XWA Day 6 The Scablands

Bikepacking

Jun 13

Day 6, I got up early and packed up the wet tent and got rolling around 5am. The plan was to ride into Othello for some McD's breakfast. In hindsight, I should have skipped Othello and went straight on to Warden, but the McD's breakfast was too much to resist (5th hot meal). It was really hard for me to get going in the morning as my right knee was having a lot of pain when it was not fully warmed up. I alternated walking and cycling a bit until I could get it feeling better. After Othello, I cruised the farm roads with a pretty good tailwind at times up to Warden. I was briefly rolling with Cody (CH) coming out of Othello who was riding the Lite route. He would be my final XWA contact until the finish. At Warden I picked up some food to load in my pack for later. I was following the XWA horse group for the next section on the trail to Lind. Fortunately, they didn't chew up the trail too much and I had a great tailwind on this stretch. The padres said hello here in Lind and I crossed under 395 and kept plugging away on the rough trail. It was great to finally get off onto some stellar gravel roads in Ralsten up to Ritzville. I had some tail and head wind stretches on my way to Ritzville and another hard mental moment here. I could see the water tower of Ritzville way off in the distance and it seemed like it never got any closer. Finally, I made it to the Love's truck stop and ordered a burger and fries (6th hot meal) from Carl's Jr. I bought some other food to store in the pack for later and again maxed out all my water (3 full bottles + camelback bladder). The backpack was super heavy leaving Ritzville, but I mostly had tailwinds pushing me along. I made good time up to the rock creek bridge crossing. After countless creek crossings and up/downs where the rail trestles have been removed you get to really appreciate the concept of a bridge. The Rock Creek bridge is a stunning piece of civil engineering in the middle of nowhere. I saw the largest snake of my trip immediately after Rock Creek. It was somewhere in here that my map flew out of my pocket and I did not want to backtrack to find it. It turns out that Pete (PD) found it later. I had to resort to my backup maps on my phone for a few more miles until I was on my next printed map. I rode a few more quick farm road miles with tailwind until I found a good spot to camp between the barb wire and the road in the middle of cattle ranch land. I had a really nice hard sleep that night and I learned a lesson about the rain fly. I clipped the rainfly in on one side of the tent so I could quickly put it up if it started raining, but kept it down for wind. I was also able to orient the tent in the direction of the wind as I had the luxury of a fairly large area to pitch the tent. It never rained, so my rain fly stayed down the whole night, but I did have some dew in the morning. The wind also died down overnight so this was one of my best nights of sleep.

DAY 6: 112mi, 3500ft elev. gain, 15hrs, Seep Lakes-Middle of Nowhere