Day 15 - Orick, CA to Crescent City, CA

Day Total - 36.8 miles
Trip Total - 582.7 miles

We're actually about 8 miles short of Crescent City, but towns are getting few and far between.

Getting out of bed today was difficult, not because it was cold or because we were especially tired, but because we were getting out of actual here. A little after 8, I finally got up and took a nice, hot shower before running across the street to the Orick Market to grab breakfast. Outside, it was still damp, but at least it wasn't raining.

Morning in Orick

Shortly after we got back to the room, I noticed someone grabbing things from right outside our window. Kevin had left his sleeping pad and a few other items out the night before, and he went out to see if the man was taking them. They were about to pull away when Kevin went up to them to get his stuff back - they apparently thought another group had left it there.


As we were ourselves about to leave, Kevin realized that they still had his U-lock. We still had his cable lock with us, but we have been using the U-lock to secure the bikes nightly. The truck was long gone by that point though, so there wasn't really anything we could do.

As we got on the road, it was still overcast and a little chilly. We started back on Highway 101 for several miles before we exited onto the Drury Parkway through Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. It was a lot like the Avenue of the Giants except that this part of the coast is much wetter, and the forest is correspondingly more of a jungle. As we climbed gradually, we came across another northbound cyclist, one of the few we have met to this point. He, interestingly, was the person responsible for some stamps in the food locker in Bodega Bay. He called himself the Starving Cyclist, and he was a month into his journey up the coast, then around the country and the world, ending up in Nepal. We pulled ahead of him on the steep top of the hill, but we would see him a couple more times throughout the day.

Meanwhile, once we crested the climb, we had a nice long descent into the town of Klamath, at the mouth of the river of the same name. Klamath is an Indian reservation town, and there wasn't much besides a gas station market, but we pulled in there and spent awhile snacking. The Starving Cyclist came by a little later, and we talked about the climb to come - at 1200 feet, it would be the second highest of the entire route.

Before we started the climb, we stopped to take a picture of giant statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. We don't know why they were there, other than just being another tourist trap on 101. About a mile further down, at a rare (for this stretch anyway) ocean beach, the climb began in earnest. Though it wasn't as long as Leggett, it was steeper, and construction zones added to the challenge. In two sections, we had to follow pilot cars, which is difficult when you have to push hard to do 6 or 7 mph. We made it through safely though, even if the long line of southbound cars was not all too happy.

So...yeah

From there, we turned away from the seaside bluffs onto the final stretch of the climb through more redwoods. We entered Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park (we had entered Del Norte County just before getting off the Drury Parkway) where our campground for the night was located. It was starting to drizzle a bit, but under the redwoods, we were well protected. All we had to worry about were a couple bursts of traffic before we reached our turnoff just over the crest of the hill.

We then dropped some 500 feet to the campground itself, about 2.5 miles from the highway. The actual hiker/biker site wasn't open yet, so the ranger gave us a site next to an enormous old stump and under a canopy of redwood branches. It turned out to be incredibly well protected from the rain, although we did have a blue jay and a chipmunk stalking the site for the whole time we were there.

Later on, a solo cyclist pulled into our site, closely followed by 4 other (all female, a rarity) cyclists in the site right next to ours. It was strange that they put us all so close together in a mostly empty campground, but we would have normally been like that in the biker ghetto anyway. Besides, everyone was friendly, and I talked with the man in our site for awhile. He was riding a fixed gear bicycle (aka fixie) south from Central Oregon to Los Angeles. Kevin and I both thought he was crazy - a fixie has one speed and no freewheel, which means no coasting. But it wasn't his first tour on that bike either, so I imagine he'll get through just fine.
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