Getting to the 2022 XWA Start Line
This past January I was toying with the idea of participating in the Cross-Washington (XWA) Mountain Bike Race that starts in La Push on the beach of the Pacific Ocean and finishes in the rolling hills of the Palouse at the Idaho border in Tekoa, WA. I ran the idea past my wife and solicited some advice from veterans of the route on social media. This has always been a goal of mine since the route was created, but I had my doubts about whether or not I could be ready for the Grand Depart (aka start) on May 22nd. After all, I had some minor long distance cycling experience, but very little multi-day bikepaking experience. I had some bikepacking gear, but did I have enough to make the 714mi journey? My amazing supportive wife was on board and I had some great advice and support from veterans of the route as well as one of my good college friends that completed the Tour Divide. I remember one particularly convincing statement on Facebook: “If you wait until you are ready, you’ll be waiting forever.” That was the beginning of the “race” to the start line for me.
One of my goals prepping for this race was to try and utilize as much gear that I currently owned and minimize purchasing new gear for the race. This included choosing to ride my 2010 Gary Fisher Superfly 29er. This was an XC mountain bike that I owned, but getting a 12 year old mountain bike to the starting line and yet alone to the finish line, would take some work. I needed my equipment to work for the very long and often times remote haul. Back in February my bike looked like this:
Superfly Overhaul
I replaced all of the pivot bearings, replaced the bottom bracket bearings, new tires, new grips, new chain, new rear wheel and cassette, refurbished rear shock, new seals/oil in fork, new shift cable/housing. My friend Nick has been experimenting making bike bags and I was in need of a custom frame bag to fit my full suspension bike. The lead-times from popular bag makers were pretty long so Nick graciously offered to work with me to build me a custom frame bag. Here is a picture of the paper template and fitment checks with my tent poles:
Frame Bag Template Check
Once I got the bike ready, it was an iterative process to figure out my gear list and method to packing my bike. I did training rides with my fully loaded bike and practiced packing and unpacking all my gear until I found a setup that I was happy with.
Another one of my goals for the race was to complete it without the aid of GPS navigation using paper maps. I have a background in orienteering and navigation racing so I was confident that I could complete the route this way. The big advantage to this was that I did not require a large cache battery or any stops to recharge my navigation system. In fact, I debated on bringing a cache battery at all for the journey. I utilized my bike map board for sections of the route where I needed to constantly refer to maps. For the long stretches that were easy to navigate (i.e. rail trails), I stored my map board in my backpack to minimze wind drag.
Bike with map-board navigation
Prior to the race I had printed 64 maps (32 pages double sided) with notes on the route. These would be my guide to complete the route. Before printing the maps I needed to determine good scales for printing that allowed enough detail to navigate, but not too detailed to require the constant flipping between pages. The print scales that I used worked out pretty well.
Map #39 Guess Where?
Stay tuned, in the coming days I’ll write about my day-by-day experience on the XWA route.
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