Tour Deshais: Climb more bearable as fifth wheel

As we climbed toward Rainy Pass, and then up to Washington Pass, Emma Koenig led the pack.

The 21-year-old college student from Portland, Oregon, is riding her bike to Maine with three friends, and I was lucky enough to leapfrog up the mountain with them and their buoyant spirits.

Sam Caldwell, 23, the only guy in the group, did well keeping up with Koenig, but he was no match for her on the long hauls – even with his solar-powered battery charger and tiny speaker kicking out his favorite jams.

Not far behind them Raisa Ebner, 21, and Kali Woodard, 20, rounded out the quartet. And though I was older and slower, they welcomed me as their fifth wheel. We became a bike touring group of sorts at a particularly hard stretch of the 30-mile climb to our summit of the North Cascades. Just past the Skagit County line, I felt my will flag as I ate another energy gummy cube.

“I’m halfway,” I told myself, even though I wasn’t. This stretch of the North Cascades Highway was only made in 1972, and as the road unspooled before me, I was wishing they had left it unbikeable wilderness.

So when I saw them perched on the pavement, eating lunch at a turn-out, I smiled. We all had met briefly the day before in Newhalem, and I was happy to talk with them some more.

And get a break from this infinite uphill.

The three young women had known each other in high school in Portland; Ebner met Caldwell at Cornell College in Iowa. And in a true test of friendship, they embarked on a 10-week, continent-crossing bike trip, which began the same day as my tour. I told them my own statewide jaunt shrunk in hardcoreness compared to theirs.

“We haven’t even done anything yet,” said Ebner, easily the most effusive.

But together, we did do something. In raw numbers, we climbed almost 4,300 feet – and that’s not counting the many, many moments we lost elevation that then had to be regained.

At the top of the pass, amid and well above patches of snow, an icy fog chilled us and we bundled ourselves against what lay before us: a 30-mile downhill. Together we braved that blazing, harrowing descent into the arid lands of the Methow Valley.

Now in Winthrop, I’ve lost my bike companions, who’ve gone to stay with a couple they met on the road, bike travelers themselves who offered to feed and house the poor, “adorable college kids” (Ebner’s phrase, not mine) for the night. As for me, I’m in a hotel with my first shower and a soft bed.

As we said goodbye, we went over our itineraries and realized we may meet again in Republic.

And if not, that’s fine. We’ll always have U.S. Bicycle Route 10, Washington Pass and our sore, triumphant legs.