Last year, Tony and I did the Starvation Mountain loop in Winthrop, Washington. It was a wonderful ride, and one that rekindled my interest in mountain biking. By my lights, it was damned difficult. I wanted to try it again this year to see if it was as great as I thought last year. The numbers: it’s about 26 miles long, with about 4500’ of climbing. Of the 26 miles, 5 are a fire road climb, about 4 miles is abandoned doubletrack, all the rest is singletrack. The way it’s laid out is that you start at about 2500’ altitude and climb for 4 miles on very buff singletrack. Almost exactly as mile 4 ends, you cross a fire road and miles 5 and 6 miles are on more singletrack, but this one has 4 seriously steep/sandy “pitches.” When you pop out of that singletrack section, you take 5 miles of fire road to the top of Starvation Mtn (6600’). You then ride along the ridge line of Starvation Mtn on the abandoned doubletrack, climbing 400 more feet to about 7000’. This part is sort of reminiscent of Repack on Mt. Tam, minus the ruts – it has the rocks and the steepness. (For the record, I haven’t encountered a rut anywhere in this area. Catherine attributed it to the soil type – she had a name for it. But, to coin a phrase, buff singletrack by any other name . . . ) Finally, at mile 12, you point your bike downhill and it just stays that way for the entire ride. The first three miles downhill are, well, eclectic in nature. At mile 15, it turns into pure singletrack all the way to the car. The top 5-6 miles of this singletrack are why you ride mtn bikes. After that, things take a turn for the more . . . absorbing, we agreed to call it. The trail is really sandy, narrow, although not insanely narrow, and terribly exposed to a several hundred foot drop. It’s not a complete air drop, that is, your wheel would touch a few points on it’s way down, but once over the edge, the consequences would be dire. After about five miles of that, the trail drops back into the trees and you ride back on the same mile you rode out on. So that’s the ride. Catherine, of WOMBATS fame, came up to join me in Winthrop for three days. On her first day here, we did the Sun Mountain trails, which are a perfect way to start any weekend. That got her into a receptive mood, so I suggested we give Starvation Mountain a try on Sunday. Even though the weather was a little iffy (Winthrop is about 60 miles from the Canadian border – Labor Day Weekend is entering the transitional weather zone), we set off for the trailhead at Beaver Creek campground. After navigating some of the worst washboard roads in existence, we parked, organized ourselves and took off. It was way better, actually, than I had remembered. I guess because the population density is so low in this area, bikes haven’t been pitched off all the good singletrack. From riding in the Bay Area, I’ve built up a mental connection that if it’s singletrack that’s bike legal, it’s (a) not really singletrack and/or (b) bodaciously steep and/or (c) frighteningly rutted out. Not true in the hinterlands of Microsoft country – Catherine and I spent most of our time in low/low, and walked a little, but most of it was rideable. Anyhow, we took off from the trailhead and immediately hit singletrack. It was sandy at low points, but doable. We climbed steadily along the steep bank that Lightening Creek has cut along 18” wide singletrack. We crossed several tributary creeks, but someone had placed rocks spaced at step distance across all of them, so we were able to cross with dry feet. Which was good, since it was getting colder. There were only a couple of parts that were totally unrideable – two sections that were 6 inches deep in sand and just about straight uphill – it was a grunt to walk up them, much less ride them. At four miles, just as we were getting to the second section of singletrack climb, we met a group of about 8 people going downhill. They had been ferried up. I can’t lie, we immediately decided they were Microsofties – everyone in the group but two guys at the end were really wobbly on their bikes, all the bikes were Trek and Specialized top end dual suspensions, all the pedals were clipless, all the shoes absolutely clean, and all the socks blazingly white. Anyhow, they were impressed that we were climbing up what they were going down. We were horrified that they were going to descend what we had just climbed. We crossed the fire road and started up the next segment of singletrack. It was more aggressive. There were no long stretches where we had to push our bike, but there were several parts where we had to really grunt, or where small rock gardens knocked us off our bikes. That said, we really climbed well and made it through several segments that I thought would knock me, at least, off my bike. We stopped to regroup after the first pitch and noticed that it was raining a little. We stopped at the top of the second climb and it seemed to be raining a little harder. Actually, it was at this point, that Catherine identified the precipitate as hail. But it wasn’t hard. Yet. We continued to the top of the climb. By the time we reached the fire road, it was hailing steadily. We decided to not continue on our ride, since that would mean climbing into bad weather. For some reason, we were both spooked about descending on the singletrack, I guess because of the exposure and the sandy parts, so, without reference to the maps, we decided that the car was probably pretty close via the fire road, so we turned our bikes downhill and took off. It continued to hail, so we were bombarded with ice pellets as we descended. For some reason, Catherine really fixated on the fact that it kept hitting her nose. I noticed that when it hit the Moots, it made a really nice gong-like noise, yet another reason that Titanium is superior to alternative materials, and one that I’ve never heard anyone else mention. Anyhow, we flew down hill – that is, until, we turned up hill. This pattern repeated itself several times in our carward journey. As I noted earlier, we had ridden a total of 6 miles when we turned down the fire road. When we pulled up to the car, I had 21 miles on my odometer and my guess is that we had done another 1000’ of climbing. Great bail out, eh? This experience only convinced me that I needed to do this ride, sealing Wayne’s fate. We took Catherine to the airport on Monday (after a short singletrack exploration ride), but on Tuesday Wayne and I set out to do the ride. This time when we got to the six mile point, it was raining instead of hailing and it was an hour later, so once again, we made the mature decision and decided to go home and drink beer. However, having tried the fire road approach and found it to be flawed, we decided to return on the singletrack. Good call. The singletrack was bliss. Actually, the sandy sections that I was most worried about were the most fun – the sand slowed us down enough so that we could just point our bike straight downhill. In some cases, as on the long sandy stretch, we actually had to pedal down the hill. Anyhow, it was a blast. So that sealed not only Wayne’s fate, but our friend Mike’s. Mike is a mountain climbing friend from Seattle who joined us for a couple of days. Wayne and I talked about it and we decided that even though Mike doesn’t ride as regularly as we do, he is generally fit and will optimistically throw himself into any adventure, so he’d be up for it. The plan was that I would leave early and do the first climb (2200’) and Wayne and Mike would meet me at the point where our previous rides had been aborted. I got to the meeting point early, having made a great climb. Wayne and Mike drove up about 15 minutes after I arrived and off we went. The only fly in the ointment was that Mike was recovering from a cold, so he was a little handicapped. So we took off up the fire road slowly. Actually, we made pretty good time up the fire road, climbing slowly but really steadily. At 11 miles, we turned off onto the ridge. We stopped for the view, which was spectacular. We could see several really impressive snow covered peaks, including Bonanza Peak, the highest non-volcanic peak in Washington – it’s handy having a climber along with you. We then went along the ridgeline – it was not fun. It was rocky, sort of like Mt. Tam, so we kind of bounced from place to place. It wasn’t horrible on the climb, although we were all ready for the climbing to be over, but the descent on this part was intimidating. Mike and I sort of hated it, but Wayne was in pig heaven. He was flying down through the rocks, jumping over ditches, crashing into logs, etc. About mile 13, we ran into a herd of cows arrayed completely across the path. Due to the nature of the terrain, having to slow down for the cows made the descent even spookier because we couldn’t use our momentum. So first Wayne got up close to them and used the East Bay “Hssst!” technique. The cows were interested in him, but didn’t move. Mike decided he could do better. He went flying up behind them and did a fine Bruce Willis imitation “Yippie Ki Yay Ki O!” About the thirteenth time he yelled and charged them, the cows sort of stampeded. This was okay by us, but there were stragglers behind us, and they stampeded too, so we had to dodge flying cows until they all got past. This is particularly difficult when you are convulsed by laughter and performing a technical descent on a mountain bike. The cows finally found another pasture and moved off the path, so we went on at a significantly higher rate of progress. Soon after we passed the cows, we hit The Sand Road, which I remembered from last year. This is a WIDE path, about 6% downhill covered several inches deep with sand. It’s on a wide bowl, so there is no exposure at all. It was a blast, sort of like skiing in powder – just keep your front wheel unweighted and steer by leaning. Good fun. Anyhow, we went blasting down through the sand. I got to the bottom first and stopped for a call of nature. By the time I got back from the trees, I looked back and Mike and Wayne were standing under a tree with a couple of signs on it, chatting. I waved them down to where I was and we kept going. We emerged into this huge sandpile with two main trails taking off from it through a large meadow. The map said that we took a sharp left at Beaver Meadow so we took the left one, even though it was not a sharp left. We followed it out for awhile and it was definitely a planned trail – it had cuts through several logs and the trail was in excellent condition, but it went seriously up – which I didn’t remember at all. So we went back to the sand pile and found the next trail. It followed a stream, as we were supposed to, but the trail wasn’t what I remembered either – it was seriously sunken with lots of roots. And it didn’t go downhill as quickly as I remembered. t was overcast, starting to rain and it was getting late. This is serious stuff when the temps are falling to the 30s overnight. We decided to go back to the sandpile once more and look for trails that took off sharply left. If we didn’t find any, we’d backtrack – up through the sand and the rocky drops and down the fireroad. We didn’t find any more trails, so we headed back up, none of us too excited about the prospect of climbing the two or three miles out of the meadow, particularly through the sand. However, as we rode, we all saw the signs I had noticed, this time going close enough to read them. What they said was “Lightening Creek Trailhead this way”. Ha! So off we took. The first half mile was scary – rocky and exposed and narrow singletrack. Mike appeared to be close to explosion, although even if he killed me, he was going to have to get down the hill some way. Fortunately, after the half mile, the trail turned into a boomer’s dream - totally exhilarating drops through a beautiful forest, small logs to jump, tight switchbacks through small streams, narrow trails through groves of trees separated by handlebar widths. This went on for about three miles, until we got to a short chute. Wayne looked back over his shoulder to see how I was doing, turned his front wheel as he turned his head and flew headfirst into a log. When he got up, his right eye was bloody. Scared the living daylights out of all of us. Fortunately, the only effects were a serious shiner and some scrapes high on his cheek. We continued After about 5 miles, we got to the exposed part. The exposure is not Yuba River-like, but it is spooky. We continued riding, with me leading, Mike in the middle, Wayne sweeping. Suddenly, Mike’s bike went flying past me, sans Mike. Wayne and I looked at each other and had one of those moments of telepathic communication engendered by 18 years of marital bliss: if he dies, do we call his ex-wife or his girlfriend? We had no answer, so we both ran to the edge to see where he ended up. Fortunately, he stopped about 15 feet down the side and about 50 feet from a Long Drop, so we didn’t have to answer the question. That sobered us up and we started paying a little more attention. Since we were all tired, we ended up walking quite a lot. We all agreed that we could have ridden more, but everything told us to be conservative – it was getting dark, it was getting cold (raining off and on), Wayne and Mike had each had a frightening fall, and we were all tired. Oddly, for me at least, one of the reasons I thought I could ride lots of it was because it was sandy. There was a lip built up at the edge that, based on my previous day’s experience, I thought would act like an emergency braking chute for trucks – it would slow me down before I fell over the side. I really have started thinking that Mr. Sand is my friend. Anyhow, we walked and rode, walked and rode, walked and rode for the 4 miles of exposed stuff. We then got to finish on the creek bottom singletrack – Yahoo! So I finally did the complete ride. It was as cool as I remembered. Interesting differences between riding in the Bay Area and Winthrop: (1) on the whole ride, we saw one other person, and he was on the fire road, (2) on all the creeks except one that were even close to being too wide/deep to ride across, there were big boulders placed at step intervals across the creeks, (3) the quality of the trails is uniformly fabulous – this may be due to the lack of use and the 9 months the trails aren’t ridden on due to snow cover, (4) chain lube doesn’t last long up there, (5) there aren’t any signs showing legal trail users – all God’s children are legal in the Great State of Washington. Great ride!