Rolling in the West

Saddled up and on the trail across the state.

By Eric Lucas

Photograph by Methow Valley Photography

SCIENTISTS SAY the most enduringly evocative sense is smell. I’ll long remember, then, this morning along the Methow Community Trail, which winds along its namesake river near Mazama, on the northeast flanks of the North Cascades: The air is laced with the spicy scent of ponderosa pine and the musty tang of cottonwood resin. In the background are the subtler smells of sage, hay, dust, deer, and shrub rose. Occasionally I round a bend and come upon a stretch of the river itself, whose crisp scent, sparkling sound and topaz waters tickle my other senses.

I’m on my favorite conveyance, a bicycle, in my favorite season, late summer, in one of my favorite places … and I don’t exactly mean the Methow Valley Trail System, wonderful as it is.

I mean an off-street recreation trail on which I can ride for hours (or even days), never needing to look over my shoulder for cars, rarely needing to stop at a traffic light, sharing the path with morning breezes, buzzing insects, clear Northwest air, and chattering birds.

Washington has a delightful baker’s dozen of such trails,
as well as innumerable shorter jaunts that also offer the delights
of off-street riding.

Riders of all experience levels can pedal along the shores of the north Olympic Peninsula, ogling the snowy Olympic Mountains on one side and the azure waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the other. In the Snoqualmie Valley, east of Seattle, a lovely trail climbs a gentle grade from pastoral river-bottom dairy farms into shady maple, alder, and hemlock woods. In the rolling hills of the Palouse, a nicely paved trail passes green or golden wheat fields, depending on the season, to connect two of the country’s prettiest small college towns, Pullman, Washington, and Moscow, Idaho—yes, an interstate off-road bike path.

The Burke-Gilman Trail skirts under Seattle's
Aurora Bridge — Photograph by Sean P. O'Neill

To be clear, I am not talking here about the hundreds of miles of mountain biking trails that also wend through the Evergreen State’s mountains and forests— those offer exceptional adventures to experienced riders who are properly outfitted and in shape for the serious grades, narrow paths, and rugged circumstances of true single-track riding, as it’s called. Nor do I mean the many famed routes that occupy Washington’s back roads in countryside east and west; there are many of these, too.

My attention here is focused on the low-key, user-friendly, separated-from-the- highway paths that have largely been fashioned from abandoned railroad beds, a practice called “rails to trails” for which Washington was one of the pioneers. The famous Burke-Gilman Trail—which leads from Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood along Lake Washington and connects up with the Sammamish River trail before, nearly 30 miles later, ending at Marymoor Park in Redmond—was one of the first such in the United States, and it was a radical idea at the time. Its westernmost stretches were initially sought by local recreation activists when Burlington Northern Railroad surrendered its easement on the line in 1971; the first 12 miles of trail opened in 1978. Now, literally thousands of users—both recreational riders and commuters— ride the path every day, particularly to the University of Washington, whose campus the trail bisects.

Up close at the Dungeness Spit on the Olympic
Discovery Trail — Photograph by Eric Schofhauser

Fog in the morning here
will make some of the world far away
and the near only a hint. But rain
will feel its blind progress along the valley,
tapping to convert one boulder at a time
into a glistening fact. Daylight will
love what came.

Pensive as this is, these words seem a welcoming benediction for the meditative, natural pleasures of a ride along Washington’s superb dedicated trails. And just as I am reading these lines in Stafford’s poem, a tapping in the ponderosa woods nearby seems to echo the verse. It’s a woodpecker a hundred yards away. The rapid-fire knocks fletch the air like a drumroll. I never catch sight of it, but on a morning when all my senses have been heightened, it doesn’t matter.