Passed the test!

(Susan here, writing Friday night. I won’t be able to upload pictures and post until Saturday afternoon, I imagine.)

Triumphantly, we biked over Washington Pass today and are camping tonight at the Colonial Creek NPS campground on Diablo Lake, 10 mi. east of Newhalem. For all the work we did today, we’re only 500 feet lower than where we started this morning in Winthrop. Tomorrow we’ll hit up Sedro-Woolley; Sunday we’ll bike to Ebey’s Landing after hitting the coast and catch the ferry down to Port Townsend; Monday we’ll bike to Bainbridge and get the ferry into downtown Seattle for our last day.

This landscape is just stunning and it amazed me the whole ride up that it is even passable by bicycle at all. It’s also amazing how much the environment here on the west side of the Cascades is worlds away from the desert valley we were in yesterday–our campground is lush and green; all the trees are dripping with moss, and it’s a small miracle that it actually didn’t rain at all today, other than a few drips at the pass.

I’ll let the pictures in chronological order speak for themselves:

I am skeptical about the utility of this advice:

Snow! :

A lot more snow! (this is almost at the pass) :

We came from that little road down there! :

Shortly before the following picture was taken, Brice stepped off the road to go pee in the trees and promptly fell chest-deep into a snowbank. He refused to hand me up the iPhone to document the occasion, I can’t imagine why.

After Washington, this little one was nothing:

We didn’t take nearly as many pictures on the way down because it’s a bummer to stop when you’re coasting like a fiend. Here’s one, of Ross Lake:

Our campsite and Diablo Lake behind it: