Day two of riding began — stiff, cold and faded. Lake Crescent shivered under a light but constant breeze. Storm King was wreathed in drizzly clouds. We packed slowly after a leisurely breakfast followed by very good instant coffee (thanks to Kelly) and a certain amount of sitting in our ultralight camp chairs, which we enjoyed but also thought we should probably use since we’d packed them. (The chairs, by the way, are a minor marvel. Weighing barely over one pound and packing down very small, they support even a 200-pounder like me, as long as they’re on a vaguely flat surface.)
Such were the distractions of the morning, but we were off finally before about 9:30 am. “I guess we are 9:30 people,” we said to each other on the way past Devil’s Punchbowl, a formation on the far northeast corner of Lake Crescent’s shore. Almost immediately we began to climb a ridge toward the day’s first challenge — the 26-mile Olympic Adventure Trail, a singletrack route across a shoulder of the Olympic Mountains between the lake and the Elwah River drainage, a few miles short of Port Angeles. The trail wound through what seemed like an endless series of forested valleys, clearcuts through switchbacks and fun descents. At times we had a broad view of the Straight of Juan de Fuca, Vancouver Island and Victoria. At one point we came around a tight turn and surprised a large group of adolescent bald eagles who propelled themselves over the cliff with thumping wings. The trail peaked and dove over several 500 foot ridges so that our total climb for the day already exceeded 3000 feet by the time we rolled into Port Angeles in time for a very late lunch. We were scratched up, hungry, wind-blasted and happy.
After loading up an entire large pizza and acquiring a vast quantity of energy snacks and a pair of warm gloves (the descents were proving to be a bit chillier than anticipated) we hastened toward Sequim and its famous rain shadow. On the upside, the wind picked up spectacularly and began to propel us at 150% of our normal speed directly east. On the downside, a piece of useless plastic shielding (which really I should have rid myself of before setting out) slid out of position on my rear wheel and required us to borrow a set of snips from a nearby Toyota dealer. On the further downside, our rather leisurely breakfast was now catching up with us, and we pushed ourselves to benefit from the 10 miles of tailwind-assisted travel before we turned south back into the mountains and tackled the final 15 miles of the day, all of which was very steeply up.
We crossed 101 short of Sequim, hit up the last convenience store we’d see in quite a while, and began the climb as evening began to set in. The slog up the ridge toward the Dungeness River Valley was a painful one, with sustained grades of 8-10%. It was cold when we finally turned off of the pavement into a dark maze of mud road that took us up a slight rise and then down a frigid descent into the dark shadows of the rainforest valley. It was dusk as we crossed the river at the gorge’s bottom and labored up once more over one final shoulder of land tilted as if in insult at a ridiculous grade. The Dungeness roared below as it gathered voice for the coming night. We arrived at one final promontory where at last we could look back up into the upper reaches of the valley, back into the heart of the Olympics.
There, over a rock shelf of distant mountainside far above us a second river flowed. It was a river of cloud which seemed to spill over the shelf as if issuing from some unseen reservoir in the sky down into the blackness of the forested valley below. At night in the nearby Dungeness Forks State Park campground, this very same river of air would wash over us as we slept, dampening everything we wore and owned, creeping into the cells of our bodies. But for now it hung, suspended, flowing over and progressively hiding the mountainside, a slow-mo version of a science fair paper-maché volcano, except that the volcano is as big as the world and the dry ice vapor has become and endless stream of cloud. And the sun, long retired behind the bulk of the range, transmitted a distant glow to the cloud-river’s edges and peaks — pink gold, pale yellow, dark blue and white.
Kelly and I stared back up the valley for quite a while, not wanting to let the moment or the vision go. The cloud-cauldron boiled over high above us, and I felt suddenly very small and temporary — a guest in the realm of the mountains as they extended their cold embrace over the world for one more night.