Sentinel Peak / Springwater

January 20, 2025

The morning begins (early - I’m up at four again, part of my normal pattern for the last week) on a thrilling note. A day or two ago I finally finished completely rewriting the journal of our first tour of Andalucia, rewritten after finding the original handwritten journal I kept at the time when cleaning out our storage unit last month. Finally done with that, I’ve turned next to a second notebook I rediscovered at the same time, this very small one that contains the journal of what I’ve always regarded as my first real bicycle tour: the ride from Bellingham to Salem in 1972.

I’m so pleased this little guy stayed with me for the last fifty plus years. And what a bargain! I see it set me back $0.19 at the time.

This morning I began by opening the notebook up for the first time and turning to its final entry to see how far I got into the tour before I stopped writing. Pretty good! It’s missing only the final day of the ride. I turn the final page to be sure there’s not more, and am shocked by what I find - the first page of another old journal written behind it! This one was written in pencil, and after 45 years it’s so faded I almost didn’t recognize it and can barely read it under bright light, but it’s there: the journal of my tour of the North Cascades in June, 1981, just over a year after Mount Saint Helens erupted in May 18, 1980. A year later, there was still so much ash on the roads in eastern Washington that I had to cut the trip short and hitch a ride back to Seattle at the end.

So there’s another journal I can look forward to putting up once I’m done with the Bellingham ride.

The first page isn’t the journal itself, which begins after a three page bird list from that tour. It took some eye straining work under a bright light to tease the names out.

Later in the morning I complete the assembly of my bike by installing the right side mirror and Varia mount I picked up at REI. It’s technically a simple task to mount the mirror, made easier because the packaged instructions are so clear and internally consistent- the components named in the text match the names in the illustration for example, which seems like a small point but is so much different than our maddening experience with Rachael’s Amazon Watch, in which instructions are terse, incomplete, inaccurate, and don’t match what we see on the watch itself. We still haven’t gotten much beyond figuring out how to turn the damn thing on and off, and I’m ready to destroy it with a hammer. I’ve struggled through many really terrible manuals, but this one is the worst ever. Grr!

Assembling and mounting the mirror though is difficult and must take around twenty minutes, even though I’ve mounted this same mirror many times in the past. It’s difficult because of my new depth perception issue, which I’m starting to realize is a pretty significant limitation. Its bad enough that I have difficulty lining up the Allen wrench to the tiny bolts and then the bolts themselves into their threaded slots. I’m not sure I could have done it without Rachael’s help, standing there shining the flashlight from her phone on it so I could see well enough to align the bolt.

And along the way I was constantly dropping things on the floor - tiny bolts, tiny washers, even the multitool. I must have dropped something fifteen times, and then we’d hunt with the flashlight to find the lost bolt or washer so we could continue.

So that looks like it will be a more challenging adaptation than I’d been expecting. So too will be learning to manage my new prednisone-induced distractability, as is shown by our challenge getting out the door at the start of today’s 30 mile ride we plan to take together down the Santa Cruz to Ida Road and back. It’s the same sort of fiasco we experienced getting to the bike store a few days ago, where one essential item after another gets forgotten. We resolve to post a checklist of items to take or consider on the door for us to read when leaving the house. Hopefully that will help in the future.

It’s not enough to protect us today though, and the ride plan gets ruined when a mile into it I decide it’s too chilly to ride without my long-sleeved shirt and realize I’ve left the house without my rucksack - again, because I just did that yesterday too, forgotten in the same way. I had it on, but went back in the house for a left-behind item and set it down while searching for whatever had gotten left and then forgot to put it back on again.

The rucksack is essential - it holds the pump, the tire repair kit, the Canon - so we go back for it. And once we’re back Rachael decides she’d really rather take a walk after all because once she’s started biking she’s realized that after four straight days on the bike her feet and wrists are bothering her and it’s time for a hike instead.

So she sets off on foot to climb nearby Sentinel Peak with the plan to stop off at the Safeway on the way home. She gets her miles in and makes her way to the Safeway alright, but she never makes it up Sentinel Peak because the route I’ve drawn for her is crap - a succession of trails that aren’t really walkable or even accessible. It turns out that the only way to the top is the one she’s taken before, the paved spiral that the cars take also. Sorry, Rocky.

Here Rachael is off route on her way to the store, and took a photo here to make sure she wasn’t backtracking to the same spot later.

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Since I’m on my own I decide to take the opportunity to ride up the east side of the Santa Cruz, the side we’ve treated as unrideable for the past several winters because of the homelessness encampments beneath the Broadway and Grant Street underpasses. Today though I’m amazed to discover that they’ve been cleaned up too. The trash is gone. The path isn’t half covered with legs stretched across it and it looks like it’s being regularly swept and maintained again. And the Loop riders have returned. So wonderful..

And wonderful too is my visit to Sweetwater, my first time here with the new camera. It really has transformed the birding experience for me, and I can get shots now with much more detail, and look for interesting shots rather than just identifying ones.

Great blue heron, with a mouthful. He’s been working at this thing that folks with a much bigger lens claim is a bullfrog for about two minutes.

It’s after three when I finally leave Sweetwater. I’d been thinking I’d cross the river and make a quick pass by Silverbell Lake, but it’s too late in the day for that now and besides the camera battery just died. By the time I get home it’s really too late to go on a nonalcoholic quest run either. There’s beer in the fridge and plenty of snacks to graze on, so it’s a nice time to just stay home and cull through the five hundred shots I got before the battery died.

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Today's ride: 18 miles (29 km)
Total: 129 miles (208 km)

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