Tuesday, July 21st, 2015
Start/End: Ontario/Unity, Or
Mileage: 84+
Weather: Hot. Cloudless for most of the day.
if you happen to come across a Knight who says, “Ni”, just hope that you are not in eastern Oregon, because there are no good shrubbery here. There are instead, plenty of scrub (bery) brush along our trek. Today we had a decent day that was without a doubt one of our tougher days in the past stretch.
We woke up in Oregon, but not yet in the Pacific time zone, and got ready for our day. Today’s ride was dedicated to a friend of a rider who was diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkins lymphoma at age 17 as she was going into her senior year of high school. She took a semester off to get treatment, causing her to lose all of her hair in addition to her experiencing a lot of other symptoms from chemotherapy. We are really happy to say that she has been cancer free for 5 years now, but we wanted to dedicate today’s ride to Gabi as well as any young person who is battling cancer.
Today we had a decent ride ahead of us so we got started right away. We continued to drive through more desert areas and the hills were fairly desolate, except for some occasional cows. As we went through the day, we climbed two very decent hills reaching Brogan Summit and El Dorado Summit. Both were under 5,000 ft of elevation, but we climbed just about all of that distance from sea level. So that was fun. One of these hills that we climbed was actually under construction and was cut down to a single lane with a flagged and an escort vehicle. The construction workers were so generous and offered to use a different support vehicle to escort many of our ride groups who had caught up together (I don’t think he knew what he was getting into and how slow we would go uphill in the heat). Alas, we made it safely and we were very excited that the crew was so accommodating to our safety.
As we descended our final climb through El Dorado Pass we finally passed into the Pacific Time Zone at mile 68 into Oregon. We were surprised it took this long and some of us were hoping to take a picture with the sign but honestly it was a nice decent and we were all getting pretty tired and hot.
As we continued to wind down to Unity, Or, we passed some pretty remarkable rock formations. They are known as the balancing rocks and were great to look at.
As we pulled into Unity, we stopped at a gas station/cafe and a lot of us hung out enjoying some food and the cool air before we finished our journey to Unity Lake State Park. When we felt refreshed and ready to move on, we continued to the campground which was very nice. It overlooked the lake and had showers on site! So we pitched our tents and got set up for the evening. We enjoyed some nice cold cut sandwiches for dinner with carrots and some miscellaneous leftovers.
We were glad to sit in the shade and enjoy the evening. Good day, but sleeping seemed nice…