The Missing Link
Dwindling Forest - near Cle Elum, Washington
Having been off the trail for a little over two months, licking our physical and emotional wounds, we were finally ready to head back out on the Great American Rail Trail/Palouse to Cascades Trail. I knew I’d be a bit out of shape having had so much time off the bike, but I figured we could still do a 25 mile day without too many problems. There was now also the extra logistical hurdle of needing to keep Dogzilla’s chemotherapy medication in a refrigerator. My workaround for this was to find a 24 hour gas station and use one of their many coolers to keep his pills cold. It wasn’t the greatest plan, but it worked! Besides, it beat the alternative of potentially not riding at all for 3-9 months.
We got back on the trail where we’d left off in Easton, Washington. It’s a tiny fly speck of a town but at least the trailhead had a bathroom and cold running water that was safe to drink and since it was August and we were officially out of the Northwest Pacific Rainforest, water would start to come at a premium. It was pretty windy out which was going to slow us some, but we didn’t have anywhere to be so I wasn’t too concerned.
(click photos to enlarge and see descriptions)
The trail was mostly flat, which was nice, but the surface had started to change. It was becoming less of the nice, packed gravel surface we’d been riding on for the last 50 miles or so, but was instead starting to get just a little bit softer and have slightly larger gravel. I’d read that the trail starts to get worse east of Easton and that this trend continues all the way to Idaho some 250 miles away. Perhaps the wind and worse trail keeps people off of this section because we were alone most of the day. We did meet one man though who thought that the dog trailer was the coolest thing he had ever seen and even went so far as to take our picture so he could show his wife. I’m pretty sure this is the first time anyone has taken our picture and it caught me a little off guard or else I would have been smart enough to ask him to take a picture with my camera as well since it’s so hard to get shots of myself on the trail. Oh well, I’ll be ready for next time.
Our route more or less paralleled the Yakima River for the better part of the day as we headed toward the town of Cle Elum. The softer trail was sapping my energy a bit, but I knew there was a treat in store for us ahead, so I didn’t let it bother me. When we got to Cle Elum, we entered a small historic district that had the old Cle Elum depot and a couple of train cars as well.
As we got closer to the depot, it hit us, the smell of BBQ! We had made it to our lunch destination, Smokey’s Bar-B-Que. I treated the dogs and I to 1 lb of beef brisket and thought it would be the perfect little pick-me-up to help fight the wind and deteriorating trail conditions and finish out our day.
Having eaten more than our fair share of brisket, we set out on the trail to finish off our 25 mile days. Things were harder now as we all had full bellies and were heading straight into the wind. Plus, with the softer trail having taken more energy to navigate than I had expected, I was starting to want the day to end. Luckily, we soon came to a creek that was right next to the trail and easily accessible, so we stopped for a nice, long break to digest our lunches, let the dogs splash around a bit, and just enjoy the moment. When the break was over, we headed back to the car and called it a day.
Our next ride came the following weekend; I took off work early and had planned on making it a 3 and a half day weekend so that we could maximize our adventure time out on the trail. The half day was fairly uneventful as we had only planned to cover about 8 miles. The trail continued to be softer and rockier but it wasn’t a big deal since we were doing such a short day. We also didn’t see a single other person, which was perfect. At one point, we came upon a section of Palouse to Cascades Trail that was flooded to the point that there was several inches of standing water covering the trail. It was just deep enough to hit the bottom of the trailer as we tried to cross. Hitting the water with the trailer created a lot of drag for the few yards that we were in it, but thankfully the trailer itself is waterproof so the dogs didn’t get wet. I’m sure the dogs appreciated this.
We camped out that night and got an early start the next day; picking up Zilla’s chemo pills at the gas station. We then drove to the trailhead, unpacked everything, and when I went to hook the trailer to the bike, I realized something was wrong. The piece that connected the trailer to the bike was missing. I frantically searched the ground and the parking lot but to no avail. This meant that the piece had fallen off somewhere on the road between last night and that morning, during which time we’d driven ≈30 miles. My best guess was that all of the ruts we were hitting on one of the gravel roads had caused the piece to shake loose from the trailer and fall off.
In most cases, losing a piece to something isn’t a big deal; I would just contact the manufacturer and tell them what piece I was missing and they would send me a new one. Unfortunately, the company that built our trailer, Cycletote, had gone out of the business the previous year and the system they used to attach their trailer to a bicycle was unlike any other company’s system that we had seen. Knowing that this missing link might be the only one of its kind left, I was extremely motivated to try and find it as without it, we were dead in the water and our trip was over. I retraced our steps from the previous night, stopping every time I saw a promising piece of road debris. To make matters worse, the majority of our driving had been on Interstate 90, an extremely busy highway and very dangerous to walk on, so my ability to search it was limited by how much risk I was willing to take.
After 2 hours of searching, I had to come to terms with reality, the piece was gone and I was not going to find it; our bicycle touring adventure was over unless I could find a replacement for the unknown missing piece.
The Missing Link - Without it, we could go no further.
