Permanent #1876 -- Kingsley Shacklebolt

• Distance: 410K
• Elevation: 12,179 feet according to RideWithGPS
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Ever thought to yourself, "Hey, I want to go to Seattle for a weekend, but I'm tired of riding the traditional STP route and don't want to pay for Amtrak fare?" Well, here's one for you!

This basically pieces together two of the brevets I did last year -- ORR's Olney Gothic Logger 300 and the last hundred or so miles of SIR's spring 400K.

You start in Portland and end in Bremerton. Assuming you want to get across the water to Seattle itself, you'll need to plan the ride so you can finish and hop on the ferry, which runs roughly once an hour between 6am and 11pm. Of course, this route can also be used in reverse, though I haven't yet written out a cue sheet for that way.

If you go north, you'll get the ride's only two semi-tough climbs out of the way in the first third of the ride. Highway 30 to Scappoose is, of course, totally flat, before heading over a lumpy Scappoose-Vernonia Highway that goes up to about 1,400 feet. There's also a great dirt path/trail/road which parallels this that I'd highly recommend as an alternative routing with the exact same distance.

From there, it's pretty familiar Oregon Randonneur territory -- out OR-47 then continue on OR-202, past the Birkenfeld store and towards Astoria. You do get back up to 1,200 feet or so when you go over the coast range, but it's a pretty relaxed climb, and on a backroads area with very little traffic.

After descending all the way down to just 70 feet and rolling through lovely Olney, OR, you continue into Astoria, where the rather terrible Astoria-Megler bridge awaits. It's long, nearly shoulderless, and usually windy. It's also well-signed for bicycles. Ride it, wait for it to be over, then enjoy continuing the rest of your ride on solid and wide roads.

Head north on WA-4, then meet back up with 101, which you'll take for a full fifty miles before turning inland at Montesano. Unfortunately you don't get many actual ocean coast miles, but it's still a nice semi-remote highway.

From Montesano, you roughly follow alongside -- but thankfully not on -- WA-12, on backroads through towns like Brady, Satsop, Elma, and McCleary. At mile 209 in Kamilche, you rejoin 101 (which is much busier here) briefly, heading for Shelton then WA-3 which takes you most of the way to the ferry.

After the Oregon Coast range, you never go back up over 500 feet of elevation. As is one of the perks of one-way rides, you can plan your trip and hope to get about 200 miles of tailwind riding (usually out of the south in winter/early spring, out of the north for summer/early fall).

Do keep in mind service options and availability for late-night riding -- there's a convenient 24-hour Safeway in Shelton at mile 216, but otherwise you might face long stretches without food available.

Permanent #1648 -- Aberforth Dumbledore

• Distance: 110K
• Elevation: 4,609 feet according to RideWithGPS
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Another inland one of sorts (you can't exactly make a route that goes west from Netarts... unless RUSA allows the use of pedal-boats), this time checking out the towns of Pacific City, Hebo, and Beaver in that order.

Starts south via the awesome Netarts Bay road before heading over Cape Lookout and into Pacific City where you'll have plenty of nice food options. The "focus" of the ride is a 20-mile stretch on 131 and then 22 -- a pair of great, shady, scenic, and low-traffic highways. After rejoining the 101 in Hebo, take it back towards Sandlake then over Cape Lookout again for the ride's conclusion.

Two passes over Lookout makes this one a little more challenging, but nothing terrible at all. Pleasantly, each direction of climbing has a very different feel as you're riding, so it's by no means dull and you can decide for yourself which direction you prefer. The 130-to-22 stretch goes gradually up to about 550 feet, almost all of which is gained on very mild grades. The only downside is that there's about 10 miles of unpleasant northbound 101 riding between Hebo and Sandlake, but even that is not so bad if you go at the right time/day/season.

Permanent #1691 -- Grawp

Beautiful, isn't it?

This is my twelfth registered permanent, a multiday whopper designed to take advantage of two things: first, a RUSA rule which relaxes the time limit for rides >700K; and second, my grandmother's big lovely house in Oceanside that would serve perfectly as a mid-ride overnight rest stop.

Thus, time to introduce: GRAWP.

• Distance: 712K
• Elevation: 25,832 feet according to RideWithGPS
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It's enormous and awesome -- the name selection was pretty easy.

This is the end product of basically throwing a bunch of my favorite roads onto a map and finding a way to get them to stick together.

The initial southwest-bound crawl out of Portland is pretty straightforward -- taking well-traveled roads through Oregon City and Canby, then joining up with the official Willamette Valley scenic bike route and crossing over the Independence Bridge.

I aped the Independence-Kings Valley connection from Joshua's 600, then used the gravel Hoskins Rd to get over to Logsden which I last traveled on 2011's coast 600K. The seventy or so following miles are almost the same as what was used for Susan's ride, just reversed and extended out to Bear Creek Rd rather than a longish stretch of Hwy 101 towards Pacific City.

In Pacific City, you make a U-turn to go back and take Little Nestucca River Rd and Hebo Rd up to Willamina (this stretch lifted from the Three Capes 300K). Whereas that ride ducks back towards Forest Grove, mine sends you straight north out of Willamina for the toughest climb of the ride, towards Bible Creek Rd and a connection with Nestucca River Rd.

Going north over Cape Lookout is only about a 600-foot climb, nothing too outrageous, but watch for poorly maintained pavement. After passing through Netarts and Oceanside, my same comment applies for Cape Meares.

Stock up on food at the 24-hour (edit: closes at 1am) Tillamook Safeway, since you'll have a rather remote stretch on Miami-Foley Rd then the newly reopened Foss Rd (now with intact bridge!). Foss is about eighteen miles of rough gravel -- just what everyone wants to see at mile 320!

There's a restaurant and market on the short stretch of Highway 26 you need to use to connect to Hwy 103, which will likely be much-needed after the gravel stretch. Or, you can make that stop a relatively quick one and instead get a longer sit-down meal at the always-popular Birkenfeld store, about twenty miles later.

Unfortunately, the route just wasn't quite long enough if I used the Banks-Vernonia Trail, so instead you take a longer way back via Timber Rd. The final stretch is straightforward and well-used -- Clapshaw Hill, West Union, Laidlaw, Thompson, and Cornell.

Then, voilà, 712K done!

David and I will be riding this starting 5pm on Friday (yes, that's October 20). Overnight lows in the 40s, 30% chance of rain in most places along the route. Should be... interesting, if nothing else.

Permanent #1614 -- Crookshanks

So I already have a pair of permanents that will get you from Portland to Tillamook and/or Netarts... but what are you going to do once you get there?

Well, snack and drink beer and walk on the beach and go to the lighthouse and check out the octopus tree and have campfires and read books and play board games.

Aside from that, though, I thought it would be nice to have some coast-based riding options. So, voilà, one of two new permanents.

• Distance: 104K
• Elevation: 4,260 feet according to RideWithGPS
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Instead of doing the one of the more obvious coast-based riding options, this one takes you inland for a great stretch of riding on Trask River Road. When you first join the road, there's a warning sign for high truck traffic, but when I did the ride on a late Tuesday morning I saw maybe a half-dozen total commercial trucks in the 20 miles I spent there, plus sparse car traffic from the various park/campground/boat launch options.

Oh, and I also saw a cow giving birth in the field. How cool is that? I stopped to gawk at it for a while from the roadside, but then the sow seemed to get stressed out by my presence lurking a few feet from its newborn, so I rode on.

The turnaround point is at Trask River County Campground. They have drinking water available, but it's highly sulfuric and reeks of rotten eggs.

The rest of the route is pretty straightforward -- starting over Cape Meares (I much prefer approaching it from the south, where you pass the best views on a slow climb rather than a scorching descent), connecting back to Highway 101 via backroads behind the Tillamook air museum/airport, then taking Sandlake Road to Cape Lookout.

Throwing in the two capes puts the elevation up around 4K feet (with the usual disclaimer that my preferred online mapping program tends to wildly exaggerate this number), but it feels like a pretty relaxed ride. I rode with no sense of urgency at all and finished in five and a half hours, or a full ninety minutes ahead of the maximum cutoff.

I can't promise a live cow birth to future riders, though.