Spirits ran high as everyone was delighted to participate in a mass-start event after a full year of COVID cancellations. All at once we were off like a herd of turtles dashing for the Idaho border. My wife rode me out the first 10 miles, so I only had another 690 to ride alone.

Of course I soon met up with new friends and old pals from the XWA 2019, the first being a guy from Colorado on the slow climb up a pass where a 45-minute snow drag and plenty of bear pooh was waiting for us. Singletrack trails along Lake Crescent and above the Straights of Juan de Fuca were as delightful as ever, as were the Seattle urban park segments, and the climb over Snoqualmie Pass.

My own fascination with gravel and adventure riding the last few years, though, has been going places I’ve never been before, and I had one good eye on the “high route” which no one had ever taken from the grand depart on account of the May snowpack.

The high route cuts north from the Palouse to Cascades Trail from Cle Elum over the Teanaway and Mission Ridge to Wenatchee. The weather forecast looked miserable, yet every rider I talked to but one seemed to be gunning for the high route.

As it turned out, it was Olympia’s Adam Hale, winner of XWA 2017, who became the first rider to “turn left” in Cle Elum to take the high route. It was an inexplicably pleasant day when I came to the turn. I had my fillings rattled out on the alternate Colockum Ridge route in 2019, so I was game for some high-country snow trudging and tree hoisting.

And yes, there was a little bit of snow up there and a lot of fallen trees. But the breathtaking views of jagged, snow-capped mountain and buttery smooth singletrack descents were so delicious, I never noticed that I was only averaging 2 mph most of the day. That may have been my best day on a bike ever.

A dozen of us rode out of Wenatchee the next morning, a few visibly traumatized by the bone jarring 5,300-foot low route. The canyon creek crossings and blasting dust storms of eastern Washington were a stark contrast to the misty verdant rainforest of the Olympic Peninsula.

I saved the final 211 miles for my last day, savoring the smell of sagebrush and the stony scabland views. Except for the 40 miles of the Palouse to Cascades Trail from Warden to Ralston—no one savored that sandy, rocky, tumble weed mess.

Mount Spokane cheered me on from afar as I pedaled out of Ritzville with a pile of gas station hotdogs to fuel the final 100 miles. Some friendly wheat farmers tossed me a beer at sunset as I made a long day’s journey into night, guided to the Idaho border by an almost full moon.

I rolled to a stop at the finish line in the town of Tekoa, a mere five days and 21.5 hours after starting. I napped until the sun chased me out of my sleeping bag, at which point I devastated the entire breakfast menu at C & D’s Bar and Grill. What a ride!

Justin Short has two 8th place XWA finishes now and will spend the rest of the summer goofing off in preparation for The Big Lonely out of Bend, Oregon. Look for his documentary on XWA 2021 coming soon to the Gravel Braintrust YouTube channel.

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So what happens to bikes and the cycling community when the whole world locks down? Apparently a lot of people ride bikes: new bikes get purchased, old bikes get overhauled, and people take to the streets and trails in record numbers.

Things like the Social Distance Cycling Club also happen. In March 2020, retired geologist Fred Zelt of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, created the SDCC Facebook group to encourage riders to get outside and ride in a safe way. The numbers quickly ballooned to more than 7,000 members. It’s about as warm and friendly a community as one can hope to find on social media, with a healthy gaggle of riders from the Inland NW adding to the mix. 

But what are competitive racer types—many who derive a bit of their identity from bike racing—supposed to do when there’s suddenly no race season? We can end up building decks and backyard sheds until there’s no space left to build them. Enter indoor and outdoor virtual events. Indoor smart trainer platforms like Peloton and Zwift exploded last year into an entirely new video game angle on road racing that has left top World Tour pros wondering why they can’t keep up. 

“Everesting” became all the rage as the warmer weather of spring appeared. Everesting is the practice of climbing the vertical gain of Mount Everest in one effort, either indoors on a smart trainer or outdoors doing hill repeats on a steep stretch of road until reaching the magical vertical gain of 29,031 feet, roughly seven climbs up Mount Spokane.

Damion Miller of Tri-Cities, along with a few friends, did the only gravel Everesting I’ve ever heard of. Spokane’s Ben Tobin climbed 100,000 feet in the month of May, riding up the trails of every hill in the periphery of town. Even at the end of the month, after all that climbing, he was waiting for me at the top of every hill. 

While the 2020 pandemic led to races all over the world being cancelled outright or postponed for the fall, it also spurred a creative burst of virtual events. Gravel pro Ted King of Vermont spearheaded DIY Gravel, encouraging riders to solo ride the distance of their favorite races and events to keep the spirit of adventure alive.

Troy Hopwood, organizer of the Cross-Washington Mountain Bike Route (XWA), took DIY gravel a step further by offering live tracking on bandok.com. With virtual XWA, riders from all over the world were able upload their rides, commutes, and trainer sessions to move their dots along the 700-mile course with 2 weeks to finish. Second place XWA finisher, Ivan Moore of Bellingham, Wash., rode the whole thing outside on a loaded bike in a dizzying four-and-a-half days.

Perhaps my favorite virtual event of the year that I hope survives into the post-pandemic era was the locally-produced Packfiller Classic, a DIY stage race consisting of four stages, each being suitable for a day’s effort. Of course there were a few goofballs itching to ride all four stages in one day. My own effort amounted to 124 miles of pavement, gravel, full-on mountain biking, bushwhacking, and a Bowl and Pitcher swimming hole.

As we move into the warmer months of spring and summer, some events are returning, others are waiting another year. I think some aspects of virtual and indoor cycling are here to stay, but there’s no replacing the experience of seeing a friend coming the other way on your daily commute, on a rip around Beacon Hill, or on a gravel road in some remote corner of the Palouse.

Justin Short rode outside throughout winter 2020-21 and completed the 2021 edition of the Cross-Washington Mountain Bike Race in 6 days. He enjoys absurd adventures accompanied by the jaw-dropping beauty of the Inland NW.

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XWA is a non-race, non-event sort of thing, but you can be sure that freaks of nature will be out there gunning for the finish line—including course record holder, Josh Kato, and 2019 Grand Depart winner, Thomas Baron. Other riders take their time, making sure they hit every brewpub on the course and the pie shop in North Bend that offers a free slice to XWA riders. 

On May 18, 2019, riders rolled out onto a misty beach at La Push for the ceremonial dunk of the rear wheel in the ocean. They were ready for scenery, ready for adventure; as for the ride, they would soon see. The countdown was made and they all shuffled toward the tangled mountain of driftwood through which they hefted bikes to begin this epic journey. 

To fully understand this race, you have to understand the ethic of bikepacking. Distinct from bicycle touring, bikepacking can be any overnight bike trip, but tends toward ultralight minimalism and off-road adventure. A typical adventure bikepacking race is a self-supported affair with no support crews, no feed stations, no course markings, and no prizes. The exception for XWA is that the town of Tekoa offered $15 gift certificates for the top 10 finishers to any of Tekoa’s four restaurants. 

The first leg across the Olympic Peninsula was filled, as one might suspect, with magical fern-carpeted forests as riders pedaled over mountain passes on gravel roads and some exceedingly fun singletrack trails with that favorite west side companion, RAIN. The ferry from Kingston offered 6 miles of respite from the grind. Then the route begins hopscotching through parks along the northern Seattle suburbs up the steepest climbs of the whole route. 

The Snoqualmie Valley Trail leads riders to the PTCT, which offers a rather gentle climb over Snoqualmie Pass through an almost 3-mile long tunnel at the summit. The route continues on this chunky gravel rail trail all the way to Kittitas, where the route cuts north over the barely rideable Colockum Ridge, then plummets 3,000 feet down into Wenatchee. The last big climb over the Rock Island Grade leads into Palisades, Washington’s own Grand Canyon, and on to Ephrata, through a herd of cows to Moses Lake. It then crosses a waist-deep canal on the way to Ritzville and continues through the Swamps of Doom to the finish. 

XWA 2020 will be a virtual race, and you can follow riders’ progress at www.bandok.com.  Participants can complete the race either on their trainers or anywhere outdoors in a single push, or they can put in the mileage over the course of a month. Bandók Virtual Events offers virtual options for other long distance challenges throughout the summer. 

Justin M. Short has recently been drafted to write the Everyday Cyclist column. Watch his “Lockdown Washington Mountain Bike Race” on YouTube — a Stay Home, Stay Healthy-inspired spoof on the 2020 XWA Race.

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