Northern Tier Adventure part II: Seattle to St. Paul: Day 5: To Mazama, WA

Sun May 28, 2017
Stats: Today - 51 miles; 216 miles to date
Elevation climbed: 5479 ft; 8735 feet to date
Temp. Low: upper 40's, High: mid 70's
No wind, sunny

Saturday was a planned rest day. It came early on our trip, but we wanted to take a day to enjoy the national park a bit. So, we went on a hike in which a short hike became a long strenuous hike that exhausted us. We were concerned that it would affect our bike ride the next day. Though we were stiff and sore from the hike, it didn't affect our biking muscles.
Pictures from rest day...

More stats:
We rode 33 miles to get to the top of Washington Pass. It took us 9.5 hours. The bike computer says riding time was 5.5 hours. Thus we took about 4 hours for breaks. We know we took about 3 half hour breaks and numerous smaller breaks. Our average speed was 7.9 mph.
Coming down to Mazama, we covered 18 miles in one hour, with a top speed 36.4 mph.
When we got to the top of Rainy Pass there were a number of vehicles parked along side the road. We met and started chatting with a woman named Laura, who somehow could tell we were very tired and probably hungry. She was very kind and offered us some food. Wow, did we appreciate that. We each had a turkey and cheese sandwich and took one for the road. It was really an answer to prayer since our food supply was short, no places to buy food and we still had five miles to the top of Washington Pass.

The route was very beautiful with many streams, rivers and waterfalls.

Diablo Lake

Highway 20 over Washington and Rainy Passes are closed over the winter. Due to three times the amount of snow and the concern of more avalanches, they started plowing almost a month later than normal, thinking that it may not be open until June. With good weather and long hours put in by the crew plowing, they opened on May 16. We were monitoring all this on the Washington DOT website. It was interesting to follow.