King Castle

Saturday we met Dana, a guy that we rode with about 6 years ago when we took a trip to Arizona, and then three years ago when a group of he and his friends visited Bend to ride. I got an email a couple weeks ago that he was going to be staying over in Salem and would we like to show him a ride. We decided to meet in the middle and ride King Castle. Well, we couldn't just ride up King Castle and back down...we'd done that before. So after checking out a map, we decided to make a sort of loop out of the ride by riding up the road about 3-4 miles and then up a fireroad for another few miles before coming to Castle Rock trail and taking that up the backside of the mountain to King Castle. By now you know that I'm not a stranger to adventure rides. This ended up being no different.

First attraction of the ride was Cougar Dam where, of course, I took a damn picture.


You can read about the Cougar Dam story if you're interested.

After climbing a few miles I saw a "trailhead" to the left and a sign indicating that in fact, we were headed in the right direction. Apparently though, we were the only ones that had headed this direction in quite some time. Here is a picture, no kidding, looking back at Derek as he rode the "trail".



I was point person and here was what I rode into/through. I swear, there was a trail there underneath all the growth. I just couldn't see it at all really.



Needless to say, it was overgrown and slow going for the next few miles. When we popped out on a fireroad we opted to take it up for another half mile or so instead of continuing on the jungle trail.

Hmm, seemed to have picked up a little bit of vegetation along the way.






This put us onto King Castle trail which was perfectly groomed and a gem. A gem, that is, if you don't mind climbing. It's a steep effort with at least 19 switchbacks of varying difficulty. I don't mind climbing so it was fun. At the top we took a short break and then blasted back down 7 or so miles of pure heaven.











Great view from the tippy top of the trail.


Hopefully Dana doesn't hate us too much for the torturous ride.

I'm tired just thinking back about this and I haven't even written about Sunday's ride yet!