carver loop ride report

Started off right with an über-local breakfast — omelette i made from chris’ ducks egs, spinach, pdx cheddar, along with sweet potatoes aimee dug up from her garden and broiled in balsamic.

Andy and I hit upon doing this ride in SE with a gentlemanly 2PM rollout time. I made my way through the city including a little zip up Mt Tabor, which looks like it’d be amazing for cyclocross but the permit situation is apparently straight-up impossible. One thing the ride description didn’t emphasize enough is how much it sucked getting out there; there’s basically a 10 mi stretch on a two lane highway (the misleadingly-named “Sunnyside”) followed by another 15 mi on 1 lane country highway w/ cars buzzing past the whole time (224). The “variation” would have been way better; lesson learned. Most drivers are super courteous, but getting buzzed just got old fast.

Andy is a long-distance tourer— he rode lands end to john o groats for shit’s sake — but had been off the bike for a while so his rolling speed was lower than what I’m used to. Plus, we had to single up and get strung out along the highway and that was a little frustrating too. However, once we started the actual loop it was fine: lovely scenery, good conversation, and some moments of sheer beauty like coming across the solo buffalo in the middle of a tree farm, following the clackamas river over some old-school bridges, and a great canyon ride through Maple Lane on the way into Oregon City.

Along the way, deep into Carver country, we came across a throwback ranch house whose inhabitants had felt it necessary to ring their property-line with american flags and McCain/Palin 2008 signs. The most interesting one was right at their driveway: it had mccain’s name blacked out with a thick-tip sharpie, leaving just PALIN 2004 as the message they wanted to deliver.

The slog back up 99 into town was a tough beast: the scenic beauty of a West San Jose expressway with the road conditions of downtown Salinas. I had this definite sense that I wasn’t in Portland proper any more when I came across a capitalist war in progress between competing chains of DRIVE-THROUGH BIKINI GIRL ESPRESSO STANDS. Not just an isolated phenomenon, there were multiple chains engaged in classic spam-marketing escalation. Hell, they almost got me to stop, but I had a higher purpose in mind — getting the hell out of Gladstone — and, anyway, they were all closed.

Although we’d split during the Highway to Hell, Andy and I regrouped in Sellwood and had a nice ride back to civilization, with a quick refueling stop at the Hawthorne/SE 12th food cart pod where I straight-up devoured a catfish po’boy and Andy manfully took down a plate of poutine.

61.7 mi in under 5 hours of wall-clock time, including a couple of nontrivial stops… pretty well-spent Sunday exploring my new environs, I’d say.

Strava track here