Day 3: High Desert Happy Monkey (Trout Creek Dispersed Site to Culver)

We woke up to our wildcard day... would it be rainy? 20 mph headwinds? We didn't know, but the morning was promising. It was warm enough that we were able to get an early start and the sun was shining through partly cloudy skies. The trail we would ride along the Deschutes River was a combination of bumpy doubletrack and path that felt almost like singletrack due to the sagebrush that loved to grab my panniers! I had a few close calls and wiped out once. Whoops.

Riding out in the morning light.

We kept seeing signs on the path pointing down and saying "Trail"... and ignored them. Surely that was for people fishing to find a way down to the river. That was until we came upon a private property line and fence and a lot of bramble to scramble through and down to where the actual trail was. Turns out, all those signs were for a reason. But it was also clear that we were not the only one to make this mistake, so we found a steep use trail and hiked our bikes down. 

This is how you do it? Right?

People walk through and bikes go up and over to get back to public lands.

And then back to the beautiful doubletrack.

Lake Simtustus in all her glory.

Views over the Lake Simtustus basin.

A much needed break to fuel us up the rest of the climb out of the Lake Simtustus basin.

Once we made it up the last big climb, we had a beautiful if windy (at least it was mostly a side wind) ride back to Culver. A lot of this part of the return was on the Madras Mountain Views Scenic bikeway and the views were stunning until the last miles of the ride!

We made it to the top! And now easy-ish flat to rolling pavement for the rest of the ride! 

Overlooking Cove Palisades.

We finished our ride just as the cold air started blowing in with a tailwind all the way back to Culver. Ani headed to Portland to visit her brother. and Elisa and I headed back to Bend. We had intended on stopping at Base Camp Pizza in Terrebonne to fill the void in our stomachs, but much to our chagrin, it had not survived the pandemic despite the signage still being up! We ended up making a detour to Diego's Spirited Kitchen in Redmond, which served upscale Mexican food and has a great heated patio in the back. 

A few tips for cycle tourists:

• The section along the Deschutes River is known for its goat heads... both Elisa and Ani got a single goat head and I got zero, but running a tubeless set up is highly recommended!
• RidewithGPS had mapped the climb out of Lake Simtustus as a dirt road, but since Ani and I had ridden that section before, we knew it was lying. I tried as best as I could to color code the roads to match the reality on the ground on my version of this route.
• I would 100% do this route again... still route it through Smith Rock, but maybe find a way to ride down Burma road and skip the schlep up Grey Butte.