they elicited the information that we are headed to Iowa. But everyone has been friendly and no one has thrown bottles at us from their moving vehicles... this is actually something that we have been warned of.
On our new little bike map there are these symbols that help us figure out when we are going to hit big hills (anywhere from one to three little triangles; one being the easiest big hill). We knew that we were in for a "gut buster", the captain had told us and our map agreed. And when that hill came, it really delivered. It was not impossible, we never walked our bikes, but upon reaching the top our legs were like jello and it was challenging to suppress the yawns. Reaching the top deserved a celebration, which we did for about 10 seconds as we looked down at where we started from the top of a dam. Then we enjoyed the real celebratory feeling of coasting downhill for awhile. The rest of the ride into Detroit Lake State Park was good and almost quick enough.
Rolling into a big campground like Detroit Lake we attract a lot of attention. Some folks mentioned that they had seen us biking during the day and others were just amazed by our gear and our plans. The night went by quickly with us just going through the motions of feeding and resting and housing ourselves. We loved up some warm food that we cooked on our great little penny stove (a stove created out of a pop can -- or in our case a Pabst blue ribbon can) and crawled into bed pretty quickly.
Day Three : 60 + miles and about 1000 ft. elevation
Keizer, OR to Detroit Lake State Park
So if we thought the hills into Detroit Lake were bad we were by no means prepared for today. The hills, or I guess I should call it a hill (as in singular), we faced today was grand... epic... brutal. Someone, during our trip prep phase, had mentioned to us that we would conquer a 30 mile incline during our Oregon route. I think today was it. Granted it was a subtle hill for most of the day... so subtle that we often had a hard time telling if the road in front of us slanted up, down, or flat. But when we would turn our heads to check out the road we were leaving behind us it was clear that we were gaining elevation at a fairly rapid rate. The sign posts gained elevation rapidly... the first letting us know we had reached 2,000 feet followed quickly by a 3,000 feet sign (someone had failed to post the 4,000 feet point... we kept on waiting and waiting for that sign to arrive). Our pour jello legs peddled the whole day in easy gears... and the mileage markers didn't come quick enough. But it felt like we were getting "it" done... whatever "it" was... I, at least, felt a great sense of accomplishment every time my leg would agree to turn one more time around the gear wheel.
I've been trying to check in with what a person thinks about while biking. It's a lot of time during which it is very complicated to talk to the person that you are traveling with (the car noise mixed with the way that sound travels doesn't work too great for long and meaningful conversations). For the first couple of days I composed lists in my mind and imagined what we might see on the road and sang one line of every song I know... but on this day, the entire day, my conversation within was one of encouragement for my self and mostly my legs.
We breaked a lot during our uphill climb... we enjoyed a small lunch riverside (next to Santiam River)... and we grinded away pedal stroke after pedal stroke. So this is when, reflecting back to earlier in this blog, my tire blew. Not cool... and this time it was not just my tube it was both the tube and the tire. Thank god for Duck Tape! We healed up my crummy tires once again, with creative flair and blue duck tape. These are the brand-new tires that I had just purchased in Salem -- touring specific tires. But I had found a way to stress them and puncture them; I had hit a huge rock the day before while enjoying the scenery.
The day passed at a slow and steady pace. I think we did about 30 miles of traveling between the hours of noon and seven. And when we finally found a campground we did not question passing it by.
Did we mention that this weekend marked the start of the deer hunting season in this particular region of the Cascades?? Probably not, since we weren't really concerning ourselves with hunting deer. But it turned out that maybe we should have. The campground was full. We talked about where we could hide out and Kiel struck up conversations with other campers about our options... but nothing was panning out. We were hungry and tired and we had biked 30 miles uphill. We felt like we had earned our SMALL camp footprint. At the very end of the camp I remembered part of the conversation we had with Captain the day before -- he had told us about a campground where his buddies (Artist and Ivan) were camping. And it seemed like we were at that very campground... and further we were standing directly in front of a truck with a "retired lyons fire fighter" marked truck. I thought we were saved -- name dropping ALWAYS works.
Unless you have the wrong people. Lloyd and Ron and the boys were not the buddies we thought they were going to be but they turned out to be just as wonderful as any friend of Captain's. They offered up their campsite to us for sharing and we gratefully accepted. Lloyd and the boys were up for the hunting. They let us know that they would not be up late partying because they were on an early morning mission. Lloyd even offered to leave us some coffee on the fire for when we awoke (hours after they had headed out to hunt).
Day Four : 30 miles and about 3000 ft. elevation
Detroit Lake State Park to some small campground before the Santiam Pass
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