Day 17 – Bikeglamping!

Are you a camper, or are you a glamper?  Bare bones, or do you carry the luxuries?  There are many styles of camping, and bikepacking almost always falls far from the glamping side.

You have to keep things light or you can’t ride trail, and it’s just not fun.  Services are often few and far between, making food and water weight significant too.

But sometimes, just sometimes, you can camp off the bike and it feels like you have *more* that you need.  You have the luxuries.  All is right in the world.  You’re happy.

So it is tonight, as we set up our tent in the warm and perfect air along the bank of the McKenzie River.  An idyllic little spot just off the river trail, with plenty of open soft dirt.  The crystal clear river is rushing and already almost lulling us to sleep. 

We just enjoyed an evening soak in Belknap Springs, then rode all of one mile to get to camp.  We’re warm, dry and relaxed.  There was a store maybe 5 or 6 miles back where we resupplies on various luxury items, mainly of liquid form.  Things you’d never think of hauling for multiple days.  But the trail to get here is so flat and so effortless, it doesn’t matter.

Plus we’ve got a tent, we’ve got camp shoes (running shoes), we have a stove for hot meals and drinks.  Infinite water nearby.  Warm, did I mention it is warm?

It is not often all these things come together for such a nice night.  Ahhhh…. bikepacking.  Or bike-glamping.

OK, it’s not all glamour and roses.  We awoke to a bit of a clammy and cold morning, up above 4000 feet near the Pat Saddle trailhead.  We had several hundred feet to climb to get there, which was a good warm up.

Bikes were ditched.  Shoes laced up.  We started running.  Or, we ran when the thimbleberry and bear grass allowed, which was most of the time.  We cursed a bit at the fog and heavy cloud cover, knowing we were heading towards an amazing spot to view this corner of the world: Olallie Lookout.

The views were not totally hidden, but definitely not what they could have been.  Still, there was an eerie spookiness to the old and deteriorating structure at the top.  A relic from another time, now lost inside a Wilderness area.  The run back was fun, racking up a tad more than 7 miles on the feet.

We ate an early lunch and set our expectations appropriately low for what followed — an adventure ride on the Olallie Trail.  We knew that people regurly ride or shuttle, part of this trail.  But I had seen postings of trail work, mentions of being epic’d and high adventure.  Best to keep things realistic, especially when starting out with a hefty climb.

Said climb was “surprisingly rideable”, in that we rode probably 98% of it, smiling the whole way.  Once we gained the ridge the character of the challenge ahead became apparent — thimbleberry and bear grass — and LOTS of it.

Based on the sheer number of sticks my front tire broke as I pedaled along the next 6 or 7 miles of trail, we were the first to ride this section this season.  The overgrowth was impressive and the trail below was rarely visible.  That would normally spell disaster for an endeavor such as this, but the designer of this section understood the meaning of the word CONTOUR.  Not only that, they seemed perhaps religiously adherent to the concept.  There were no steep grades, and usually a decent bench underfood.  So, even if we were constantly getting slapped by bear grass stalks, and rolling over thimbleberry, we were still ROLLING, and not walking.

It made for some really good low effort adventure riding.  I really can’t believe more people don’t ride it.

When the Oleary trail junctioned in, as well as a shuttle-able road, the growth disappeared and the trail shot down. 

Down, down, down. Rally, rally, rally.  Smooth, smooth, smooth.  Like a descent out of a dream, it was just primo trail.

A brief section on roads took us to the deli and store at McKenzie Bridge, where we sandwiched up and switched into glamping mode.

Bikepacking, maybe it could always be this good?