A DiY Hell on Wheels: Sun, heat and cycling in Eastern Oregon
A year ago, several of us were introduced to the fun-scale during a 9 day kayaking trip in Glacier Bay, Alaska:
Type One: Actual fun.
Type Two: Miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect
Type Three: Miserable while it’s happening, and not any fun in retrospect. At all. A bad idea — if you could go go back, you’d definitely not do it.
Alaska was definitely type two, and we all loved it (especially after). We agreed we wanted to do a similar trip this year, though being warm was a requirement. With this in mind, a trip to Eastern Oregon to cycle in August was planned. Spoiler alert, I think this trip was mostly type one fun.
We ended up borrowing a large truck and finding a group of five for the trip. It turned out that five was the magic number for this kind of a trip. Any more and logistics become difficult, introducting the need for multiple vehicles. Any less and we’d spend too much time driving rather than riding.
The prior year, Cycle Oregon had made a route which would circle from LaGrande to Joseph and back through Enterprise, but they weren’t able to complete the loop due to forest fires. We used this, along with a gold-rush Travel Oregon cycle route which traverse the Blue Mountains, as inspiration for our trip’s loop. The start and finish was in La Grande. Thankfully Alex, an avid and willing photographer, was on the trip to help document the trip.
On Friday night after work, the five of us loaded our bikes and plenty of comfort gear into a large pickup truck and started our drive to La Grande. We arrived late evening with enough energy to have a beer and hang a hammock.
Day One: Ride from LaGrande to Sumpter
We woke relatively early, eager to start our trip. After breakfast and some last minute bike setup, we were ready to roll. The first day would be one of the longer ones, with a couple of decent climbs.
The weather was perfect on Saturday morning, and we enjoyed a good mix of scenery and very, very little traffic.
As the morning changed to afternoon we had our first climb of the day, and unfortunately it was with some heat, zero shade and only sometimes a breeze.
The second climb of the day took us a few miles outside of and a couple thousand feet above Sumpter. The descent into town was open, banked, winding and provided beautiful views of the valley we were entering.
Sumpter itself was tiny as expected for a town of ~200 people in Eastern Oregon. Of note were our accommodations, the Sumpter Stockade, a steam engine, a couple of dive-bars on mainstreet and a gold dredge.
The sumpter gold dredge was impressive and gigantic. In its hey-day, between 1912–1934, there were three dredges operating in the valley. These would sit in their own pond and would pull up the earth and filter through it keeping gold, depositing the earth behind it. Gradually it would move its pond along in a direction. During the time of its run, this particular dredge moved about 7 miles, leaving the earth ripped up behind it. If you check out satellite images of the Sumpter area, you can see the permanent change to the land that was done.
After way too many fried appetizers (steak bites!) and too much food at the bar in Sumpter, we returned to the stockade for rest. Well, most of us. Mark and Chad went back out and hung out at the other bar on mainstreet with a huge motorcycle group from the Portland area.
Day 2: Sumpter Down to Farewell Bend
Second day was over 70 miles, but was a long, gradual descent with the wind at our backs.
The roads were pretty open and turning more high-desert like as we made our way further east. Majority of the road was very quiet, and following parallel to I84E.
Towards the end of our ride we spent about 10 miles on I-84. While it had a very large shoulder and clear visibility, the amount of debris on the shoulder and our speed led to a couple of flats. After getting off of 84, we made our way through the town of Huntington and then up a climb to Farewell Bend, our destination for the day. By the time we were making the final small climb, it was over 100° F out.
There was shade and running water at Farewell Bend. Not much else, really, though.
Mark and Chad deemed the blue-slime infested water at this point of the Snake River as “clean enough” for cooling down, while Zach, Alex and Eric decided to drive the truck into the neighboring towns to cool down (saw Huntington’s museum, had milkeshakes in a (the?) restaurant in Huntington and stood in an ice freezer at a convenient store). As the heat continued to climb and linger through the day, we dreamed of driving to Boise to watch a movie. We almost did it.
It finally cooled to about 90°f by 9pm. We met a through-biker at the camp, Scottie, who joined us for garbage-bag-mixed pasta and shared some interesting stories that night.
It ended being a pretty windy night. I slept on the ground and woke up to a tumble-weed wedged against me. So, I get to check “getting hit by tumbleweed” off of my bucket list.
Day 3: Farewell Bend to Cambridge, Idaho
After being cooked the day before, we were eager to wake early and get to our next destination, Cambridge Idaho, where we knew we’d have a pool at the motel.
The ride to cambridge was beautiful, rolling through farms and back-roads for a long portion of the ride. Zach and I rode together for a long portion of it and got a chance to do a sprint after a very large dog ran out into the road in front of us and then continued to chase us.
Other notable part was that we had to take I-95 for a ways, including over a steep ascent and then descent into Midvale, where we stopped for iced coffee and a plate of fried food.
From here we had a ~15 mile casual ride over to Cambridge, followed by a lot of pool-side time and not sitting on bikes.
Cambridge, the gateway to Hells Canyon, was yet-another-tiny small town. Walking down mainstreet and seeing so many shops for sale or closed was pretty sad, but the town itself was nice. We had a chance to checkout the rodeo which was being prepared for that coming weekend as well as the bar on mainstreet. We spent about 30 seconds in there, quickly being reminded that you can smoke in bars in Idaho. We ended up cooking dinner (and melting a table) with a camping grill at the motel. We closed out the night arguing about how terrible it is and yet watching “Snakes on a Plane” in its entirety.
Day 4: Cambridge to the Snake River
For the first time during this trip, we started the day with the wind in our face. We continued on desert country roads out of Cambridge and up to our peak elevation of the day after ~15 miles. After this we dropped about 2000' elevation in 7 of the fastest cycling miles I have ever done.
After this descent and some traversing, we were following the Snake River in some of the most beautiful riding of the trip: winding roads following the river. We quickly made it to our days final destination: Copper Canyon campground on the Snake river. After a quick lunch, most of us made a quick ride on the Idaho side of the river towards the dam.
We floated in the snake a few times and generally laid low in the shade at the campground during the afternoon. As was the case in the days prior, the heat was unrelenting. By late afternoon we agreed to jump into the truck and drive up to Halfway, Oregon for dinner.
Halfway was about as nice as the AC in the truck on full blast was during the drive over. The restaurant there, “The Main One” was very good, and we stayed in Halfway until dusk, enjoying an outdoor concert (songs which Chad hated, and which we would continue to sing for days) and the cooler air at the higher elevation. You could feel that we were driving back into an oven as we descended back to the river.
Day 5: Beat the heat — Ride up to Joseph
Originally we had planned on spending two nights at Copper Canyon, or camping half way up from the Snake to Joseph. After a couple of days in the >100 °F heat, we called our lodging on Joseph and negotiated shifting our reservation ahead a day (which worked out well, since it was summer all accommodations required a three night minimum, of which we were only planning on using two originally).
With that, our fifth day would be the “biggest day” of climbing from the Snake up to Joseph, OR.
We got an early start and started our gradual and consistent climb, not seeing any cars other than our sag-wagon.
While the climb was consistent, it never became too overwhelming. The views during the climb were awesome — this was my favorite day of riding by far.
We ended up arriving in Joseph and having lunch and beers in the early afternoon followed by a dip in the lake and checkin to our cabin at the South end of the lake.
That evening we drove over to Enterprise for dinner at Terminal Gravity.
Day Six: Layover in Joseph
Following day was a layover day, meaning no time in the bike saddle. Mark climbed up to Ice Lake while the rest of us hung out in Joseph doing some shopping for our significant others. I ended up getting an awesome massage in town. And of course we returned to our bar-restaurant of choice in Joseph, Embers. They got a lot of our money.
Otherwise we spent our time in Joseph doing Wallowa Lake things: playing putt putt, eating ice cream and enjoying the novelties. This place is clearly a family tourist destination.
Day 7: The Road to Imnaha!
We decided to add some more mileage to the trip and planned a ride down to Imnaha, about ~1700' down from Joseph. The ride was an out and back: down one way, up the other.
Imnaha itself isn’t much more than a store and tavern by the river. The store had a lot of character and was worth the fast descent down and steaming hot climb back out. Each of us get top 10 times (KOM, 2, 5, 7) for the ascent from Imnaha which tells you how fast we rode, and how few people are dumb enough to do that ride. We counted 4 (dead) rattle snakes on the ride.
Final Day: Joseph to Minam, Minam to La Grande
For our final day, Chad drove the truck from Joseph to Minam, and then starting cycling the rest of the way to La Grande to “close the loop” on the trip. Meanwhile, the remaining four of us rode the slow descent to Minam.
Compared to the rest of the trip, this portion was pretty forgettable. More country roads and some small towns along the way. The last two days, the air was thick with smoke from forest fires in B.C. Canada. Given the poor air conditions, most of us were just looking forward to getting to Minam quickly and being done.
We got to La Granda just 5 minutes before Chad. After a few regrettable burritos from Pendleton, we had a smooth drive back to Portland to complete the trip.
Overall, most of us did over 400 miles during the week and had a great time. It was hard to determine the appropriate milage for the group during planning, but I think we hit it spot on. We’re looking forward to another cycling trip, though I think something like Canadian Rockies or elsewhere in B.C. (not so damn hot) sounds appealing. We’ll see…
