Day 19-Winchester, WA to Tucannon River Retreat (near Delaney, WA-57.17 miles

A 7:00 start even with breakfast, not too bad for us. We have a major climb today and we want to try to beat the wind. We expect to climb 2000 ft. today. We started the ride on a level lakeside road near Lower Granite Lake. We suspect that this is really part of the river we talked about yesterday. We had an 8 mile climb to the top of Alpowa Summit at 2785 ft. It took about 2 hours of climbing, but we had little difficulty, not even using our lowest set of gears (granny gears, we call them). We reached the summit at about 10:30 and prepared ourselves for an exhilarating ride down the other side. Alas, Mother Nature intervened by slapping us in the face with a sudden, fierce headwind. So what should have been a smooth, fast downhill turned into a grueling marathon. We pedaled our way downhill to Pomeroy, WA and had lunch at the Pioneer Eatery. During lunch, watching a locust tree across the road from the restaurant being whipped about by the wind, we decided to abandon our plan to ride another 40 miles to Lewis and Clark Trail State Park. Instead we called around and found an RV park about 26 miles away near a small crossroads called Delaney. It was 4 miles off route but looked like our only option. We arrived in several hours after fighting the in-your-face wind that never let up, but just got stronger. Tucannon River Retreat RV park is new and not well known (it wasn’t on our maps). We were the only campers, along with the camp hosts, the Hoovers, and another maintenance type fellow. We were pretty well dehydrated, so Mrs. Hoover kindly brought us a pitcher of ice-cold lemonade…we drank it all. This park is in a rural area which probably explains why, while we were eating supper, a wild turkey sauntered across the park, stopping to take a dust bath, then casually moved on. The wind was still blowing when we went to bed, not a good sign…wind at night generally means more wind during the next day. We have another major climb tomorrow that will be made doubly-hard by a headwind. We shall see.

-clarkwheel

Student question: The area we are traveling in (Pomeroy, Dayton, Walla Walla) is surrounded by this colorful Mountain range. What is the name of this range?