Ishi Country double overnight...a.k.a. two nights, three days

Dropping into Ishi Country.

After one heck of a month of April, I got the chance to do a quick ride with Marty and DBO along the Ponderosa Way.  DBO had turned me on to the Way in showing me Bodfish's wonderful Cycling the California Outback with Bodfish, which I'd highly recommend trying to track down if you happen to not yet have had the pleasure of perusing its pages.  Marty, the route master, had put this one together, and I jumped at the opportunity to get on board.  What follows is a bunch of photos from the ride. 

There were plenty of creek crossings on the first day when we were in and out of drainages.

This ride once again proved what seems to be a rule in for all things trip-related: elevation change equals beautiful variations in scenery.  As we undulated up and down between just under two thousand feet and forty-five hundred feet, we went from lush oaks and buckeyes up into the ponderosas for which the Way was named.

 We turned East off of the Ponderosa Way onto the Lassen Trail, along which there were markers telling about the hardships undergone by early travelers making their way through the mountains. Just another reminder of how easy we had it....

The Lassen Trail led us over the mountains, past many more of the railroad rail trail markers with their quotes about how hard passing through this area was with wagons full of people's lives back around the turn of the last century. The Lassen Trail took us almost all the way down into Chester, where we made the obligatory and very welcome stop at Bodfish Bikes and Quiet Mountain Sports where we got to talk a bit with the man himself. We ate lovely and greasy burgers at the Range House, where the bartender told us all about the runs she did in the area and told us where to go to camp that night. We also got to watch some flat track racing! Crazy!

That night after stopping at the magical Domingo Spring for water, we made our way down to the North Fork of the Feather River to camp with the sound of rushing water in our dreams.

The next day's riding stayed high and we got some really impressive pavement and a bit of a detour, which you'll see in the map below. This is definitely a route I'd recommend to anyone looking to explore Ishi's Country.