It’s not a Gravel Bike, it’s an Adventure Bike!

The misses and I went out for a little loop around the Pilchuck area, following a route I found on RideWithGPS.

Started out on a nice forest road, into a single track with overgrown blackberry bushes on both sides (ouch!), into some loose gravel ascents, with some chuuuuunky descents (I got a flat but tubeless FTW), that led us to some deep blowdown trees blocking about 100 feet of trail. Decided to bushwhack through and traverse the blowdown in hopes of some easy riding after the effort (HA!). Some leap frogging of bikes from one another and shoulder carrying, we make it through.

After crossing the large patch of blowdown, there was a horizontal tree about 7 feet off the ground with its branches acting like a drape, blocking the view of the trail behind it. Surprise surprise, about 30 feet of clear trail into more blowdown. Sunlights running out, probably 5 miles of trail to the car but don’t know how much blowdown remains between us and the car. Fortunately there’s a detour trail that leads to the main road not far from us, so we decide to cross back (easier now with our “established route”) over the main section of blowdown.

Took the detour road onto some nice road riding (my inner pavement princess was beaming) back to the car. 1:48h moving time, 3:30h total time. Almost 20 miles with 1900 feet of gain. 10/10 would do again. Calling it a gravel bike makes it seem like it’s only good for gravel, but this shit was straight up an adventure. Failed to get a picture with a log stack so did we even adventure?