Each year the road around Crater Lake National Park is mostly closed to auto traffic for two Saturdays in September. Taking the opportunity to ride around the lake has been on my to do list since hearing about it years ago. I have visited Crater Lake a couple times in the past. Once just passing through I stopped at the north rim for a quick photo op on a ferociously windy fall day. The other time was a day of skiing from the rim village. This time I got some consecutive days off work to make the 8 hour drive to Crater Lake from Spokane. This trip wasn’t all about riding a paved road around an amazing lake inside a national park though. Between Crater Lake and the spoke is Bend, which has an equally amazing mountain bike trail system. After a day riding around Crater Lake I did three days of trail riding in Bend.
I stayed on the north side of CLNP in a National Forest campground at Diamond Lake. This saved an hour driving through the park to get to the campground in the park at the south end of the lake. At the Diamond Lake camp I found there was a 10 mile paved bike path around the lake. On Saturday morning, while I could have driven the 10 miles from my camp to the north rim of Crater Lake to start the ride, I pedaled there. My thought being, after Crater Lake I’d also ride the Diamond Lake loop too.
It was a beautiful day, bluebird skies, negligible wind, good company, great scenery… There were an estimated 4000 riders on hand. The ride stats for my day were ~70 miles, ~6000’ elev, 6.5 hours of shammy time. By the end Garmin said my body battery was 13 of 100 and my stress level was 90 of 100. I slept really well that night. Road biking isn’t really my thing but something like riding around Crater Lake car free I can get into. With so many bikes on the road the cars I did encounter were well aware of bikes in the area.
The next day I drove to Bend and put my feet up for some rest, reading and re calorieing my body with pizza and a beer. Over the next three days in Bend I’d ride more miles, hours, and elevation than my Crater/Diamond loops. All of it primo, rain shadow, singletack. While I have ridden in Bend numerous times I have been there in the spring when the higher elevation trails are still buried under snow. Noting this I wanted to focus on riding higher elevation trails I hadn’t been on before. On the third day I rode the old favs around Phil's trailhead.
In my four days of riding I accumulated more saddle time than drive time for the trip. This was not a goal I started with but a nice benchmark to have achieved. Riding in the dirt was a nice way to unwind after the after the pavement around the lakes.