Mountain Bike Ride along the McKenzie River, Oct 18th

There are a couple of really interesting things that I wanted to see along the McKenzie river, one was a couple of really beautiful waterfalls, and the other is Tamolitch pool. This pool was formed thousands of years ago when lava coming from a volcano cut the flow of the river. Now the river disappears under the lava flow and reappears from underneath in this pool. Problem with organizing this was that doing the whole trail to see them all, required walking about 26 miles one way. Add to that the drive to get there which takes about three and a half hours and it becomes clear that is not an easy thing to do. Doing a bit of research, I found that the same trail can be used for mountain biking. Furthermore, if you take it in one direction, the whole thing is downhill, so I thought that it could be doable as long as we had one car at the end and another at the start. So that was the plan. Well, I learned that 25 miles downhill on a trail is a lot longer than 25 miles downhill on a road. Now don’t get me wrong, the trail is fantastic with ups and downs and turns and twists and rocks and roots, but 25 miles of it is a lot. The one thing that makes this trail even more difficult is the beauty of the place. It is almost impossible not to stop every so often to take pictures and see the river, the waterfalls and all the fall colors. The only bad thing about this day was that at some point, we missed the trail and had to get on the road for a couple of miles and missed Tamolitch pool. Oh well, nothing is perfect. I guess I will have to do it again