Day 118: Wauconda, WA to Leader Lake Campground

August 8, 2011

The cold of the mountain night forces me to bundle up and crawl way down into the sleeping bag, which leads to a deep and restful sleep. When I finally wake up, the sun coming over the horizon shines down on the top of my head and the crying of cows bounces off the hills and echoes all around the valley. It's easy to get packed and on the road because I know I have almost 25 miles of flat and downhill riding to start the day. I cruise in the cool morning with the sun beating down on my back, flying past rolling hills with pine trees on the tops and rocky outcroppings and large patches of sagebrush lower down.

It's all so effortless.

It's all so awesome.

The descent ends with a huge drop through a narrow canyon. It's such a serious downhill that there's a brake check lane a mile before it ends, to help avoid a situation where a runaway truck flies down into Tonasket and picks off a few pedestrians before speeding across Highway 97 and slamming into the Exxon station at the bottom at better than 60 miles per hour in a fiery crash. In the half hour I spend in town I see no out of control semis, but do watch someone order for breakfast something called the Mega Omelette Sandwich and then add to it a side of chicken gizzards. That's almost as horrifying.

The big ride down from Wauconda sends me below 1,000 feet. The landscape turns dry, with many shades of yellows and browns, broken up only by the narrow strip of land that runs along both sides of the Okanogan River, where orchards with orderly rows of trees creep gently up the hillsides next to farms and a few small homes. The rest of the morning stays easy and free of stress. I spend half of my time on the highway and the other half on back roads among run-down houses and mobile homes and Jersey barriers tagged with graffiti. The poverty and sad state of the land seem out of place compared to everything that came earlier in the day, but then I see signs reminding me that I'm on reservation land and unfortunately it all makes perfect sense.

By the time I finish lunch in Omak the temperature sits at 90 degrees, so I go back to the strategy that pulled me through the heat of Kansas and Colorado: dive into the library to escape from the blazing sun and scorching heat. It's boring but necessary.

It makes the most sense to camp at the park next to the river in Okanogan, the town three miles to the south, but in the early evening I decide that I want to take a bite out of the 3,000 feet of climbing that stands between me and the top of Loup Loup Pass. I've also been loving the cool and calm of the late-day rides over the last few weeks. It turns out that the evening ride is the poor man's morning ride, and that's something I'm totally ok with.

The climb starts easily out of town, but as soon as I join back up with Highway 20 I'm met with a wall of road, which is then met with a wall of profanity. In the back of my mind I held reaching the top of the pass tonight as a goal I thought I could achieve if I really pushed it. But after a mile of granny gear grinding with the promise of more steep and sustained climbs ahead I know that dream is sunk.

I'm bummed but immediately distracted by a long line of dogs who bark angrily at me, followed by a rooster who crows when I pedal by, and then a field full of shaggy sheep who don't give a good god damn about anything except chewing on grass. Around the corner I rip a giant Mexican food-fueled fart that's so loud it startles a flock of tiny birds and send them scattering. It's a very proud moment. One more corner on another set of dogs howl at me, which causes their owner to pop outside and yell at them to shut the hell up. The back and forth battle between man and beast never ends.

I roll into a campground a mile off the highway and pull into an empty site. At the spot a hundred feet to the west I hear a chainsaw howling and cutting through a log while an older woman sits in a metal folding lawn chair and cackles. She and the three men who share the site are surrounded by a couple of trucks that don't run and a travel trailer that looks like it isn't able to move either. The site just to the east of mine has been turned into a miniature homestead. A beat-up RV with four little dogs barking and yapping inside sits at the end of the parking spot, and behind it I see four huge tents, half a dozen full-size chairs, five coolers, a picnic table umbrella, a giant barbecue, bags of garbage, and even a yellow Tonka toy dump truck and a rake. It looks like it's set up for ten or more people, but all I can see and hear are a couple of young kids and a man and a woman, both of whom have the sort of deep and gravelly voices that come from decades of smoking and drinking. An air of poverty hangs over both sites.

An hour later a man from the first spot drives up to the second and then stops and leans out the window.

"We got extra wood," he says to the woman. "Ya can come and get some if ya need it."

And then he drives off in his beat-up Chevy truck.

The whole scene seems like a modern, more heavily forested version of the migrant worker camps from California in the 1930s that Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath. The campground sits on land owned by the state's Department of Natural Resources, which allows people to set up in one spot and stay there for weeks at no charge. The arrangement provides a semi-permanent place to live that turns into a home of sorts for people who may not otherwise have one.

Somehow the easy day beats me up. By 9:00 I'm dead to the world and curl into the familiar comfort of the sleeping bag. I fade from awake to asleep with a river rushing through a gully off to my left, the low rumble of trucks driving into and out of the campground, and the growling and freaking out of little dogs with names like Junior, Speedy, and Sadie, who even their owners seem to dislike.

The last thing I hear before zonking out completely is a raspy female voice yelling, "Speedy! Shut up! I'm gonna bust yer ass!"

Today's ride: 67 miles (108 km)
Total: 6,082 miles (9,788 km)

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