crater lake century

This weekend I drove out with my friend Ray to Oregon to ride this year’s Crater Lake Century. Along the way we stopped in Medford to grab dinner with Osmond, who happened to be in town visiting some friends he met during his time in Rochester.

The ride starts at the Fort Klamath museum, which was a military outpost established over a century ago.

The century ride starts out with a loop on some roads around Fort Klamath before heading into Crater Lake National Park. I thought the initial 30 mile loop was kind of pointless, if I do this ride again I think I’d sign up for the metric century ride and cut out that portion of the ride and head straight for Crater Lake.

The ride up to the Crater Lake rim was long, but not quite as bad as I expected it to be. The beautiful view when you get to the rim makes it all worthwhile.

One of the many viewpoints along the rim. I thought the ride would be pretty easy once we reached the rim, naively thinking that the ride around the lake would be flat. But I was dead wrong– there was way more climbing ahead.

Lunch was sponsored by Subway (Eat Fresh!) This was quite possibly the greatest lunch stop (or at least the most scenic) of any bike ride I had ever done.

This is a picture from Cloudcap Overlook, the highest point of the ride, and apparently the highest paved road in Oregon at just under 8,000 ft high.

The last rest stop on the rim was at Phantom Ship overlook. While I was sitting here resting, I overheard one of the ride volunteers saying that we still had about 3,000 ft of climbing left. At this point I was pretty tired, so climbing another set of hills sounded like a daunting task. But we continued on, and found that the hills weren’t as bad as that ride volunteer was making them out to be. Before long we were coasting our way down towards the finish.

The post ride meal was catered by a barbecue joint called Wubba’s in Klamath Falls. It was definitely one of the better post ride meals I’ve had.

They even had dessert, which was fresh baked cobblers and freshly churned ice cream.

Just over a year ago, on a road trip to Crater Lake with Gid and Ray, we saw some cyclists riding up to the rim and thought, “Wow, it would be really awesome to ride around the rim.” This weekend I finally got to ride the rim, and you know what? It really is quite awesome. Harder than I expected, but really quite awesome and definitely worth the effort. It ended up being among my favorite and most memorable century rides, right up there with the STP.

I brought my GoPro camera so I decided to do a time lapse of the rim portion of the ride. I mounted the camera to my helmet and set it to take a picture every ten seconds. If I do this again in the future I gotta remember to turn off the camera during lunch and when entering porta-potties.