Blessings Upon the Tubs

Short Version:
A ride, some golf, a ride, a crash, a soak, and some fried-egg sandwiches

Long Version:
The North Umpqua River Trail is best done as a point-to-point three-day ride, starting at Digit Point and ending 79 miles downriver at Stillwater. We're keen to go back and do that, preferably with a support vehicle to carry all our stuff. This time, though, we were doing two out-and-back daytrips from our base at Toketee Lake.

Because I was weak as a kitten with a wasting disease, and had sore hips and back after having been poisoned by my lovely wife, we swapped the planned order of the two rides, and hit the less-strenuous Deer Leap Segment of the trail first. I'm told that it was beautiful scenery, and wonderful, wonderful trail - fast and flowing, wandering up and down across the face of the slope. I remember very little. We rode about 9 of the 9.7 miles downriver before Janine decided that I was too feeble to continue, and we turned back. Riding back the other way was apparently also great, but more uphill than down, which was exactly what I needed.

Wives planning to poison their husbands then make them go on an 18 mile ride take note: Janine has set the standard, and you WILL be expected to push your husband and/or his bike up the hills on the way back to camp.

Back at the campground, we ate delicious foods (my first solids for a day and a half) then busted out the disc golf discs, and played our way around the area. Saw a brown frog and some very cheeky chipmunks. It was still raining, so we dug some drainage channels around the tent before bed.

They seemed to do the trick, as we didn't wash away overnight, and we set off in the rain, upriver on the Hot Springs Segment of the trail. At 3.8 miles long, this is one of the shortest segments of the North Umpqua River Trail. It was pretty nice to ride, and dropped us out at a fallen-tree bridge over the river by the hot springs from which the segment takes its name. Although not marked as such on the maps of the area, the trailhead there has - unsurprisingly - developed into a campground of sorts, and a bunch of people were packing up and heading off as we passed through and onto the [dramatic music] Dread and Terror Segment.

13 miles long, the Dread and Terror Segment is the part of the trail we'd heard most about. For most of the three hours we spent riding up it I wasn`t entirely sure why, but once we turned at Baughman`s Bluff and started heading downriver - the direction in which most people ride the segment - I understood pretty quickly. I`d not realised just how much climbing we`d been doing until I got to ride down it - we were motoring along at a good clip, and it was great! Some challenging bits, but mainly fast technical descending. The curves were sweeping and fun at the speeds we were travelling, and we were having a ball. At one point I spied a bare human footprint, which was only mildly bemusing until Janine didn`t appear for so long that I started walking back up the trail looking for her, at which point the prospect of either a sasquatch with a hunger or a local yokel with a different kind of hunger became cumulatively scarier with each passing moment. Turns out she hadn`t been carted off to be eaten or beaten, but had instead clipped the cliff wall with a handlebar and fallen down the cliff towards the river, 30 feet below. Luckily, she'd landed on her back on a rotten log 10 feet down and was able to scramble back up, dust herself off, and continue on, albeit slightly slower than beforehand.

Thirty minutes later we arrived back at the Hot Springs trailhead. We hid our bikes about as well as we did at Rainey Lake, then climbed the steep rocky path to the hot springs proper. The awesomeness was boundless. Six pools of vivid blue water surrounded by multi-colored mineral deposits. The pools stepped their way down the hillside above the river in sequence, hottest at the top and gradually decreasing in temperature. The second-to-top was the perfect temperature, and had a fairly sound wooden structure built over it, which provided welcome protection from the still-persisting rain for us and our gear. We timed our arrival really well in that one group of peple were leaving as we arrived, and we`d snaked past the family from Kansas City in Missouri on the way up, so we got the best pool, and kept it. The downside was that Missouri family Dad managed to convey to us on the way up that theyèd really rather not encounter any of the nudity that the trailhead sign warned of, so we wore pants until they left. And then gave the campers across the river a show when we stood up to dry off (we could tell from the cheers).

Putting the wet, cold, muddy riding gear back on wasn't the best feeling ever, and we were pretty tired, but some tooting helped get us up the last few hills, and pretty soon we were back at camp, cooking up fried egg sandwiches.