Dammit! If only I’d known about this before it happened, I would have found a way to be in California for it: the Tour of the California Alps Death Ride. The five-pass ride, up and over Monitor Pass, Ebbets Pass, and Carson Pass, is 129 miles with 15,000’+ of climbing. And it’s not super far from Lake Tahoe, so I could have made a side trip to see my family before or after. This totally would have been the perfect ride for me–long, super hilly, in the Sierra Nevadas, happened, oh, 8 days ago. Dammit!
Next year for sure:)
Oh, I’m sure you don’t have to go all the way down to California to go skittering up and down mountain passes. It’s not that difficult to make 15k feet of climbing in somewhere in the ballpark of 200km around here, particularly if you don’t mind a few outandbacks. (shoot, my Devil’s Flyswatter has about 12k feet and I don’t even bother to do a diversion up Larch Mountain or to Lolo Pass.)
heh. True enough, but as I also harbor a deep love of the Sierra Nevadas and miss Lake Tahoe with basically every fiber of my being, it seems like a good ride for me:)
…But you’re right. I can certainly climb in Oregon. Perhaps an Oregon Death Ride is in order:)
(hm, now that I think of it, part of the deathly part is surely the elevation, which gets close to 9000 feet and doesn’t go below 5000. Can we arrange for that in Oregon?)
With mountain bikes, sure :-)