Preriders: Bill Gobie and Bradley Hawkins
There was a landslide.
There were flooded roads. Curiously there were more flooded roads the higher we went.
There was snow. The route is “low elevation (below 300 meters/1000 feet)” they said.
We had a good time.
Conditions should be much better on the 15th.
It will be fun!
Update 5/6/22: The new owners of Hotel Packwood intend to begin taking bookings in June. We will attempt to reserve a block of rooms for riders.
Preliminary route: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/30755658
It has been a long decade since the Three Volcanoes route was last run. (Four Volcanoes is best left unmentioned.) Road washouts and then a plague scrubbed the route. With some luck things will go well enough in 2022 for us to revisit the wild country between Mts Rainier, Adams, and St Helens.
The route has been altered in several places from the old version of Three Volcanoes. We will spend less time on road 23, which carries most of the auto traffic between Randle and Trout Lake. The route visits spectacular Takhlakh Lake beneath Mt Adams. To keep the distance to a manageable 314 km the southern side of the route uses road 30.
In all there are four gravel segments totaling 37 km. Historically the route has been manageable on 28 mm tires. Road 30 has not been evaluated yet.
The ride is based in Packwood, WA. The start will be at dawn, 0500, July 23.
In the past Hotel Packwood has offered economical accommodations. The hotel is being renovated and no one is answering the telephone. We will attempt to reserve a block of rooms but at present riders should make their own overnight reservations elsewhere.
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West Seattle Low Bridge Closures
The Spokane St bridge aka the West Seattle Low Bridge will have planned maintenance closures tomorrow, Dec 19, and on four Sundays in January. Closures may last up to 30 minutes. Planned times are around 9AM, 1PM, and 5PM. In January closures will be on January 9, 16, 23, and 30. SDOT project page.
Tukwila Bridge is (almost) falling down
The 42nd Ave S bridge was hit by a truck. Currently it is closed pending evaluation. While we have no routes that cross the bridge, the Green River Trail passes under the bridge. Presently the trail remains open.
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The Carbon River permanents (2144 MI-Carbon River and 2100 Sumner-Carbon River) are reinstated. The road is closed about 100 yards before the old turnaround point, so even with slight shortening both still qualify as 200 and 100 km routes, respectively. Access is not permitted beyond the closure. The Park Service is exploring building a temporary trail on the adjacent private land. Long-term the Park Service intends to rebuild the road to reopen access to the trails.
Note the snow in the photo! A person might not expect snow at 1800 feet. In winter it pays to check snow conditions for the higher-elevation lowland routes. The Carbon River Rd has a couple of bridges that were entirely iced over on the 15th.
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04291 Basin’s Edge, 202 km, was created from the popular Basin’s Edge 200k brevet.
Suspended Routes
02100 Sumner-Carbon River and 02214 Mercer Island-Carbon River have been suspended due to flood damage on the Carbon River entrance road.
01234 Wayne’s Choice has been suspended due to permanent removal of a small bridge on Fish Hatchery Rd. Alternative routings are being considered.
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Two new routes were recently added:
04283 Seattle Lakes & Rivers Cruise, 117 km. Mike McHale designed this route. From Factoria it loops through Issaquah out to Carnation, then through Redmond and across the 520 bridge to Seattle, then south through Renton and back to Factoria. The controls offer convenient starting locations for many Seattle and Eastside riders.
04272 Phat Ferry, 100 km. Robert Hendry designed this route. Its 4500 ft of climbing should burn off the calories you consume at the four bakeries along this route as you ride from Bainbridge to Bremerton and back.
In the Almost a New Route department:
01002 Wenatchee-White River, 208 km. Formerly named E Wenatchee-Lake Wenatchee, this is a major reworking of the route to avoid riding on US-2 as much as possible. From Wenatchee the route climbs to Plain, visits Lake Wenatchee State Park for a view of the lake, cruises up to the end of the pavement on White River Rd, and returns through Plain and Leavenworth to Wenatchee.
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Two routes have been reactivated since the last post:
00536 Hood Canal Loop, 208 km. This was formerly known as Hood Canal Loop 2.0. Only the northbound direction is recommended since this places the rider in the most visible position on curves around the numerous small headlands on US-101.
02100 Sumner-Carbon River, 102 km.
New Routes
04207 Leavenworth-White River, 113 km, goes from Leavenworth through Plain to Lake Wenatchee then to the end of the pavement on the White River Rd and back to Leavenworth.
Seattle to Crater Lake Permanents Tour
The Crater Lake 1200 route was used as a template to create a chain of 100-200 km permanents from Seattle to Klamath Falls. The start was moved to Seattle’s King St Station to facilitate returning to Seattle via Amtrak. Two options are provided for the final day; the longer circles Crater Lake before descending to Klamath Falls while the shorter follows the Craters 1200 route. You can read more about the routes here. The tour routes are also linked on the SIR RwGPS Club Library home page. A big thanks to Crista Borras, who reviews new routes at RUSA, for checking 1300 kms of routes!
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In Sammamish 3515 was rerouted to avoid private roads. A couple of No Trespassing signs have gone up since this route was created.
Catching up with changes that everyone probably knows about already
In Factoria 3227 and 541 were rerouted onto the new bike flyover. On routes that go eastbound here I recommend climbing Eastgate Way to avoid the construction zone: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/35652417
The construction zone on West Lake Sammamish Parkway is passable to bikes. 3227, 541, 3502, 517, 2173, and 2292 were put back on the Parkway.
1015 was restored to the 520 trail at the Microsoft campus.
In Issaquah a number of routes were updated for the new connection of the East Lake Sammamish Trail to Gilman Blvd.
As always, you should update the routes on your gps unit to ensure you have the current version.
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Two routes were added this week:
In Factoria, 02795 Leschi-Hobart-Redmond Loop was rerouted for the new bike flyover across Factoria Blvd.
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If you have used Ride with GPS recently you may have noticed the newly added Surface Type feature which attempts to depict unpaved vs paved roads. For example:
The dashed portions of the route trace and elevation profile are unpaved road or trail.
Surface Type is encoded in the route file when the route is created or edited. So older routes may not contain Surface Type data, or only portions that were more recently updated will have this data.
Unfortunately this feature relies on, frankly stated, flaky data. From RwGPS:
We’re using imperfect data to infer the actual surface type of a route, but are striving to improve the quality of this data as folks like you submit inconsistencies. We’re excited about this new tool and will be constantly improving it so that we can provide a robust and reliable source of surface types.
We are utilizing surface data from Graphhopper (our routing engine from OSM and also the same one that all of our competitors use) that identifies surface types based on a number of variables (residential vs. highway, lane count, speed limits, rural vs urban as well as a few other factors) to provide any type of hint as what the surface of a path is. Truth be told, only ~10% of the world has actual surface-type data that is recorded on this source, so it’s a bit of a guessing game to get all results 100% right.
Right now, we’re inferring the surface type from the road classification. “Unclassified” roads are currently listed as paved in our Route Planner, this is likely why you are seeing some inconsistencies. In some cases we’ve found this to be the best option, in other cases, this is the wrong inference, so we’re trying to work through all those surface-type assumptions we are making to come up with the best solution.
At present it is very common to see improperly classified roads and trails.
If you are inclined to help improve surface classification, here is how:
1. You can update Surface Type information on OSM, which is the main source we pull from. Once Surface Type information is entered in OSM, it will be updated on our system within a few weeks. For more information on OSM Routing data as well as information on how to submit edits to OSM, check out the following link: https://ridewithgps.com/help/edit-routing-data
2. You can edit Surface Type data on any route – https://ridewithgps.com/help/surface-types#change-surface. This only updates surface-type information on your specific route.
I’ll emphasize the second option only changes the surface type in the route you are working on. Like other custom-edited items like manually added cues, it is lost if that portion of the route is resnapped.
From my perspective as a route developer and maintainer, this feature’s frequent glitches just add more work. You can turn it off in your personal account like so:
1. Log into your account on the website> Click More> Edit Profile (see image: https://s3.amazonaws.com/rwgps/screenshots/2021Mon16-26242.png)
2. Click RWGPS Labs> Toggle on or off to enable or disable (see image: https://s3.amazonaws.com/rwgps/screenshots/2021Mon16-27242.png).
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Filed under Permanents