I’d lined up this 300K for Northwest Crank this year as I’d ridden some of the roads before last year and loved the scenery. I was anticipating finishing around sunset and was initially heading out without a jacket until I heard that I might run into snow (despite the sunny forecast). I raced back to my room to get my jacket and got back to find that everyone had left promptly at 6am, it was now 6:03am. I chased down the various people out there until I got to what I thought was the front and settled in there with Ken Bonner and Suzanne. I found out later that Chris Ragsdale was further out in front but I wouldn’t have caught him 🙂
The route headed up into the Pallisades on a road I hadn’t been along before which included a 7 mile stretch of gravel. I had to walk the bike up a couple of the steeper stretches as my wheels were spinning out on the loose gravel but all in all it went all right on my 25s. I was happy to back onto pavement but it was at this point that the wind started to pick up and impact us more. I still made reasonable time along this stretch to the Dry Falls Visitor Center for the first 100k as some of the stretch had a tailwind. I hit there in about 4 1/2 hours but then took around 13 hours for the next 200k, most of it into very strong headwinds.
We even had some snow pellets hitting us out at Banks Lake on our out and back leg from Coulee City. I rode most of this ride on my own as my knee was twinging a bit so I wasn’t pushing it to stay with any group that wasn’t going at a pace that my knee felt all right with.
As dark fell up on the plateau it started getting quite a bit colder and the fact that I was only going about 6 mph into the headwind pushing hard meant that it was going to be a long day. Susan was tracking me on my iPhone and I was able to call her from Waterville as I huddled behind a bale of turf trying to get some shelter from the wind before moving on.
I got in around 11:20 pm. Probably the toughest 300k I’ve done due to the wind.
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