Lost Highway

The rainbow connection.

Dr B. has been wanting to ride Lost Lake Highway for several days now, so we finally headed out there on Halloween. The weather seemed partly sunny here and in Hood River, but was looking gloomy around the mountain - I suspected once we reached the lake we'd be enveloped in cold, wet clouds.

Finding a place to start the ride was difficult. First of all, our directions were ambiguous, but once we finally got to Dee Mills it was all fairly straightforward. Our book showed a loop ascending Lake Branch Road, which also forked off towards Whatum Lake on Mount Defiance. We debated parking on this remote logging road, but I had a major case of the creeps out there all alone and insisted that we drive the loop first to see what we were in for.

After some rough forest road, eventually we reached the resort at the lake, which was entirely boarded up and decidedly Friday the 13th-esque. For some reason, Dr. B saw no problem with all this (perhaps because he had not recently watched back-to-back Paranormal Activity 3 and Lake Mungo on Netflix), and he wanted to ride. I was over it, but was more than happy to ride SAG. I didn't want to ruin his day, so I tailed him in the warm, not haunted Subaru.

Within an hour he rode out of the freezing rain and back into some pretty sun-dappled open road, where we stopped for a picture (above). He didn't complete the loop due to the bitter cold, but I think we'll come back and do the whole thing some day. Just maybe not on Halloween.