Clean!

Short Version:
We get clean. It feels good. We ride a long way, on dust and chunks of lava. We fall off our bikes.

Long Version:
After the big ride day on the Mrazek, we woke late, and were in no way inclined to bestir ourselves to go do any riding. So we read in the sun while small black, white, and grey wrens walked up and down the tree-trunks in search of insectoid food and a moth which we initially mistook for a hummingbird drank from the trumpet-like flowers.

Something had been in the Reaper, nibbling on our peaches. We assumed one of the ever-bolder local chipmunks had espied and taken advantage of the open doors. Naughty critter!

After most of a day, we rolled into town, and back to the Old St Francis School. We paid our Soaking Pool entry fee, and then hit the showers, for ages. Eventually we made it to the pool, where we soaked for ages before hitting the courtyard for delicious beery goodness and some foods. One final blast in the pool then we hit the staff up for a water vessel fill and hit the road back to the forest, where some middle-aged folks had set up camp surprisingly close to us. They weren't the source of the all-night comings-and-goings and thumping bass and yelling, though - that was the youngsters one ridge over.

Still, we were feeling well-rested (and CLEAN!) when we woke in the morning, and ready for some lava action high on the slopes of Mt Bachelor. We drove to the Edison Sno-Park, secured the Reaper, and set off up a series of snowmobile trails, which managed to combine dusty forest road and piles of solidified lava, all of which made for an interesting ninety minutes of uphill travel.

Our reward for the climb was fifteen minutes of downhill paved road.

And then almost three hours of predominantly downhill and flat singletrack riding. Which wasn't all sweetness and light, though, as the innocuous-seeming dusty sections demonstrated their volcanic origins by removing layers of any skin which came into contact with the powder. We discovered this when I bombed a techy downhill section and face-, arm- and shin-planted. Still, my war wounds paled in comparison to Janine's ever-increasing bruise collection, which gained yet another addition when she bailed on some rocks while rounding Lava Lake and clouted a rock, causing her a bunch of discomfort and earning a (rather pretty) multi-colored swollen hand.

The lake and its smaller neighbor* were beautiful, with fisherfolks on the water and deer on the shores, and we were kind of sad to be past them, and not just because that meant we were heading back uphill - although that was certainly a contributing factor. By the time we'd ridden the final ninety minutes up to the saddle and back down to the Sno-Park, our Woodhill-honed soft-sand riding skills had well and truly been dredged from memory and combined with our newfound and burgeoning understanding of how not to die on lava rocks, although not before I managed to flick a fist-sized chunk of planetvomit into my spokes, snapping one.

Edison Sno-Park was in full sun when we arrived back, six hours and thirty-four-odd miles after we'd set off, so we loaded up the van and headed down to the Wanoga Sno-Park, which we knew from our previous visit** had both shade in which to prepare and eat our delicious picnic lunch, and location, in that it was perched at the top of a bunch of rather awesome trails, which I rode down to the campsite while Nene drove the van back.

The trails were made of dust, as expected, and the broken spoke meant not launching off anything, but it was still an incredibly fun ride, and the bean quesadillas at the end capped it off perfectly.







* = Little Lava Lake.

** = We were riding in snow and freezing rain. Janine's arms were numb from the elbows down. We sheltered from the weather in the same structure we picnicked in this time round.