Day 4: oh no hills

Hello, it’s yours truly Julia! Sorry for the delay in this blog post, but you know how the mountains get when it comes to cell service. With that said, yes we are officially in the Cascades, and yes we have already climbed 2,000 ft elevation. 

Our day started pretty chill, packing up camp, enjoying access to clean water, and deciding to fully utilize Jon and the support car. We knew we would be trekking up mountains, so off came the panniers and into the car they went. Thank god for Jon, but you’ll understand that later. 

First, 25miles…. LOVELY. It was on this cute, straight, flat road twisting by the river creeping towards the looming mountains. The scenery was gorgeous and filled with cows. We finished the first section at the National Park visitor center, where Dustin and Brian took a nice nap under the trees. 

But then came the hills…. oof. I will not lie, it was pretty awful. Were we using every “photo lookout” turnoff to rest? Of course. But hey at least we got to take in some great sites! Jon would go ahead and scope out the road and then yell out the window “don’t worry in 2 miles there’s a downhill!”…..surprise it was actually uphill. 

Around mile 40 we finally coasted downhill to a campsite thinking it was not our campsite……we were horribly horribly mistaken. We instead kept going, but it was straight uphill to 2,000ft elevation. It got to the point where we had to take a major walking break, to the next campsite….but wait a minute, there was no campsite. Offline Google Maps really screwed us over on that one. 

We get to Diablo Lake lookout to meet up with Jon, and that’s where we decided we needed to change tactics. We loaded up the bikes onto the car and started driving  around trying to find the campsite. But we could only fit two bikes on the rack at a time…aka Dustin and I stayed at the overlook while Brian and Jon scoped out the area. 

Eventually after Jon driving up and down the mountain probably 6 times we finally realized our campsite was the one at the bottom of the mountain by the river that we passed way back when. 

After that wild ride, we celebrated our day with some glizzy’s (hot dogs) and beer over the campfire! Best way to end a day! 

Boy oh boy it was a day, though, and tomorrow is even more of a doozy…. 5,000ft elevation here we come!