Sep 092010
 

Klamath Falls to Bend -- Another spectacular day


I awoke rest­ed to anoth­er great day. After a leisure­ly walk around Kla­math Falls and a nice break­fast I loaded up and decid­ed to go up to Crater Lake even though it was look­ing stormy.

It was a beau­ti­ful ride up with sec­tions of rain now and then. After I entered the park the tem­per­a­ture start­ed drop­ping, first into the mid 40s, then low 40s, then into the 30s. I had aug­ment­ed yes­ter­day’s out­fit with a wool ski sweater and wool long johns so I was doing OK. Arriv­ing at the park entrance kiosk it was maybe 34 and I was feel­ing ner­vous about hit­ting an ice patch on the road. The kiosk woman sug­gest­ed I stop at the vis­i­tor cen­ter sev­er­al miles fur­ther up the road for a more accu­rate assessment.

Arriv­ing at the vis­i­tor cen­ter dur­ing a brief time of light snow­ing (32 degrees now) I noticed a BMW GS type bike with an Aus­tralian plate! Going in I chat­ted with the cou­ple rid­ing it who seemed to me about my age. They are going all the way into West­ern Cana­da, then over to Yel­low­stone, some of the Utah parks, etc. Very cool. I asked them the cost to have the bike shipped over and back and was told that it cost $3,000 US.

Opin­ions from vis­i­tor cen­ter folks were for no ice wor­ries so I road on up to the rim. It got increas­ing­ly cloudy approach­ing the top, so much so that look­ing over the rim pro­duced no sense of lak­e­ness. It was then 30 degrees and the ends of my fin­gers were get­ting numb. I start­ed the ride around the west­ern rim road then, real­iz­ing that the 21 miles to the north exit would just take too long for my dete­ri­o­rat­ing fin­gers I turned around and back­tracked the wis­er and short­er 10 miles down to the mid 40 degree thresh­old where I knew I’d feel better.

Twen­ty five miles lat­er I saw again a very scenic pho­to op of a pic­turesque barn I had noticed on my way up. After stop­ping I decid­ed the best shot was about 80′ back. I had rolled the Suzu­ki back about 65 of those 80 when I lost bal­ance and the bike fell over (moto night­mare #2). I took off all the stuff I could in prepa­ra­tion for a lift attempt when a friend­ly and help­ful guy in a pick­up stopped to see if I was OK, as one inter­pre­ta­tion could eas­i­ly have been that I had gone down at speed. I said I was fine and asked if he’d help me lift up the bike. He quick­ly helped me lift the bike thus my learn­ing expe­ri­ence, i.e. do not back­up the cycle for more than 10′ unless no oth­er options exist, end­ed quick­ly and easily.

The rest of the day was spec­tac­u­lar, espe­cial­ly the 66 miles along the “The Cas­cade Lakes Nation­al Scenic Byway”. After 50 of those miles being in the mid 40s and some­what high­er things start­ed to be a replay of the morn­ing’s down­ward trend. It got to a low of 32 and I was won­der­ing WTF about the time I rode by the entrance to the Mt. Bach­e­lor ski area, checked the alti­tude and real­ized it all made sense.

Anoth­er won­der­ful day of adven­ture end­ing in the very inter­est­ing city of Bend, one of the best out­door recre­ation areas in the country.

 Posted by at 2:30 pm