2015 Transam Trail Days 36-37

Day 36, 9/22: More Redwoods and a Bonus Museum
Odometer finish: 13,797
Total trip miles: 6,062

I woke up and decided to string the hammock up to enjoy some reading time before I got going. It was pretty chilly but I lasted about an hour. I made the choice to forgo cooking hot meals for these two days out and left my cooking gear at Pradeep’s so I nabbed two breakfast bars and went for a walk. A few minutes later I saw some deer and took a seat on a rock that appeared to be a long a game trail they might have been following. Lucky me, they passed within 15 feet. I guess it was their dinner before heading to bed but my breakfast.

I packed up the bike and hit the road about 10am. I was up at 7am so this was a relaxed morning.

There was only a short ride out of the old growth redwoods before being back on highway 101. Riding was nice but quite cold, my numb fingers somehow talking me out of taking any pictures. In a small, nondescript town I stopped for a bite at a cafe. I needed something hot and this was it. Thanks to the lady there for breaking the rules and making hot chocolate after breakfast hours.

It’s interesting how more often than not someone will chat me up when I make a stop. This happens but to a lesser degree on my multi-rider cycling trips and even a lesser degree on multi-rider motorcycle trips. Something about being solo maybe, and being on a bike that’s packed high and dirty I guess, encourages people to approach. Also, a LOT of guys have owned a motorcycle and have either done some touring or wished the could do some touring. There is a common thread to the demographics of these inquisitors: male, over 35 years old, have a story to share with me or advice to offer.

The interaction is welcome (I’m a social guy getting minimal social experience all day) but the same questions always hit me:
Did you REALLY ride that bike from North Carolina? (I started getting that back in Mississippi and now it’s the first question I get)
Where are you going?
How long have you been out?
You’re married and your wife allows you to do this?

Answering the same series of questions 10 times per day gets old, especially when you are wanting to get on down the road and are just making a quick stop. I remind myself how at least once per week, usually more, someone has gone out of their way to help, often making a big difference in my experience. This country is literally littered with great people willing to help a passerby. While it often feels like people I run into around town back at home are always in a rush and don’t have time for anything, in reality there are a lot of people that will extend a hand to someone who needs it. If the best way I can repay this is by spending a few minutes each day answering questions for people, so be it, I’ll do it enthusiastically. Better yet I found I could divert the conversation to interesting places if I tried.

After buzzing on up to the Redwood National Park (the prior redwoods were in a California state park) I hopped inside to warm up and chatted with a ranger there. He offered to go on a walk through the woods out back which I snapped up in a heartbeat. He showed me what turned out to be my favorite tree of the trip, a large chimney tree. When fires go through a redwood forest they will sometimes find a weak spot on a tree where it will start to burn through the bark and into the sap wood. After hundreds or years of fires this can result in the inside of the tree being burned out to the point of creating a hollow tree that’s still living. Nutrients and water are carried up trees through the outer portion of the trunk, the inner portion is old and no longer used. So, burning out of this inner portion does not inherently kill the tree. These hollowed out portions are called “goose pens”  because people used to put chicken wire over the openings and use them to house chickens and geese.

A chimney tree is a tree that has been burned out to the point of having an opening through the top, to the sky. This ranger showed me a incredibly large tree in which they once fit over 30 school kids. Check out the pics below.

The next couple of hours were spent riding through redwoods until I came out into Oregon and pointed myself towards Oregon Caves National Monument. Not far from the monument I passed a small sign for a smoke jumpers museum and, ready for a break, stopped to check it out. Being after 5pm I figured it would be closed but it was as good a place to stop as any.

I parked the bike and walked around the closed up buildings. After a few minutes a guy walked up an offered a tour to which I obviously said heck yeah. It turned out he was a smoke jumper for 12 years and gave a great personal tour that I enjoyed more than the caves that were to come.

One interesting fact is that they drop from 1,000 feet (to fight fires) and hit the ground in only one minute. They jump in pairs so they need to avoid hitting each other (which could result in death), try to land close to the fire but also try not to get stuck in trees (which happens about a third of the time). It sounded like a very, very intense 60 seconds.

When they got caught in a tree they would repel down and go fight the fire. When done, they would go back and recover the chute. The chutes were so time consuming and expensive to repair that they would fish each line out of the branches and carefully untangle and recover the whole package. This could entail climbing 100′ up a tree and scaling around for many hours.

A second interesting thing is that they hand made all of their gear. There isn’t anywhere to buy these specialized chutes and other gear so they had a room of industrial sewing machines and hand made the lot of it.

A third cool fact is that during WW II the Japanese learned how to use the jet stream to send balloons to the western US to bomb the woods to start forest fires. They thought this would be a huge distraction for us. We mapped over 1,000 spots where bombs had landed, the problem being so severe that this spoke jumping base was built to defend against it. It turned out they launched over 8,000 balloons.

I left a nice donation to the museum and made my way to a campground the tour guide suggested. Hammock up, read, walk, sleep.

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Day 37, 9/23: Oregon Caves National Monument and the Slab to Portland
Odometer finish: 14,095
Total trip miles: 6,360

There were a lot of miles to cover to get to Portland so I was up early and in the first tour group into the caves at 9:30am.

The caves were cool. I’ve always found it difficult to get pictures in caves though, so a few are below but don’t capture it well. I’m not particularly into caves but these were on the way and are marble, which is unusual. I was in, out and on my way by 11am.

At this point I hit the road and hammered it towards Portland. 50-55 mph is comfortable but would lead to a long day in the saddle so I wanted to push to 65mph. The wind against my upper body was going to thrash my back and neck to oblivion so I did something I normally won’t do: I tucked in behind a semi and rode, rode, rode.

The ride was OK, I was very happy when I arrived at the hostel and could get off my bike. The trip did give me some good thinking time during which I decided to try to sell my bike in Portland so I didn’t have to hammer 700 miles back to Santa Rosa in a few days. I listed the bike and got three responses in the next 12 hours. After zero responses in Santa Rosa this looked more promising.

I went out for pizza, which turned out to be awesome, packed some extra for Jason, went for a long walk, then hung out in the hostel until Jason arrived at about midnight. We sat in the common area and talked until 2 or 3am and then crashed for the night.

The next few days will probably involve a swing dance or two, selling my bike, Voodoo Donuts, and walking around town. Then hopefully renting a car to make the drive to Santa Rosa and fly home.

Fingers crossed.