Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Mt St Helens - Wowsers!! What a ride!


October 9, 2012 - the Fabulous Fall Run up Mt St Helens

Getting up at 4:15am, driving out at 5 am, using windshield wipers in the fog/mist.....wasn't the start of a day I normally hope for but today was a special day....after picking up Sally in Tumwater, WA, we drove south on I-5 to Exit 49, and then climbed up Highway 504 - still in overcast and mist.  But as we approached mile post 27, where we were going to start our ride up Mt St Helens, we climbed out of the fog/mist and the sun burst through!   Cool but not as cold I feared, we met our other riders at the Hoffstadt Bluffs Visitor Center.  The folks at Hoffstadt Bluffs are really great as they opened up their restrooms for us at 0830 even though their official opening hour isn't until 0930!  Thanks, Kyra!!

Kevin had come up from Portland while John & Michelle traveled from Olympia to join Sally and myself - so here's a Cascade Bicycle Club (Seattle) ride with the RL from Woodinville, and 3 riders from Olympia and 1 rider from Portland....unusual group demographics for sure.  But then again, this was to be an extraordinary ride!

Heading up of course we started to climb immediately but the sun and scenery were so spectacular, I don't think anyone noticed the first part of the climb.  At one point, Kevin had to brake to avoid running in elk crossing the road!  (And, I had failed to get the elk to sign the Ride Waiver form)  The colors were changing on the maples which were dotted around amongst the green conifers - amazing fall scenery.




As usual on long hills, I assumed my place at the back of the pack - I could rationalize this since as the Ride Leader, I was just sweeping my own ride - a position I was able to maintain all day!

Leaving Hoffstadt Bluffs (circa 1400 feet), we climbed up to and over Elk Rock (3800+ feet), down to Coldwater Lake (circa 2500 feet), and then back up to Johnston Ridge (4314 feet)...and, I was "only" about 20 minutes behind the others.   Grabbing some snacks, re-watering, we had a snapshot of us at the top - due to the sun angle, we couldn't put Mt St Helens behind us without the sun wiping out the photo so we took one to the side.  From L to R: Kevin, Al, Sally, John, and Michelle.  A pretty strong riding group (except for me of course)




Here is Michelle leaving the Johnston Ridge Observatory - you can see the smoke haze over the mountain - it was stronger from the east where fires had been burning.


Despite the haze, I got a friendly tourist to take this photo of me on the way back at Elk Rock - it better captures the mountain on this fabulous fall day.   Wow - this was a day for scenery overload although I could not get enough of it!!



By the way, here is an update from 17 October showing the mountain but now with some snow - fall/winter is starting to seriously arrive!


 Getting back to the cars, no one seemed motivated to extend the ride on down to Sediment Dam Road and back - adds about 13 miles and 400 feet of climbing to make this a metric century.  The good views and scenery were all done at that point so we packed it in after 50 miles and 5700 feet of climbing!  Woo Hoo!  Gotta love those mountain hills!   We'll do this ride again next year but maybe in July when the mountain is still covered in snow and the spring flowers are just coming out.



On the way out, Sally and I did see a fair number of the big dump trucks hauling gravel up to Sediment Dam.  These were the vehicles that the Army Corps of Engineers had warned me about since they were doing some re-construction work on the Sediment Dam - so we chose to start higher up at Hoffstadt Bluffs which worked just great for everyone!



3 comments:

  1. Crazy stuff! Looks like a pretty nice & scenic route, but I'd find it hard to justify getting up at 4:15 AM in order to do a ride.

    The class you missed was 4x 10 minutes at ~88-94% FTP, with variable cadence in 2 minute blocks (comfortable/fast/slow). In between each 2 minute block was a 15 second sprint at ~150%, 3 minute rests in between 10 minute blocks.

    Sounds like your ride was more hardcore!
    As like before the captcha is crushing me, requiring 3+ attempts to solve :(

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  2. The commenting works fine for me, not sure if you'd have to use the captcha since you're the actual blogger? Also not sure if I'd have to do the captcha if I used a different login, I just signed up this one for the blog since I didn't have any of the other logins :)

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