...don't go to work - go riding instead!
Bobcat contacted me earlier in the week and asked if I could play hookie on Friday. The cards were in my favor as the airplane I'd been working on for the last three weeks or so delivered on Thursday and we weren't scheduled for a new one until Monday.
We decided to ride the N. Cascades Hwy (SR20) over to Winthrop for lunch. For those not familiar, Winthrop is ~160 miles from where Bobcat & I call home. The beauty of this road is, not only does it wind wonderfully thru the Cascades, it does not readily connect any major metropolitan areas. It can get clogged up with RV's, but it's still early enough in the year that if you leave the west side in the morning, you won't have to deal with much traffic going over - and practically nothing coming back! (Sundays, coming back can be a different story though.)
The fun of SR20 starts in a sleepy little company town called Newhalem. There's not much in this town but a few blocks worth of homes, a general store and a visitors center for the hydroelectric dams on Ross and Diablo lakes. Not even a gas station! The residents of Newhalem all work for Seattle City Light, the owner of the dams.
Here's a couple of shots of our bikes in Newhalem in front of the visitors center. You can see the powerlines coming off the dams in the background.
We wound our way to the top of Rainy Pass where we stopped for a photo op with the snow. Not a lot of opportunity for these kinds of shots on this route. When snow starts to fly in the fall, they don't bother keeping this road open since it's not a major connector. They don't bother to plow it until they think the snow is done. Fooled them this year though, they had it open for a couple weeks and a snowstorm hit, followed by several more weeks of snow and closed the road for almost a month. It just recently opened back up again.
As you can see in the above pic, the sky wasn't too pretty up there. The forecast said possible thundershowers, but luckily, that didn't come pass.
(It turned out to be blue sky beautiful on the return trip.)
After the photo op, we continued down the other side and on into Winthrop where we had lunch and discovered another guy I work with having lunch with his riding buddy.
After lunch, we decided to explore some of the backroads around Winthrop. Who needs a V-Strom?
After we finished out little backroad exploration, we headed back to the other side of "the hill." We stopped at the Diablo Overlook and instead of taking the usual west-looking pictures of the lake, Bobcat decided to snap one looking east, toward the heart of the Cascades.
...as well as north. (The lake would be visible if you were to look down from the railing - but since it's several hundred feet down to the water, it obviously doesn't show here.)
For those who missed posts from any of last years SR20 trips, here's the westward view from the overlook - taken last June.
* Credit for all the above photos goes to Bobcat
. . . who's too much of a lurker to write a trip report.
Topic: Best way to spend a workday... (Read 4622 times)