Crater Lake Bike Tour

Crater Lake — Thursday September 5, 2002 | Next

Another "rest" day. A lot of people, even some of the novice riders, wanted to ride around the 33-mile rim road, a challenging route up and down the side of the mountain. I took it easy to baby my knees. We rode clockwise and stopped at many of the overlooks. Thankfully the wind had died down and the air was clear, but we either were grinding uphill or screaming downhill so I constantly was adjusting my layers of clothing. The color of the lake was not the electric blue we expected. The water did have some areas of deep blue and teal, and the colors changed constantly. Near the junction road, one of the "senior citizens" we'd seen in the lodge the night before zoomed by on a bike sporting a Bike Virginia license plate. I wanted to ask him about Bike Virginia, but we didn't catch the guy and his buddy til Cleetwood Cove. He and his friends turned around at that point and it was the last we saw of them.

As an aside, Bike Virginia is held every year during the end of June in a different part of the state. We've ridden the tour 7 times. Surprisingly we found out that Tim has also ridden Bike Virginia, although we'd never run into him. It's a great trip if you don't mind riding, eating, and sharing sanitary facilities with 1000-1500 cyclists for five days. It's very well organized, and is usually very scenic (of course we may be a bit biased).

We rode up the hill to Cloudcap, one of the highest points on the rim and where we hoped to have lunch, but the leaders decided to have lunch at the Pinnacles instead. Cloudcap was too cold for comfort. Something told me to grab my fleece jacket from the van, and I was glad to have the extra warmth as we experienced a frigid downhill stretch from Cloudcap. Things warmed up as we descended.

We had a 6 mile downhill to the Pinnacles (which translates to a 6 mile climb back to the rim). At the lower elevation, we warmed up considerably in the sunshine and didn't really need the hot tomato soup whipped up by our fearless leaders. We shared our meal with some voracious yellow jackets that must have had a nest among the hoodoos. I opted for the van shuttle back to the rim road with Jaz, Mitch and Mike. Bruce rode back up the spur with Mark. We all came back together at the viewpoint for the Phantom Ship. Bruce and I stopped at the main visitor's center and rode the last hard climb back to the Lodge with Pete. After cleaning up we walked over to the gift store. Mitch had correctly observed that the store had plenty of tchotchkes. We picked a few souvenirs from the mass produced selection of items. Dinner again at the Crater Lake Lodge.