The Time of Your Life
“It’s something unpredictable, but in the end is right. I hope you had the time of your life.”
-Good Riddance, Green Day
Shortly after leaving Lind, WA and crossing under Highway 395, the trail to Ralston, WA got bad in a hurry. Smaller gravel gave way to larger stones which made for a bone jarring ride for Captain and Zilla, so we slowed our speed to right around 3mph and resigned ourselves to the snail’s pace that we would be progressing at. But going slowly isn’t a bad thing as it allows you more time to appreciate your surroundings and pick up little details that you might have missed otherwise, in this case lots of old railroad debris. It also gives the dogs plenty of opportunities to walk and it tends to lead to less wear and tear on bike parts as there isn’t as much rough, jarring motion. The only real problem I have with rough conditions is that it causes me to have to try and adjust our start and stop points on the fly.
Slowing our progress even further were a number of locked gates that we’d have to stop at, unlock, open, cross through, close, relock, and begin moving again. It was shaping up to be a long day…
(click photos to enlarge and see descriptions)
While doing the typical song and dance at one such gate, a small gust of wind came up and was just enough to knock the bike over as I fiddled with the lock. This had happened many times before, so while annoying, I wasn’t surprised. That is, until I picked the bike up and saw that the trailer didn’t shift with the movement of the bike. Then, to my horror, I saw the reason why. The piece that attaches the “Rod End: Female Studded, 52100 Steel Spherical, Right Hand, 3/8"-24 Thread Size, Carbon Steel” to the rear bike rack had sheared in two making it impossible to connect the bike to the trailer. We were dead in the water, 3 miles from the car. Not only that, but with Cycletote being out of business, if I couldn’t find a way to fix this broken piece, the entire trailer would be useless and our journey would be officially over. In short, this was a catastrophic failure and the fate of our adventure hung in the balance….
The force and angle of the fall had been enough to shear in half one of the 2 small bolts which clamped the trailer to the bike. I had spare bolts, but because it had sheared off in the hole, it would need to be drilled out. This is not a repair I can do on the trail so our day was done, minus the long push, literally, to get back to the car, 3 miles away. At the time, our location on the trail seemed totally insignificant and hardly noteworthy, but it would wind up being a monumental landmark as it marked the furthest east that our trio would ever ride.
We didn’t have many good options to get back to the car: 1) Walk 3 miles while I pushed the bike with one hand through extremely rough terrain and pulled the trailer behind me with the other hand (easier said than done) 2) Ride the bike 3 miles back to the car, leaving it and the dogs there while I walked back 3 miles to the trailer and then pulled the trailer 3 miles 3) walk a few hundred yards to the nearest deserted road and try to hitchhike back to the car, even though we’d only seen 2 cars on the road in the last hour or so. Ultimately, I went with option 1 as I prefer to be self sufficient and didn’t feel like walking 9 miles and leaving the dogs in the car for 6 of those miles as there was no way Captain could walk that distance and the rough trail would tear up Zilla’s paws pretty bad if he had to walk that far.
The team headed back to the car at a very slow pace, taking frequent breaks to rest my arms/hands as there was no good way to try and grip both the bike and the trailer at the same time. After approximately an hour, we had covered roughly 1 of the 3 miles. Around this time, as I was walking, the grip I had on the trailer slipped and the piece I was holding onto fell into the rear rack of my bike and kind of got stuck. This gave me a great idea. If there was enough friction to hold that piece in place, I could try to ride slowly and assuming we didn’t hit any large bumps the piece could act as a makeshift attachment to hold the trailer in place. The only problem, as we slowly moved along, the trailer would slide back and forth across the rear rack, rubbing away at the paint which meant it would rub away at the metal as well. Thankfully, I only needed it to hold for 2 miles, so I thought it was worth the risk of breaking the attachment piece even more.
To my surprise, it actually held together fairly well and we were able to slowly make our way back towards the car without further incident. It’s not something I’d ever want to have to do again, but now I know we have an emergency plan in place should that bolt break again in the future.
After getting back home, I contacted a local machine shop to see if they could help fix the broken trailer piece. The man I spoke with was more than willing to help, so I dropped by to get the stripped bolt removed. As we got to talking, it turned out that he was one of the co-owners of the shop and incredibly, his father had actually helped build the Palouse to Cascades Trail and was one of the first people to traverse it on horseback! Considering the trail was nearly 200 miles from where we were standing, this was quite the coincidence! Anyhow, the shop and team did an amazing job! Not only did they pull out the sheared bolt and then relined the hole to make it sturdier, but they had also done an engineering drawing of my broken piece and came up with ideas of how to make the piece stronger, and they even reengineered the oversized replacement piece I had purchased from Cycletote when they went out business. Thanks to them, a piece that had been too large was now shimmed to the perfect size and would act as a viable back-up instead of being totally useless. I cannot say enough good things about my experience with them. Normally, I would provide a link and name the company and man, but he requested to remain anonymous as the shop doesn’t typically do general machining but instead works in a very specialized industry, so the fact that they chose to help me at all is quite incredible!
With the trailer back together and better than ever, we were once more ready to head back out for adventure on the trail and excitingly, the Beverly Bridge which we had been forced to skip do to a construction delays was set to open in a few days after roughly 8 months of delays, so we’d be able to knock out that last 2 miles of trail and reconnect our entire journey into one continuous line across Washington and I would be able to fulfil my promise to Captain and Zilla that I had made so many months earlier to get them to the Columbia River.
And that’s exactly how it would play out if life were a Hollywood movie, but it’s not, “it’s something unpredictable, but in the end is right. I hope you had the time of your life.”
“The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality.”
- Emily Dickinson
(click below for video)
