Day 9: Last of the Mountains

Hi everyone! Brian here with our trip today finishing up the last of the Washington Mountains!! We started today finishing up our stay with DiAnne and Boyd with a nice breakfast and some parting stories before beginning our ride.

Almost immediately we were ascending the last of the mountains up to Sherman Pass which has an elevation of 5575 ft. Even though we started at 8:45 or so at around 2820 ft elevation, it still took us until 12:10 to get the 15 miles uphill and finally get over our last mountain pass in Washington!! We also met a ton of other bikers on the trip including a couple who were doing cross country on a tandem bike, as well as someone who was just finishing his cross country trip going the other way. That means he started his trip in Boston in April…remember how cold that was? Couldn’t be us. 

Side note: when I get back to UConn I’m going to christen the stationary bike I trained on for this trip because training on that has single handidly saved my leg muscles from dying while going up these mountains. I will take name and champaign recommendations in the comments.

Alright I’m gonna warn you, this is when our luck took a slight turn for the worse. About 5 miles on the downhill, Julia and I are riding together and she goes “Hey Brian, does my tire look weird?” and sure enough Julia had our first flat of the trip! We are very proud of her and got a lot of photos commemorating the moment.

We fiddled with the tire for a while before Dustin, who was three miles ahead of us, came back and showed us how to actually change a tire. 

Okay! Tire is on! Ready to go! Or so we thought. As soon as I try to start riding my bike I forget I’m in the highest gear and it’s super hard to pedal at first so I fall right over. Our first fall of the trip! No pictures this time thank goodness. However this spelled further doom as we were biking a few miles further downhill and my bike was shifting weird. The next uphill I hear a snap and a lot of grinding sounds and I just think oh no. I walk my bike up to the group and find out that not only did my derailer snap off, the part of the frame it attached to got busted as well. So I’ll be heading to a bike shop tomorrow to see how much money will pour out of my wallet but there will be no stopping us this trip! Pictured below is me literally 10 seconds before this all happened

We spent the night at another warm showers place which was a farm with over 350 animals of all different kinds! We walked around the property and saw some of the most beautiful views of the entire trip and had some delicious food and are holed up in a camper for the night. 

Photo Dump:

“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”— Ibn Battuta