After Rosalia, Dogzilla and I had to head back home for a few days so that I could work. This actually worked out quite well too as it turned out that my friend, Jacob Ashton, was cycling through the area near my house during that time and since I hadn’t seen him in several years, this gave me the perfect chance to offer him a place to stay for a few days and to catch up. Without stealing too much of his thunder, Jacob is an extremely well-travelled cyclist who has ridden on and across pretty much every continent except Antarctica. He was in the process of finishing up a round-the-world trip when Covid hit, so that screwed up his plans and he had to return to the US. Jacob is a pretty extreme guy who pushes his body to the absolute limit. His ride by my house was a training run to prepare him for “The Tour Divide” which is a marathon bike ride from Canada to the Mexico border along the world’s longest off pavement cycling route and is the equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest from sea level to summit 7 times! If you’d like to learn more about him, I highly suggest checking out his first book - Until the Road Ends.

Jacob stayed for a couple days and was able to get a couple of relaxing days in to rest from his long ride and we got to catch up, play tourist in my area, drink a few beers, and muse about life. All in all, it was a great visit. We even got to do a very short ride together as when we started, it was obvious that Jacob was in much better shape than I and since he was on a time crunch to ride to the ocean and then turn around to head up to Canada for his race, he didn’t have a lot of time to spare at my super slow pace.

(click photos to learn more)

About 2 weeks later, Zilla and I returned to the trail and picked up where we’d left off in Rosalia. We continued east along the Great American Rail Trail through the farmland of the Palouse. We’d left the forest again, but were definitely not back in the desert. This area was very verdant as Pine Creek was prominent here and helped to nourish the soil. We saw a number of flowers along the way and even got lucky enough to watch a coyote hunting in the distance.

The trail itself was in pretty decent shape though in a few spots, the old train trestles were not in service so we either had to do bypasses on a nearby quiet country road or at other times by riding down the steep hillsides into the bottom of the gully and then back up on the other side. One of the bypasses wasn’t very well marked though and caused us to get a little off track before getting to the beginning of the trestle and finding that it was out with no navigable way down into the gully. So we had to backtrack a little bit, but it wasn’t very far.

The only aggravating part of the day came in the form of 2 Jeeps. The trail is closed to motorized vehicles as it is supposed to be for pedestrians only (hikers/bikers/horses) and has numerous signs telling people that cars aren’t allowed. There are even gates at all of the road crossings to prevent cars from driving on the trail. Unfortunately though, there are a number of private farm roads that cross the trail and so the locals all know where they can easily get around the gates and drive illegally on the trail. Well just our luck, as we were riding through a long rock cut that offered no opportunity for Zilla and I to get out of the way, 2 Jeeps came flying up the trail from behind us. Thankfully, I heard them coming and was able to position us on the trail in a way so that we would be as visible as possible and not get hit by the Jeeps coming around a blind curve. Ultimately, they had to slow down and wait for Zilla and I to find a safe spot to pull over to let them pass. In hindsight, I probably should have gotten their license plates and reported them, but by the time I got into cell range, they would have been long gone and it would have been their word versus my word.

We didn’t let this ruin our day though. We were in absolutely beautiful country and something wonderful was about to happen! I was pushing the bike and letting Zilla walk next to it while I was talking to him as I do sometimes. Well, for some reason, I thought about how we had held a memorial for Captain on the trail a few weeks earlier and how while I was devastated, he walked up to her memorial and peed on it, causing me to break out in the best laugh I think I've ever had. Well, right as I was telling Zilla about this, the sky opened up and it began to confetti hail on us. The only other time I can recall having ever seen confetti hail was when Zilla and I had crossed under the Columbia Plateau Trail and how it had felt like Captain had sent the hail as a way to celebrate that milestone with us. Well now, she was sending it as a way to get back at Zilla for having peed on her memorial. Not in a vindictive way, Captain wasn’t like that, but she was sending this confetti hail as a joke as she knew how much Zilla hated getting rained on, or snowed on, etc. It was such a special feeling to know that Captain was still out there and doing what she could to still be part of the family. It was a perfect end to our day!

Old Friends

News From the West

Rosalia