I blew right past the turn because Dave and I were chatting and I wasn’t paying attention. So a little backtracking brought us to the road to Umptanum Ridge. As hard as Sunday was, this day ended up being the hardest day for all of us. The road up to Umptanum Ridge is every bit as hard as that babyhead section yesterday but longer and steeper. This one tested all of us. My arms were aching from the strain. Fortunately my back was getting better. There was just no let-up and we just pounded our way up for 20 minutes until we got to a spot that was more or less on top to take a break. My GPS showed this as 1550 feet up in elevation for about 4.5 miles. When you look at the WABDR site, they show this as baby head hill not the one we rode the previous day. I’d have to say they are right - this sucker was one of the hardest spots to ride, though we had a little more to come.
Tim: One of the things I learned on this section was that it was pretty difficult to keep the sharp concentration we needed for this hill climb because it was so long. Tom kept motoring on and on and I began to think the hill would never end.
We had one more short, but nasty rocky place to go past right about dead center of the ridge. It was probably only about 350 yards, but it had a right-hand curve, then a sharper left with sort of a two foot chunk of rock to go over or around if you could. I hit it at about 10:30am and was able to make it up without falling, sitting at the top determined to not get off the bike because my back hurt. But after about 10 minutes I figured I’d better figure out what was going on.
Tom Clark
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Intellitect, living in Spokane, Washington. I also do a little development work on the side. And I love riding motorcycles all over the country with my friends.
