Heather and I just re-discovered Warm Lake Road last weekend when we went camping with some of her work colleagues. We brought our bikes but only rode up both climbs on either side of Warm Lake. Since Heather had some business to do up yesterday, we decided to come up, stay the night and then do a longer version of that ride. The road has been recently paved and is super-smooth with no chipseal…imagine that!

We stayed at nice little motel started out early this morning. While it was over 100° in the valley, it was only 52° when we started and just barely crossed 70° when we finished at noon. We mostly rode tempo, except for doing LT intervals up the two major climbs: Warm Lake Summit (elevation 7,291 ft), and Big Creek Summit (6,564 feet). We were cold for the first two hours of the ride and didn’t really go hard until we hit the Warm Lake Summit climb. Then we rode to the end of pavement (EOP) then turned around. On the way back we stopped at the Warm Lake Lodge to refill our bottles, then headed to Big Creek Summit where I did another interval.

Once it warmed up I felt much better and pushed it hard all the way until we were back in Cascade. It was a great workout! BTW, camera is starting to go on the fritz…if you noticed the horizontal artifacts on the EOP pic.

Here’s the GPS data on Strava:
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/10403980