Cycling 1,200 km Through Washington and Oregon | 14
The Pacific Coast Bicycle Route runs from Vancouver all the way down to the border with Mexico. With its incredible coastal views, abundant wildlife, impressive redwoods, and easy resupply in the frequent towns, it's no surprise that this is one of the most popular long-distance bike routes in the U.S. After having cycled through the remote north of Alaska and Canada for the past three and a half months, it felt like the perfect time for a change of pace. So I began pedaling towards the coast.
Hi, I'm Benjamin, and I'm cycling across the Americas. This is what I found in the Pacific Northwest. I can't believe I'm almost back in the U.S. This is crazy. I literally, like, don't even know what to feel right now. 110 days, top of Alaska, coming up to Washington State. This is an incredible milestone. This is amazing.
Speed limit 25—that's in miles per hour, not kilometers now. Entering Blaine, Washington. We are in the U.S. Shortly after crossing the border, I set up camp at Birch Bay, the first of many state park campgrounds along the West Coast. All right, this is it—the first full day in Washington State. From here, Washington,
Oregon, and California have a lot of campsites in state parks that have special hiker-biker rates that are not so bad. You get pretty decent amenities, and it's so easy—maybe 40 miles between each one. You can easily just hop around park to park. So that’s probably what we’re going to be doing for the next month or so as we make our way down the coast.
So we were kind of riding through suburbia for a while, and it was kind of brutal. Like, not fun, to be honest. But we found the coast—we're back. The views are pretty nice. So we have some good news and we have some bad news. The good news is it’s a beautiful day again today. Look at this. This is perfect.
The bad news is, I had my first case of theft on the trip, where my towel was stolen from the campsite restroom after I took a shower. I left it up to hang in the bathroom, thinking, "Who in their right mind is going to steal a used, dirty towel?" But apparently I was thinking wrong, and the towel’s gone. So I have to buy a new one now. So I've got that going for me. Like—who? What? Why do you want my used towel? I don’t understand. It’s not even valuable—it’s 15 bucks. I don’t know. Anyways, I'm going to go buy a new towel in Seattle. It’s fine. It's whatever. But it's just a reminder that I’m not in the far north anymore, where you don’t have to worry about thievery at all. I have to start being a little bit more careful now that I’m coming into bigger cities. Throughout northern Washington, I had a mix of suburban riding on busy streets and some nice back roads with beautiful views.
As I got closer to Seattle, I started searching out bike trails that helped to bypass some of the traffic. Before I knew it, I had already come out the other side of the big city. Finally—finally have a decent trail coming out of Seattle. Riding through those city streets was kind of bad, but you know, we made it work. And now we're on a nice path. Follow the coast all the way down is the plan. Super excited for it. Everyone tells
me how beautiful it is. Rainier just slowly gets bigger in the distance. All right, here we go. We're coming up to the junction with Highway 101, the Pacific Coast Highway, which we're pretty much going to be taking for probably the next 1,500 miles—over 2,000 kilometers or so. This road is supposed to have beautiful coastal views. It's supposed to be amazing. So we're going to take it. Let's see what it's all about. I'm pretty excited for this one. This is going to be pretty cool.
The 101 brought me to the West Coast just in time to watch my first sunset over the Pacific. Here we are—we’ve made it officially to the Pacific Coast. This is going to be pretty cool. We're going to be following this probably for the next month and a half. Should have a lot of good views. Should be a little bit more traffic-y than we're used to,
but it'll be all right. But yeah, let’s see what we can see. Just around the bend up here, over the top of this hill, we’re going to come up and finally see the Columbia River. This is the border between Washington and Oregon, and there’s a huge bridge that we’re gonna cross over. That’s kind of dangerous for cyclists. We’re not really looking forward to it, but I don’t know—it should be really beautiful anyways. There we go. Just across the river, that’s Oregon back there. All right, it's time. We’re going to cross the Astoria Bridge. Not looking forward to it, but
you know—it’s probably not going to be that bad, right? It's only four miles. It’s not that bad, I don’t think. It's got a mini shoulder. It's not super busy. It's kind of cool. Crossing over the bridge brought me to the town of Astoria. As a huge fan of a certain movie, I had to make a quick detour to see a particular house. If you know, you know.
With my pilgrimage complete, I rode over to the nearby state park campground to set up for the night. So I believe this is the camp for tonight. We got picnic tables over here—this is the hiker-biker site. There’s a bike rack back there. I couldn’t figure out how to check in, so I don’t even know if this is legit or not, but here we are. We got a little table. There’s a fire pit back there—we're not going to use it. But this is really cool. Back here we’ve got a pump—we’re probably going to use that. There’s tools—we're not going to need those. And in these, there’s like outlets and
stuff so we can charge stuff. This is pretty nice for eight bucks, I’m not going to lie. It’s a bit foggy and misty this morning, which is not ideal, but it's not super bad. We're not getting soaked. But I've got some stuff I'm trying to dry on the front of my bike, so we're going to
hope that those actually dry. If not, we'll be a little sad—because the rain is coming tomorrow. It's going to start, and it's not going to stop, I don't think. So we're kind of gunning it south. There's something oddly unsettling about seeing like half of a giant rock out in the ocean—but you can barely see it because of this fog. Really interesting place. It’s kind of hard to believe, but this is the first tunnel I’ve been through on the whole trip. Man, these Oregon hiker-biker campsites are actually pretty nice. For $8, you get—look at this. There’s nobody here because we’re pretty much in the off-season. Rainy season
starts tomorrow. But we’ve got tent pads that you can set your tent on, and there’s tons of them. Picnic tables at every spot. Fire pits at every spot. Back here, there’s like lockers where you can put your electronics in to charge. There’s water. There’s showers that come with it. We’re pretty much living the luxury life out here—which, compared to what we used to be doing, like, we were camping for free—but this is pretty cool. I'm not mad about this. I think I’m going
to keep trying to stay at these state parks because this is where it’s at. This is awesome. All right, this is it. This is officially the start of rainy season. It's going to be rain on the forecast for the whole next week, and basically the further south we get, the less rain we're going to have. So the plan is: starting tomorrow, we're just gunning south. Today I didn’t go that far south,
but the main reason for that is that there’s a big headwind today—so why fight the headwind when I can do it easier tomorrow? Anyway, that’s the theory. Maybe that was a mistake—who knows? But we've got another 20 kilometers today to a state park. Going to set up for the night there, even though it’s not too late in the day yet. And we're going to get wet. So let's do it. Entering Cape Lookout State Park. We're going to set up here for tonight and hopefully it dries out
a little bit. I'm hoping the tent site is in the forest to block a little bit of this rain because I'm pretty soaked through. So yeah, that’s the plan for tonight. It's getting wetter. I'm going to try to find somewhere dry. Hopefully they have a picnic shelter I can chill in for a little bit. So this is one way to wake up in the morning. It's raining still. We're all soaking wet. And then we got this coming up—oh my God—300 meters of climbing just out of nowhere, just to start the day when you're already wet. Oh my gosh. All right, let’s just get this done. We're going to try to get either a hotel tonight
or a yurt where we can dry off a little bit. The tent is completely soaked. We’re drenched through. My socks are soaked. Let’s find somewhere to dry off tonight. But let’s get a little bit of distance in, because to be honest, the further south we go, the drier it’s going to get. And we want to be dry. Let's get to California. I booked a hotel room to avoid the rain tonight—and there’s fire trucks here, so maybe I booked the wrong room. Let's find out. Oh, it looks like it’s going to be a nice day, actually. I'm so happy. I did have this little puncture last night,
so we're going to have to fix that before leaving this room. Oh, we get some views—that’s cool. Every now and then—typically during these steep climbs—the trail kind of diverts onto these side roads, and this is so much nicer. This is
what the whole trail should be like. The parts with the cars are brutal. After a couple of days of riding in the rain, it was so nice to have clear skies again. The ocean views look a lot prettier when the sun is out. There’s a bunch of seals over here. These are the
first seals I’ve seen. There’s a whole bunch of them. I almost missed them. Sea Lion Caves, a quarter mile. Yeah, that fits. It is a beautiful morning today. We’re back at it—going to do another probably 70k today, and the weather is going to be perfect. This is incredible. Looks like we’ve got another big bridge to go over. So I’ve been checking bike shops basically since Prince George, British Columbia, looking for new tires. Been in the market for them but haven’t quite found what I was looking for. Because,
to be honest, finding 26-inch tires is a little harder than it used to be. But anyway, shoutout to the guys over at Blue Sky Bike Shop in Coos Bay, Oregon. They had it—the Schwalbe Marathons in stock. So we swung by, switched out the tires, and now we are
cruising. Definitely feel like these are quicker on pavement than the Surly Extraterrestrials were. With Trundle getting his new shoes, we were a little bit slow today—I mean, we were fast on the road, but we were slow because it took time to get the new shoes. Anyway, we’re going to just come into this state park, get a little bit of an early rest, set up before it's dark, and maybe get a little bit of work done. Well, I was looking forward to that campground shower, but unfortunately, this whole campground is actually under construction. So they sent the hiker-bikers to this horse camp.
Yeah, this is supposed to be a horse camp. There aren't any horses here right now, but some just walked through a little bit ago. They put the hiker-bikers here, where you can stay for just one night. The reason being, there’s like 30 miles to the next campsite, so some people might get stranded. But unfortunately, that means no facilities. I guess, on the bright side, it's probably going to be super quiet here. I’ll be the
only one once sundown hits. Everything else is closed — it's just day use. And yeah, so we got this nice little spot back here. It's... it's not the worst. But I was sad about the shower, for sure. Tomorrow, we're going to get that shower — definitely. And it’s going to pour down
rain tomorrow night, so we're probably going to find a hotel or maybe get a cabin or something. But we're going to get that shower. We're going to get it. Well, I figured I should at least come down to the beach for the sunset. Should be a nice one. It’s a perfectly clear day today. So it looks like a beautiful morning today, but tonight it is going to pour down rain. And there's not really any good accommodations from here for like another 100 km. So I think the goal today is: just gun it south. 100k today. Doesn’t matter what mountains are in the way — we’ve got to do it. And then find... like, they have cheap hotels for like 50 bucks.
So I think we're going to do that instead of getting caught out in the rain tonight. Let's see how it goes. Hopefully we can make it. Unexpected problem today: headwind is brutal here. And it’s going to be this headwind all the way down. We’ve got another 60 kilometers to go. I don't know if we can do it or not, but we're going to try — and hopefully get a nice hotel tonight. The upside of cycling during the rainy season is that there are many beach towns with lots of hotels discounted from their peak summer rates. I managed to book a room for under
$50. It was a difficult ride, but I made it — just before dark and before the storm came through. In the morning, the storm had cleared out, and I had perfect weather for my last full day in Oregon. Looking back, I would say that I had a love-hate relationship with the Pacific Northwest. For days,
the rain was relentless. The cities were stressful. And for the first time on the trip, I had to share the road with heavy traffic. But on days like this — where the sun came out and the waves lit up — I could really appreciate the beauty of the Pacific Coast.
Compared to the remote north of Alaska and Canada, this section was louder and more chaotic, but it was memorable in its own way. The coastal views, the incredible sunsets, and the amazing campsites all make the Pacific Northwest coast worth visiting. Now, I had arrived at the last campsite before the border with California. And I could enjoy one last Oregon sunset before crossing into the final state of the trip. But that’s a story for next time.
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2025-04-27 10:57
