Meet the Road Blog – briantowey.com
This ride starts in Mosier (5 miles east of Hood River) and travels 9 more miles east to Rowena, by way of the “Rowena Loops”. At the finish point for this ride you can cross under the freeway to Mayer State Park on the Columbia River.
The Loops are a 600 ft decent (and climb back) on a 2 mile stretch of road that is very popular amongst car manufacturers for use in advertisements.
The round trip is 18 miles and has 1,500 feet of climbing.
This is the ride you can take anybody on. It’s an out-and-back that ends next to a couple of places to get coffee and / or ice cream. The trail is heavily used – often by people that have no idea that anybody else might also be trying to use the trail. So, stay to the right and look around before stopping and starting.
There is a viewpoint just short of 3 miles from the parking lot that is a good place to turn around with smaller children or anybody that doesn’t want to pedal up a hill.
Most of the rides from Hood River cover roads to the south (up the Hood River Valley), or to the east (including The Dalles). This ride does a little of both and covers one of the epic Gorge climbs (7 Mile Road). Also, it never exceedes 2,000 ft in elevation, which makes it a good early season option for avoiding poor road conditions and colder temperatures. In the summer months The Dalles can get very warm and this ride is best done on a cooler day or with an early start.
This ride starts at Egg Harbor (a good place for breakfast, and you’ll need it) and ends in front of 3 Rivers Grill (a good place to sit on the deck and have a frosty cold beverage).From Hood River you work up the West Side of town The roads are light with traffic and pass through orchards and one of the town’s golf courses. You then cross the Hood River and up a short hill toward the town of Odell before crossing The Valley to the east for the ride back down East Side Road.
Now, back in Hood River, travel east on old Hwy 30. Hwy 30 from Hood River to Mosier is now a very wide bicycle trail (beware of loose dogs, unatended children and bewildered tourists – travel cautiously). From Mosier keep riding east on lightly traveled roads through more orchards, with views of Mt. Adams and the Columbia River. This portion of the trip includes a twisty 2 mile decent from Rowena Crest that is so beautiful that many car and motorcycle manufactures choose to film advertisements there.
Once in The Dalles, work your way over to 10th Street and continue east to Cherry Heights Road (near the center of town). Cherry Heights gains about 1,000 ft before the first little decent and then rolls before beginning a decent back toward the west end The Dalles and the start of the 7 Mile Road climb.Here you can turn left and tackle the 1,500 ft climb (it’s kind of a shortcut) that will then decend to Mosier. Or, you can continue another mile or so back to Hwy 30 and return to Hood River over the same route on which you came.
The climb is worth the trouble, however. There are spectacular views any time you choose to look for one and the descent will permit you to reach speeds that you have believed are myths told by comentators of bicycle races on television.
If your goal is to see it all in The Gorge, this is a good start.
Two races followed by rides to get the daily total over 80 miles.
These are the highlights.
Long Beach – Palos Verdes Loop
After the crit in Long Beach today, as after the Bulldog race yesterday we did another ride. The trip in and out of Long Beach is kind of sketchy, but the Palos Verdes part of the ride is spectacular.
The Hard Corps race series at Camp Pendleton benefit programs that support Marines, Sailors and their families. This race was a blast and for a great cause. Riders of all abilities participate in a very friendly atmosphere.
There is something about being on a Marine base that makes me feel differently than when I’m anywhere else. It’s hard to put to words, there is just something that makes me want to work harder – as if there is something extra to prove. Having the Marines (and some Sailors) that had volunteered to work the race telling me what a great job I had just done made me feel proud that even for just a little while they thought that I could hang…
After the race, my brother-in-law, Joe and I rode from Oceanside down to Torrey Pines and back along the Coast Highway. Another great SoCal ride along the beach with lots of cool places to stop for coffee or food along the way.
Thursday Coffee Crew is a regular ride all year (as far as I know). This is an option if you want to be abused at 6:10 on a weekday morning in Southern California.
I’ve done this ride twice and I always have a bit of warm-up getting to the start at Campus and University (adjacent to the UC Irvine campus). It’s a big group and the ride remains civilized until it gets into the neighborhood of the old Air Base (MCAS El Toro).
On this day we rode with the group until splitting to meet a couple more people in Laguna Beach for a ride through Laguna Canyon followed by a long spin out to Long Beach and back.
Great before work ride (if you’re into that sort of thing – work, I mean…).
This is a nice 30 plus mile ride from Troutdale. We got kind of lost and had to ride in the dark a bit, but this is a great scenic route with lots of little climbs.
Close to town with relatively little traffic once you’re off the main road.
Brian
This is the easy version of the Como Street ride in Tustin, California.
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/6084833
I’ll be posting maps and descriptions of some of my favorite rides. The description of this one is “pain”. It is simply an un-organized race replacement training ride that leaves from Tustin Marketplace on Sundays at 8am.
There is also a longer, harder version that the fast guys go on. It is described as “pain” and “humility”.
Since it’s February it seemed like it was time to finally take the bike off of the trainer. Riding in front of the television is cool and all, but…
Wednesday was a beautiful day, so Lara and I headed out for a quick spin. We waited for the temperature to get above 40 degrees (because there was frost on everything from the night before).
We rode east from Hood River and encountered lots of ice and frost in the shady spots. It was a ride like this last year that put me on the ground and messed up my early season riding, so we were very careful.
Saturday we ventured out on a “real ride” and rode out to Mosier and up Dry Creek Road, which turns to gravel for a few miles. The road was excellent, the weather was perfect and other than quite a lot of gravel on the paved roads it was like a normal Spring ride.
We ran into sometime riding friends Tom and Taylor on the way back from The Dalles and had a mini-group ride all the way home.
Not so bad for early February.
BT
p.s. I talked to my brother-in-law yesterday who had done the Boulevard Road Race in SoCal (1.5 hours east of San Diego) – it is the first big race of the year.
His race had gone early and ended in snow. As the Pro-1-2 field was getting ready to roll out the snow became heavy. There will probably be some good stories out of that.