FKT: Richard Kresser - Tour de Volcanoes (Cascades / CA, OR, WA) - 2018-07-19

Athletes
Route variation
Standard route
Gender category
Male
Style
Supported
Start date
Finish date
Total time
25d 9h 58m 0s
Report

Trip report:  https://www.runningfarther.com/tour-de-volcanoes-recap/
 

The tour, as best I can estimate, ended up being approximately 2,400 miles of biking with 127,000' elevation gain and 180 miles on foot with 79,700' elevation gain. While the volcano portion took me 25+ days, the overall adventure lasted 39 days, house to house.

I biked down from Tacoma along HWY 101 for a nice scenic leisurely start to the trip, and things got hard when I had to climb up and over the inland mountains to get to the Cascades in northern California. I intended to complete the entire journey solo and self supported, but ran into some problems. California was hot and buggy, so I was happy to get into Oregon where it cooled down a bit. Unfortunately, while in Bend, I started running into problems. I had to retreat and lose a day to pick up a new tire after my rear one wore through. Then once in Bend, my bike was stolen. I was able to recover the bike, but he made off with about 1/3 of all my gear, about $1,500 worth of specialized, hard to find, gear. Up until that point, I had been self supported, but switched to supported as I stayed one night at a friend's house, borrowed a bit of his gear, bought a lot from REI, and overnighted anything I couldn't find from backcountry.com. 

I had one last day delay while I waited for winds to die down on Jefferson, my last rest day. On Jefferson, I was intending to use my roped solo system to traverse some technical parts, but route crowding and time constraints caused me to team up with a group of The Mountaineer's for a mutually beneficial partnership. Besides the two pitches we teamed up for on Jefferson, all the mountains and biking was solo. Washington's volcanoes, while large, gave me little problems but much joy. Before long, I had finished at Mount Baker and returned home on bike the next day.

In the end, I had only three days of delays from what I had hoped for (best case scenario I had predicted was 24 days), but made up one of those days by combining some smaller days of biking. Having done the tour, I believe a better climber or quicker biker could potentially go under 20 days if nothing went wrong. My blog at www.runningfarther.com has a daily report from each day of the bike approach, climbing, and return trip.