Cycle San Juan

This past weekend, I cycled around the San Juan Islands with three of my friends. We packed up our bikes on and in my van, along with a few days worth of gear, caught a ferry in Anacortes and started our journey on Lopez island where we stayed with a friend of Kirk's.

We arrived on Lopez around 3:30 and started riding around 4:30. We rode Lopez island in a counter-clockwise fashion, stopping at the Lopez Bike shop where you can get a blood transfusion and EPO for the rock bottom price of $25. The owner told us he keeps his costs down by using the same needle for every customer.

At the southern end of the island, near agate beach, we came across the sign above. I was the only person in our group brave enough to wear my spandex from beginning to end.

Kirk is an agate hound and snagged five or six in just a few minutes. We finally had to drag him away...

We rode by this scene in a nearby harbor. Notice that every post has a gull or heron sitting on it.
We rode a little over 30 miles the first day, got back to the house at dusk and headed out for dinner. It's rather hard to find a place to eat after 8pm on the island.

The next morning we walked our bikes onto the ferry for Friday Harbor and San Juan island. We dropped our gear at the Wayfarer's Rest grabbed some lunch and headed out for our tour of the island. We rode up to Roche Harbor where we marvelled at the decadence of the giant yachts in the marina. Kirk and I talked to a man from Port Townsend who was waiting for some friends that were looking at a four million dollar yacht. "They have more money than sense." he told us.

There is a 19 acre sculpture garden nearby. Kirk just had to stop and bang the gong ... it doesn't sound so good.

We headed south from Roche harbor and had a snack at the lovely Lime Kiln look-out and Light house. This section of road was my favorite of the trip. Absolutely gorgeous. We completed our circle of San Juan again with about 30 miles of riding for the day. We ate dinner in Friday Harbor and Mark and I went to see The Bourne Ultimatum at the Palace Theatre. Kirk and Alan were fast asleep by the time we got back to Wayfarer's Rest.

On day three, we packed up everything (we were carrying enough gear for a couple of days) and headed to Orcas island. We got off the ferry and started off. The first mile and a half is mostly up hill. We reached the top of the first big hill, all commented that it really sucked carrying so much extra weight and then noticed that we were standing next to a nice little forested area ... hmmm, caching anyone? We took absolutely everything we didn't need and stashed it in the woods. Much easier going with ten pounds less to lug up these hills.

We had been debating climbing Mount Constitution on Orcas. We knew it would be tough and after two days of riding we were all a little tired. When we reached the turn-off for the Mountain, Mark said, "I think we should do it." "Okay, we'll just go as far as we can." And off we went.

The summit of Mount Constitution is at an elevation of 2,407 feet. The road to the top traverses 4.7 miles. About half a mile up the hill, Alan decided to go check out some water falls. He wasn't sure if he'd make it, but told us to go on without him. He has been riding the least of all of us. We were amazed that he rode so well the first two days, but knew he was spent. Kirk had continued ahead of Mark and I.

We caught-up to Kirk after another half a mile or so and I didn't want to stop, so I kept going. I think Mark stopped when he came up to Kirk. I kept chugging along, but after a little more than half a mile I was begging for a good place to pull off the road. It's a rather narrow, winding road, and I didn't want to stop on the road itself. After about a mile, I finally came to this view point. It's a little more than half way up. I sat down, took some photos and started eating an energy bar when Mark and Kirk showed up. Kirk was totally drenched.

All of us were utterly spent at this point. I begged Kirk for one of his GU packs. We took these photos and decided we'd let everyone assume we'd made it to the top. We were getting ready for the descent when a cyclist came down from the top and stopped at the view point.

We all thought he looked REALLY fresh for having just climbed to the top, only to discover that his mother had driven him up and he was just riding down! He told us that we were nearly through the hardest part of the climb and that it leveled off near the top. WHAT?! Damn. We knew instantly that we had to keep going at that point.

We climbed back on our bikes and started up again. My legs were NOT happy about going up, especially when they were ready to go down, but I suffered through it and after almost a mile, the road did level off and it was almost bearable. Both Mark and I had checked our odometers at the bottom. All of the mileage markers had been over-stating distance for the whole trip for us, usually by large amounts. We were both eyeing our odometers as we went up. After we passed more than 4.7 and were no where near the top, I yelled back to him, "Where the hell is the summit?" Luckily it wasn't too far off.


We climbed to the top of the tower at the summit and knew that the twenty miles back to the ferry were really going to suck.

I have to say that the descent was a lot of fun. We caught up to a camper going 20mph down the hill. He finally pulled off at the view point where we almost turned back. We passed Alan less than a quarter of a mile down the hill from there. I couldn't believe he made it so far.

We trudged back to the ferry and grabbed our stuff along the way. Luckily, it was still there. Alan was leading us much of the way and was first to the top of the final hill. We grabbed the ferry back to Lopez, had a great dinner, crashed and caught the ferry back to the mainland the next morning. Whew.