Oregon Again

Short Version:
Reaper Sleeper, a trail too short

Long Version:
We're back in Oregon, and that feels good. Not just because there are many beards and not just because so many places here are bike-friendly - although both are contributing factors. Crossing the Rogue and then the Umpqua Rivers on our way up the coast was like seeing old friends again, and the beaches with their rocky wildness reminded us of Auckland's west coast. Except that there's no fee to stop and eat food at Bethell's or Karekare or Piha. No clean public toilets or people picking up rubbish either though. We were too cheap to pay the $6 fee when challenged by the Ranger bloke, but he gave us helpful advice on where the best free spots nearby were, so we hurtled a few hundred metres further up the road then stopped for delicious foods, including my new favorite condiment: mustard.

Nourished, we carried on north, and watched the beach get taller as we went. Pretty soon there was a significant dunes area between us and the sea proper. There were ATV hire place, dune buggy rentals and tours, guided tours in huge bus-chassis dune buggies - there was even Dunes City. There were also, as we discovered later, large tracts of duneland set aside as nature preserves, which was pretty cool.

Not far north of Dunes City was our planned next-day ride, on the Siltcoos Lake Trail. Halfway round its 4.4 mile loop there were some campsites marked, but we'd arrived late enough in the day that we decided against packing a bike-friendly set of camping gear and riding in, opting instead to drive into the nearby National Forest and disperse into the woods (ie camp for free). Unfortunately for us, we didn't find any appropriate Forest Service roads into the woods, and, with dusk gathering, we decided to sleep roadside, in the Reaper. We'd spied a really nice grassy area at roadside on our way into the forested region, so hauled back there and parked up.

A bunch of our gear had to sleep outside for the night to make room for the humans, so after delicious foods (fried pizza, and mushroom soup with mushrooms) we locked our bikes to the van, stashed our important stuff on the front seats and the rest under the van, and crashed out. Or at least one of us did - apparently Janine wasn't quite short enough for the space she'd been allocated, so didn't have the best sleep of her life. Still, she was cheery enough early the next morning, when we rose early, reloaded the van, and relocated to nearby Woahink Lake, where we set ourselves up lakeside for a breakfast picnic before rolling a few hundred feet down the highway to the Lake Siltcoos trailhead.

The Lake Siltcoos Trail begins with an access trail which winds its way eastwards up a hill from the trailhead. Just east of the crest it butts into the loop trail which goes as far as the western shores of the lake before hooking back east. We rode clockwise, on a whim, and didn't regret the decision; nothing we saw looked like it would have been better ridden the opposite direction, and the ride we had was fantastic fun, marred only by how soon it was over. So we rode it again.
Beautiful forest, smooth flowing trails on a really nice surface - if there was more trail here, it'd be a fantastic place to go. As it is, with only a few miles to ride, it's certainly somewhere we wish we'd reached earlier in the day, as the campsites were really cool, and a loop before turning in followed by a couple in the morning would have been about perfect.

As it was, we left the trail feeling underdone. We'd been precluded from repeating the loop for a third time by the fact that my front wheel was buckling due to the snapped and now absent spoke, so we rode across the highway and down a long paved hill to the Dunes Recreation Area. We saw boardwalk wildlife walks, multiple campgrounds, and fenced-off areas for snowy plover breeding. We climbed a high dune and saw the sea through the ever-present fog. Janine took her shoes off and walked down to the beach proper. I got menaced by a labradoodle.