Whew! Truth time. I'm writing the blog posts for day #11-14 about 3 months after this trip. It's been emotional reliving this experience. In 2 weeks, my group mates and I are doing a short movie presentation and Q&A with our local community. I'm excited and it's gotten me thinking about finishing the OTT next summer.Anyway... today we knew we had a lot fo uphill miles to cover. We headed toward Mt. Bachelor Bike Park with hopes of a burger and beer. The first 5 or so miles were along an old gravel road to Lava Lake Store. Yes, there was a beer at 10:00am and it tasted pretty damn good while we charged our devices and chargers.
New lesson- always make a plan for where to meet, even when going to the bathroom. About 20 minutes were lost as we lost each other at the small campground Oh man!
Finally, we hopped on the Metolius- Windigo trail to start our uphill pedal to Mt. Bachelor. We were pretty quiet in our personal journeys this morning. We didn't chat too much. 20 minute or more would go by without us speaking at all and giving each other mental and visual space. I know I was feeling a little sentimental reflecting on the past 10 days and being almost finished. I was also pretty tired. We all were. I easily zoned into a somewhat meditative state with a repeating mantra:
I am strong
I am powerful
I trust my body.
I also distracted myself my singing OKGO's "I won't let you down" over and over.
I also made a mental list of things that are harder than this. I later shared this mental list with the boys and it would serve as giggle fodder for the next 2 days. Whenever I looked or acted complainy Bill would just mention something that was worse- and some were very creative. It was worth the crack up. Turns out, our ride wasn't so bad. Again with the realization that we were riding our bikes most of the way through the state, healthy and free enough to accomplish such a thing.
Finally, we made it to Mt. Bachelor Bike Park, at the same location as the resort and man were we ready for those burgers!
Airlift.
What!?! Bill found the first person who looked like they worked at the resort (ski/ bike patrol) where we could devour some lunch. He told us that the cafe was at the TOP of the chairlift. This was not good. Luckily, our new friend could tell we were hungry and thirsty with credit cards, and knowing that we had no interest is shredding the brow pow in the bike park, he subtly walked us on to the chair lift to take us to our late lunch destination. Here we all enjoyed elk burgers with fries, salad, and a cold beer. I guess I haven't mentioned yet that the temps were in the high 90s that day, but it was a bit cooler at the resort.
We ended up hanging out there for almost 2 hours, just cooling off and relaxing, and drinking much much water. They eventually had to kick us out when the cafe closed. Our's were the last 3 bikes waiting at the bottom of the chair lift.
Onward and upward we headed about 10 miles along a primitive dirt road. This was actually a very pretty ride, with amazing views of Broken Top Mountain. We were trying to make it to 3 Creeks Campground, but we were running out of sunlight. After finding some water for the evening at a stream, Bill found us a nice flat place to sleep. You could tell by the soft dust imprints left that logging operations had occurred that day right where we were camped. We were feeling pretty satisfied about our 37 miles, and 3800 feet of elevation gain. Soon we were nestled in our tents, looking for to a lazy morning and nice descent to Sisters.
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