[We’ve gone riding! For 10 days Bike Intelligencer is mountain biking in places so remote an iPhone 4 can’t even find a signal to drop. We’ll report back on our return, but in the meantime we’re running some “BI Classics” from past adventures. See you on the trails!]
Return to Starvation Mountain
I had talked with Jim about doing one of my favorite epics, Cooney Lake/Horsehead Pass, the following day. But it’s a bit of a drive, including a godawful steep, windy and pitted fire-road climb, and Moby’s painful big toe persuaded me that we should choose another path. I discovered in talking with Jim that, for all the times he’s raced at Winthrop’s Fat Tire Festival, he’d never done Starvation Mountain. I hadn’t done it for a couple of years either. No mountain biker should go through life without getting Starvation under the belt and on a regular basis. We headed out early the next morning.
I’ve been riding Starvation about as long as I’ve been a club member, but it had kind of slipped to the back of my book. You do something enough times, you think it has nothing left to offer. There are several ways to do the loop from Beaver Creek Campground, but the only one that I really give any weight to is up Lightning Creek, then a 5-mile fire-road climb to the heli pad, then up to Starvation and down to Blue Buck. You can also ride up the whole length of the fire road, which is an abomination that Zilly, for some unfathomable reason, actually recommends. Or you can shuttle, an equally loathsome alternative.
At Beaver Creek some yahoo had posted signs, “DEATH TO SADAAM!” on trees and draped a big American flag across a campsite with his trailer. Given that Moby has an “ATTACK IRAQ? NO!” sticker on the back, I figured we didn’t have a whole lot to talk about. But I wondered about the legality of politicizing Forest Service property. It was like he’d staked out a good half an acre with various posters and emblems. We parked up creek, toward the trailhead.
Lightning Creek trail is a great ride down, and not a bad ride up. It’s rideable pretty much to Sandman, a deep quasi-dune that keeps getting longer seemingly year by year. Then you cross the road, bearing right (counterintuitively) till you pick the trail back up again on the left and climb some more till you T out onto the road. From there it’s a Tiger Mountain kind of climb, only quite a bit longer and a bit more fatiguing, since the singletrack climb takes a bit out of you and you’re ready for the road to be over with at any of the interminable switchbacks.
Where the road ends you take a trail off to the side and climb up toward Starvation Mountain. It’s a nice view from the top, but nothing like Tiffany or Angel’s Staircase. It’s also always a bit chilly, for some reason. One year I started the ride in sunshine and a tank top, and was in a long-sleeved Capilene shirt with tights and windbreaker at the top, where it was snowing.
The nice thing about Starvation is that once you’re at the top, you’re pretty much done with the climbing for the day. You start down a series of moto’d-out whoops and sandpits — the lower jumps give you pretty good air even if you’re not much of a launch artist — and then reach another encroaching sand quarry, after which you bear left onto Blue Buck Trail for a long, 10-mile ride down. Blue Buck is just fantastic. A lot of screaming singletrack, some ledge work, some drops and risers — it’s got a bit of everything, but nothing so severe you need dismount or play kamikaze. “This is what I call a ‘zone’ trail,” Jim told me. You can just zone out, enjoying the experience in an alternate universe state of mind.
At one point we came upon a big shiny black lump speckled with red berry pits, smack in the middle of the trail. “That there is bear pookey,” Jim said in his Appalachian affect. “Big, fresh bear pookey.” About then I started flashing on a Gary Larson cartoon, with Jim astride his bike, turning back to look down at the trail, saying, “That’s about the biggest, freshest bear pookey I’ve ever seen,” while a huge Grizzly rearing in front of him grinningly lowers its jaws around his helmeted head.
A couple parts of Blue Buck have been thoroughly trashed by hooved critters. There’s a horse tie-down at one point, and a gully churned to pastry flour. Then, at the final switchback where the trail heads back to Lightning Creek, someone has been herding cows up the ridge. What a mess. It’s all undoubtedly legitimate, but all the mtbs in Whistler couldn’t do this damage if they spent the entire day trammeling the hillside.
I asked Jim which of the two 10-mile downhills he’d done in three days was his favorite. As I suspected, Blue Buck won hands down over Pot Peak. When I thought it over, I realized that the Starvation loop was a classic for good reasons. You can stay on the bike the whole time, yet you’re constantly being challenged enough to keep things interesting. It’s long. It’s lovely (by Fat Tire Festival time the larches are golden). If it didn’t exist, a huge hole would yawn in Washington’s mountain-biking itinerary.
Starvation Mountain elevation gain: 5350. Elapsed time: 5:15.