There has been a bit of a drought on cycling blog posts lately, partly due to the fact it’s prime smallmouth bass fishing season so whenever the conditions allow, we are out on the water fishing. You can ride a bike in almost any weather conditions, with kayak fishing, you have to go out when it’s not too windy, which is not that often here in the Columbia River Gorge. We do ride whenever we get a chance, but this time of year, much of the time we are out there alone, riding the backroads and trails mainly for fitness; training rides. While the scenery is always spectacular around here, compared to the sudden green and flowers of spring and the autumn colors, summer can be on the dry and dusty side, not as photogenic. Reckon we are pretty jaded as far as scenery goes.
Anyway, we’ve had some passing storms that put a few clouds in the sky, washed the dust off the vegetation and turned the dust back to dirt, so we took the camera along for this ride. The sun was out most of the time, but there were passing storm cells coming over the Cascade Mountain foothills. Usually, the storm cells aren’t too big and you can see them in the distance so you can avoid them.
The late spring/early summer flowers are in bloom, so is poison oak. This is the time of year when ticks are a problem, checking for them after every ride is mandatory.
This is farm and ranch country; cattle graze on open land and must be rounded up from time to time. This is still done the way it was in the days of the Old West; by cowboys(and cowgirls) on horseback. This time of year, the cows and their new calves are rounded up off the open pastures and taken back to the ranch so the young calves don’t get into any trouble.
The wild animals were active as well. We saw a lot of deer and wild turkeys with young turkettes running around. Deeper in the woods, when the storm clouds came over it was dark, cool and damp. Pretty good riding conditions.
Looks like we may have a calm wind day tomorrow, so we are getting the kayak and fishing gear loaded up for a 4:00 AM wakeup call tomorrow morning. Yay.