Long hard day today. By the numbers, this will be one of the hardest days of the tour. An occasional headwind, and temperatures in the high 90's for most of the day, made for a particularly difficult ride.
We had breakfast in the parking lot of our Wenatchee motel, then left a little after 6 a.m. After a series of rollers for 15 miles along the Columbia River, we turned right and began the Orondo Grade, which I had just done 2 weeks ago on a training ride. It winds uphill in a narrow desert canyon, and rises 2100 feet in 6 miles (steep!), before giving way to the broad expanse of the eastern Washington high desert. Waterville is the first town one comes to; it is a time warp place that looks like it is stuck in the 1930's. After a rest stop there, we started a bleak 42 mile stretch that has absolutely nothing commercial.....no gas stations, no restaurants, no stores.......no nothing! Only an occasional farmhouse, with lots of wheatfields and even more sagebrush. About 20 miles into this stretch is a 4 mile steep descent into the Moses Coulee, a giant slash in the earth created by a retreating glacier in the last ice age. It is starkly beautiful and a quintessential "wild west" landscape........I half expected to see John Wayne and the U.S cavalry pursuing a band of Apaches. Nice descent down, but then we had to climb back out for 7 miles.
At mile 87 we had a nice lunch at the town park of the tiny hamlet of Almira. For the last 75 miles into Spokane, it was one long roller after another, each looking just like the one before. By this time the temperature was in the 90's. Some riders had had enough by then, and got sagged the rest of the way to the motel. I arrived a little before 5 p.m., after about 9 1/2 hours in the saddle. My back side is predictably a little sore, but otherwise I seem to be OK. I'm consuming about 12 liters of fluid per day....no significant dehydration problems yet.
Tomorrow is a relative "day off".....a mere 80 miles. I think the group is looking forward to that.
162 miles. 6700 vertical feet climbed
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