The weather wasn't hot, the trail was railroad-grade flat and hadn't done it before - all good reasons for a short bike ride along the John Wayne Trail. It was also a chance to test the hitch-mounted bicycle rack I had bought at least two months ago.
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| 2113 miles to Chicago - not today! |
No one was around to sell us a new Discover Pass at the parking lot near Hyak so we drove less than a mile down the road to the USFS trailhead which was even better for our purposes since we were not going west through the tunnel, but were riding east along Keechelus Lake. Our Golden Access Pass (aka, Golden Geezer Pass) on the dashboard kept us legal for parking. There were signs warning about the lake being closed at certain times due to rock blasting along I-90 on the other side of the lake. There also were some places where the old RR grade, now a wide trail, passed beneath some cliffs and there were warning about avalanches - more for winter than summer. We passed two trailside campgrounds each with five or six sites and an outhouse. Water would have to come from a stream or from the lake. There were interpretive signs as well as mile markers showing the distance from Chicago. One old sign for a no-longer-existing station (?) was eroded so much that it now said KEECHFLUS. We reached the dam, our goal for the day (although the road to Lost Lake tempted us) and turned
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| C.J. near the Keechelus Dam |
A short bushwhack through the lakebed put us on a rocky island with a good view for a lunchstop. Then we pedaled back to our starting point. We had met only one other couple in the approximately eleven miles we had traveled. The trail is probably much busier on weekends.
Since pilots had been asking about how the landing zone ("carrier deck") looked for flying at Rampart, we drove out there and took some pictures. The lake was way down and there was plenty of room to land a hang glider in the usual place. There was even a wind streamer.
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| The "Carrier Deck" LZ at Rampart |
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