Through the National Monument again

April 23, 2020

We leave John Day for Pullman a week from tomorrow. We’re down to 8 riding days, assuming the weather holds out for us, so we’re looking through our short list of new rides we want to take and old ones we most want to repeat. At the top of the list is the one we began with almost a month ago - the ride north from Picture Gorge to Kimberly, through the eastern part of the National Monument. Rachael insists on repeating this ride before we leave town.

It’s lightly raining, windy and coolish this morning, but it looks warmer and drier downriver by Dayville and Kimberly, at a thousand feet lower elevation. This looks like our best time to repeat this ride, so we hop in the car again and head west. On the way through Dayville we glare at the home of our tormenter, noting with satisfaction that no dogs are out today. Maybe it really was a rare aberration when we biked through.

It’s still drizzling in Dayville, but by the time we park the car just north of Picture Gorge the sky is overcast but dry. We unload the bikes and start pedaling north into a stiff but manageable headwind.

We’ve seen this spectacular road before so I won’t say much more about today. This time we generally stay close to each other since I’m not stopping as often for photos of the same landscape we’ve seen before. We continue biking a couple miles beyond Kimberly, still closely following the John Day - this road stays with the river and well behaved for almost another 30 miles, all the way to Service Creek, before climbing north into the mountains toward Fossil. We may be back though before we leave to ride this final stretch along the river. It’s on our short list, so hopefully it will fit in.

Heading north. The sky is mostly overcast, but improving.

It’s been nearly a month since we were here last, so hopefully not too soon to show you some of the same terrain. It looks a bit different under a grayer sky anyway.

A heritage structure in the National Monument.

We’re a bit further into the spring now and starting to see a bit of new color here and there.

There are so many subspecies and varieties of lupine, so who knows what this is? Possibly a variety Lupinus lepidus, the Prairie Lupine.

In the National Monument, in the Foree area I think.

From a distance, I was somewhat puzzled by this osprey pair. They look so uniform and almost cone-shaped, that I wasn’t sure if they were strange pieces of equipment at first.

Still in the Foree area, one of the most colorful stretches of the road.

Video soundtrack: Let it Slide, by Shawn Colvin

A first this year: bike tourists! These two are shuffling back to Buffalo, along with a third rider further ahead. They’re being held up a bit by their extra ballast, I suspect. The tail rider is carrying the extra six pack of Coors they couldn’t finish last night.

We ate lunch sitting at the base of this chalky roadside formation. We gave our shorts a good dusting off when it came time to go.

This pretty thing was growing at the top of the chalky wall above. A row of these flowers was growing all along the lip - the only place we saw them today.

Strapping in for the return ride. It’s still a bit too chilly to remove our coats, but won’t be before long. Having the wind at our backs makes all the difference.

Back at Picture Gorge, Rachael overshoots a bit in her perennial quest to round up her mileage.

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Ride stats today: 41 miles, 1,300’.

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