Two beautiful passes today. There was a lot of climbing, but the scenery is fantastic, and there’s no way I was going the flat way round the mountains, with all the traffic. 

The alps may be beautiful, but these moutains are the Wild. No chalets, ski lifts, villages, tourist buses – just logging lorries coming through every now and again. 

    
I spent most of the day climbing 6% grades at 6.6 mph at a cadence of 66rpm. Sounds diabolical, but it was heaven!

Starting at 5.30 meant that we got to the top of the Wauconda Pass in the cool, and were down in Republic by 9.30. Republic is another proper Wild West town, dating from the gold rush in the 1890s. But the mining was very short lived and nowadays, apart from the period shopfronts, there are but two attractions: a fossil hunting centre and – wait for it – a wooden carousel built in 1896. We didn’t have time for fossil hunting but we felt we had to hunt down the carousel. After all, you can go a very long way between visitor attractions around here, so it’s important not to miss anything interesting! But it was shut.

    
We were well fed in the general store, and stocked up with delicious cookies. The Sherman Pass was steeper, but just stunning. Rolling mountains with fir trees spaced out in lush grassland. On the summit we met two touring cyclists who had been crawling up the Washington Pass a few days ago as we shot past. They got to Winthrop about 4 hours after us and looked done in after a 12 hour day. They were looking enviously at our set up and planning to shed some gear. So how they got to the top of the Sherman Pass ahead of us I have no idea! They must surely have got a lift part way – but they weren’t owning up to it!

A long descent took us to Kettle Falls. Kettle Falls is a sad sort of place, because the falls no longer exist. Where there used to be a magnificent set of rapids and waterfalls, and a major salmon fishing site known to native Americans since ancient times, now there is just a pair of utilitarian bridges for road and railway. 

The falls were flooded in 1940 by the creation of the lake behind the Grand Coulee Dam. Nonetheless, the Columbia river is the first major river crossing of our trip, so it was worth a stop and a photo.

    
A litre and a half of iced coca cola in town revived us for the final leg. A fantastic day.