After a couple of weeks of pathetic, wet, drizzly & cold NW weather, more like fall than early summer even for here, it finally cleared & warmed up to a great sunny weekend. Having ridden, photographed and written ride reports on about every paved road of a scenic bent in western washington the last couple of years, I had run out of material, so-to-speak. So, under fortune's hand we got ourselves a couple of MZ Baghira supermotos and have begun exploring the real "backroads" in Washington state! Turns out there are some sights to see out back and off the pavement as well as on it...
Friday we played hookey and "bagged" off to the mountains taking the Mowitch Lake road out of Wilkerson, wa. Altho i had been down this road (hiway 165) before on the FJ and over the gorge of the carbon river, i was frustrated to find the "pavement ends" shortly after the Mowitch lake cutoff into Mt. Rainier national park.
Not anymore! The reward of the less travelled gravel roads is that you can get up close & personal to some spectacular sights..like this:
Beautiful spots like this just beg one to linger...so while we did we snapped another pic with the remote just to show how pretty the spot was with motorcycles in the pic!
cattard left, me right
The road up to this point, about halfway to Mowich lake itself(still closed because of snow--and it's after the solistice! ??? ) is relatively well engineered gravel with only one turn that can catch you out at speed--the rest can be ridden pretty fast and relatively safely (from oncoming traffic which, thankfully is pretty sparse) as the road is quite wide and rut/hole free, offering peeks of the snowy mountainsides, where the trees open, all the way up. About an hour from where we live, yet peopleless during the week, this makes a nice mountain getaway for when time is short.
Saturday the three musketeers hit the road, us 'tards and a friend on a KLR. We hit the road for st helens area (Gifford Pinchot National Forest) about noon. The route was via Orting and the Orville road, running south past Lake Kapowsin and into Eatonville (a notorious speedtrap town so beware and don't spend any money there either! ) This road is vacant even on a sunny saturday and offers a shaded and scenic twisty alternative to the hated north half of hiway 7 out of Tacoma, the more popular route to the Elbe turnoff to Morton and Randall.
After a right in downtown Speedtrapville, the road put us out on 7 at Alder Lake just outside of Elbe. We decided to continue past the traditional turnoff to Morton and went straight ahead down 706 to the Skate Creek road turnoff and FSR 52 to Packwood. This is a sweet but rough paved road which follows a meandering mountain stream for most of it's length--a perfect motard road tho, the baggys gobble up rough pavement like a goat in tall grass! Gassing up in Packwood we ran into a couple of guys one of which was riding--an MZ Scorpion! Wonder of wonders, and he lives in Tacoma too. Pretty cool bike --he seemed to like it a lot anyway!
Oh yeh--told him about this website too.. 
Just outside packwood we hit FSR 21 which quickly turns to gravel as it delves deep into the national forest. First stop is Walupt lake...
Here we found some lakeside picnic spots, an mostly empty campground and this gorgeous lake...
where cattard and klr-rider enjoy the view.
From a couple weeks ago, last time i was up this high it was snowed in..thankfullly the snow level was up to almost 5000 feet this time so we could pretty much take any of the major forest roads we wanted. We took advantage...
Our next stop on the 21 was Takhlakh (Tack-lack) Lake,
arrival at Takhlakh lake...
Nestled at the base of that "other mountain" most people in Washington have never even been close to--Mt. Adams, the state's second tallest volcanic peak at over 12,000 feet,
Mt. Adams from the Takhlakh lakeshore.
Takhlakh Lake has another mostly unused campground and the most spectacular views we had yet seen this day...
Mt. Adams, 12,276 feet of dormant volcano.
Altho the day began cloudless and hot, it had become cloudycool and we could hear thunderstorms to the south--exactly where we were headed! No bother, our bikes were made for that stuff! After a smoke and a look about we rode south and were surprised by what we found---and what we didn't find!
We didn't find rain (which is always good news on a bike you have to admit! )--but we did see what the thunderstorms we had just heard were up to...
Starting a forest fire!
stopped on the road next to a newly lit lightning fire.
Alongside the road was a small clearing with a rocky mound in the center...scattered trees, several of them on fire...
you can see flames (the red spot upper left in the tree) burning..several trees were clobbered by lightning and the whole area was full of smoke already...but none of them got nailed like this one:
still on fire too and where the top half went we couldn't figure out...maybe the little splinters and charred bits scattetred around it were all that was left---can you imagine riding happily by, minding your own business, right when it got hit? YIPES! Talk about something to make you pee your pants...
After a respectful gawking session we continued on to FSR 23 via a dualsporty shortcut (which was really rough but quite a blast to ride) named road 5601. Taking 23 back into Randall was a real blast of fun, perrfectly smooth, wonderfully twisty and well engineered pavement, a perfect cap to a great day in the woods. We didn't hit a tenth of the roads down in this mostly deserted forest and look forward to doing some camping here this summer for sure.
a lake i forgot the name of that the blair witch could love...spooky![/img]
