Going Slowly
Rough Skinned Newt - Near Gardiner, WA
(click photos to enlarge and see descriptions)
A week had passed since our last ride and the temperatures had fallen to just above freezing, but knowing that Captain’s health was hanging in the balance and that we still had over 200 miles to go to complete the Olympic Discovery Trail, I was motivated to keep going, despite the December chill. Pulling the dogs and the trailer really kills any chance to ride fast as we average anywhere between about 6-8 miles an hour on flat, paved surfaces. This meant we realistically had many days to go to reach our goal of the Pacific Ocean in La Push. Such a slow speed might be infuriating to many cyclists, but it does have advantages; for starters, there is a lot less wind hitting you in the face on a cold day, so this made our December ride just a few degrees warmer. Also warming me up was the weight from the dogs and trailer; the additional ≈120 lbs requires a lot of extra effort to pull and so I warm up very quickly on rides and find that I can start a ride in shorts and a light sweatshirt and then strip down to a t-shirt within a mile or two of starting, even at freezing temperatures.
Interestingly, the next “section” of the ODT is non-existent. It isn’t that the trail turned into a section of road that needed to be followed to the next portion of the trail, it was that the road was deemed so dangerous that the ODT’s official website tells you to take a bus and gives you a link to the bus schedule! I debated trying the road anyhow, but decided it would be unfair to the dogs to risk their lives, so I put those few miles on the back burner for the time being and promised myself that we’d find a way to make it work later on so that we’d have completed a continuous line for our travels without leaving any gaps.
As such, our day started in Discovery Bay on a very short, paved section of trail that runs along the bay, passing a few old train cars that were converted into a marijuana dispensary, and then let out onto a quiet country lane paralleling the extremely busy Highway 101. The road less travelled used to be the old Highway 101 back in the day, but it was ultimately deemed too narrow and winding to be useful for modern transport and so it was replaced. I love roads like this because they tend to have no traffic on them since everybody wants to get where they are going as fast as possible and seldom take the side roads and go slowly. In fact, this particular side road was so forgotten that it had actually started growing moss!
Before long, our quiet country lane soon merged back into the busy Highway 101. To add insult to injury, it did so at a short hill that was so steep that I almost had to get off the bike and push. Instead, I powered through it, gasping for air with every turn of the pedals, and upon reaching the top, collapsed next to my bike for nearly 10 minutes, trying to recover. The hill itself had been no more than 30 feet tall, but the grade of the road was outrageous.
Having regained my breath, we rode along a thankfully wide shoulder of the insanely busy road. Highway 101 is the one and only road that connects the Olympic Peninsula to the rest of the state, so every car that comes out this way has to drive the 101 at some point. This meant that every breath we took was filled with choking exhaust from the cars and trucks that were whizzing by. I’ve always found that the smell of exhaust is much worse on a cold day and today was no different. I was more than happy when I saw the next side road that we were to get off on.
Once more, we were totally alone. The dense forest began to give way to cleared farm land with long views out to the Salish Sea. The only vehicle we encountered was a road cyclist who was easily going 3 times faster than we were. Clad in his full lycra suit like he was training for the Tour de France, this guy blew by us so fast that he couldn’t be bothered to say hello or raise a hand to wave as the added wind resistance might add 1/1000th of a second to his ride and cost him his personal record on this particular route. For a brief moment, I was envious of his speed and fantasized about how quickly we would finish the Olympic Discovery Trail if we could go that fast, but then, not 100 yards later, I saw a tiny animal crossing the road at a nearly imperceptible pace, a newt!
The newt’s camouflage blended him in almost perfectly with the road. Had I been going any faster, like Lance Armstrong was a few moments earlier, I would have missed him entirely, or worse, I wouldn’t have missed him and he’d have been flattened by one of our four tires. It was at this point that I really began to appreciate the advantages of slow travel. The point was to be out in the world, experiencing it with my two best friends. Why the hell would I want to rush through that?
Red denotes the portion we temporarily bypassed while figuring out a safer option.
