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www. FavoriteRidesAndDestinations. com | ridermagazine. com
FALL 2016 ISSUE 02 / VOL. 01
Standing at the top of Washington Pass we are looking down at the infamous U-turn, which has claimed a number of vehicles in its time. Top right: The chef at the Hiouchi Café, about 10 miles northeast of Crescent City, California, was always flipping me new sausages to try; loved the place! it was open. Despite its 900-pound heft, Rocky does well on these small roads, although making U-turns for photo purposes can be a chore. Bob’ s Triumph, a Tiger 1050, was a good deal more adept.
Then I had to head off to do my judging chores, so I wound around cloudshrouded Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier to end up in Tacoma, where the Saturday show would take place. On Sunday, some 100 festival riders gathered to make a 75-mile loop around Rainier, but Bob and another old friend, Carl, showed up at the hotel at eight o’ clock in the morning to hustle me off on our own ride— which was over that northernmost route to cross the Washington Cascades, Route 20. And what a ride it was!
We bored along Interstate 5 for the better part of a hundred miles before turning east on State Route 530, which runs along the Stillaguamish River and then the Sauk River, before meeting up with the Skagit River that parallels Route 20. The west side of the Cascades is all very green, as it gets beaucoup rainfall from the Pacific moisture, with many rivers rushing toward the ocean.
Route 20 actually splits the North Cascades National Park. Three dams on the Skagit River create two small lakes and one large, the 20-mile-long Ross Lake. The