For my birthday, Sandie and I went mountain biking at Ape Canyon (Plains of Abraham) in Cougar, Washington. This trail runs beside Mount St. Helens. Yup, next to an active volcano. About 3 hours driving from Seattle. This trail is listed as an IMBA epic. I’m tired of driving, but this wasn’t bad since Sandie drove down there.
Driving there was pretty cool. Scenery is amazing here in the Pacific Northwest. I can’t say that enough.
We used the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance website to figure out where we needed to drive to. No problems finding the trailhead. Plenty of hikers and bikers out today. I think we’ll become members of the Evergreen MTB organization soon.
The start of the trail was nothing but climbing through the forest. Like 4 miles of climbing. All singletrack, very buff and easy (except for lots of climbing). Very nice that it was all through the dense forest that was all shaded. Not like temps were that high…maybe in the 60′s.
After we got out of the forest, we’re on some “moonscape”. Kinda surreal. Awesome views for sure. Singletrack trail runs along ridges, and it was very loose. Like riding on a crushed gravel driveway, but add some bigger rocks and sand. And hills. No room for error, or else you’re gonna slide down quite a ways.
This was more like a hiking trail open for bikers. Sure, we saw plenty of bikers, but mostly taking breaks or walking. Our ride was one of the slowest rides I’ve ever done…a little under 16 miles in about 2.5 hours of ride time. My Android phone using the Strava app logged 15.3 miles with ~3100 feet elevation gain. The ride back downhill was sketchy and slow too because of how loose it was (plus being safe and not wanting to slide down any ridges).
Overall this trail was something very different than I had ridden before. Nothing technically difficult about it, but plenty of climbing. We did not do any epic loop, just a simple out-and-back. Could have gone further, but we only planned for a day trip and had a 3-hour drive back to Seattle.
I think we’ll be back here again to do some of the other trails and explore Ape Cave. Apparently they recommend at least 2 light sources to go into the caves, and we didn’t have any. Next time we will.
