Over the top

of Sherman Pass!

We made it the 4 miles from Kettle Falls to the base of the 23 mile, 4000 foot climb around 8:30, crossing the Columbia “river” in the process. We’re north of Grand Coulee right now so it’s really just a big long lake:

We started up the hill and it promptly started raining, continuing with varying intensity for the next 3.5 hours. It’s pretty easy to stay warm while moving, but we had to take very short breaks to not get chilled while stopped. We kept up slow but steady progress until the rain finally let up with a few miles to go. Unfortunately between my fogged glasses and the rain washing sweat into my eyes (easily the worst part of biking in rain) I didn’t get to see much scenery, but I’m pretty sure there were a lot of trees and some clouds.

The last few miles were quite steep so we stopped to take some photos:

We made the summit, just over 5500ft elevation, ~4.5 hours after starting, and rapidly put on another layer or two for the descent, since we would be basically sitting in a cold 25mph wind for 17 miles. The sun broke through a bit but there were only a few nice vistas:

Now we’re chilling in Republic WA, contemplating the weather and seeing if we’ll be able to ride tomorrow – we’ll decide after we wake up since the forecast can’t decide between torrential rain or maybe just showers. The next segment has a shorter climb but a very long descent, so it would be pretty miserable in the rain. We feel pretty ready to ride though; today was hard but manageable and all the hills are shorter from here.