SanJuan 11/25/02 11:13 AM Page 3

Traveler
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SAN JUAN REV SHIPPED 11/18

While biking, hiking, and kayaking in the

San Juan Islands, Tracy Young tries to keep
her balance between extreme activity
and extreme indolence

SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS

STORY EDITOR

DESIGNER

COPY EDITOR

PHOTO EDITOR

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Traveler
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SAN JUAN SHIPPED 11/15

warm-up ride: a seventeen-mile loop, then back to the

N M Y FA N TA S Y L I F E , I A M T H E
Sebastian Junger of leisure travel. I crave dock, ferry to Lopez Island, and another five or so miles to
anything that smacks of athletic derring- our B&B. But the fit and fabulous riders among my trip
do. If I knew I’d be reincarnated as a four- mates, whom I’ve already heard chatting knowledgeably
teen-year-old boy, I’d happily die right about which obscure European just won that day’s stage in
now. Don’t send me solicitations from the Tour de France, have long since dropped me. Well, the
AARP. I’d rather leaf through outfitters’ hell with them. I shift into a granny gear and grind up yet
brochures and surf their Web sites, reveling another hill.
in fresh-air pornography as I imagine myself By the time we’ve ferried across to Lopez and begun
in an orgy of activities that promise to push cruising along its comparatively flat west coast, I’m already
my limits and massage my ego while somebody half in love. In the early evening, the light has that quality
else—I’m thinking of a tour guide as a really buff you find only in places where farmland abuts the ocean and
geisha—does the scut work. cows outnumber cars. The cars I do spot are old, albeit per-
Dazzled by possibilities, I’ve finally chosen eight days of fectly maintained—testaments to either the benign climate
cycling, hiking, and sea kayaking in the San Juan Islands or some native frugality. Or maybe I’ve pedaled into a time
and Victoria, British Columbia, with warp. Truth be told, the old fisher-
Bicycle Adventures. I’m attracted to
the Northwest, with its astringent I loll on my queen- men and farmers, seafarers and
smugglers are gone; the software
cleanliness and brawny topography millionaires are at the gates: Perhaps
that make you want to go out and
chop wood; I enjoy cycling; and Bi-
size bed, leafing the beauty of this place is enhanced
by foreboding. But I digress. Riding
cycle Adventures has a great rep. My
only concern is that the trip is billed
through “Vogue.” a bicycle will do that: free one’s mind
to spin its own circles within circles
as “suitable for all levels.” I’m wor- while the landscape unreels, a bright,
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS
ried that it won’t be tough enough. This is how any flickering ribbon, like an after-
thought.
SO HERE I AM, HUFFING UP-
hill on Guemes Island and trying not
sane person As we swoop down the last stretch
of road into tiny Lopez Village, just
to curse myself for leaving my own
bike at home and riding a rental. I
travels by bicycle a handful of shops scattered along
the water, my heart leaps. The Eden-
admit it: I’m an equipment geek. I wild is a gabled cottage with stained
love my titanium. I wish I could replace a few disks in my glass in the upper windows, a broad front lawn surrounded
back with it. I also wish I hadn’t been so arrogant as to think by a white picket fence, and huge sprays of flowers whose
that I could forgo training and pedal blithely into the July bright shrieks of color keep the overall effect from being ex-
sunset, which, here in the incredibly picturesque and sur- cessively tidy. Inside, it’s charming, despite too many im-
prisingly hilly San Juans, comes at about ten o’clock. ages of the Virgin Mary hanging over the piano for me to
I need to calm down and pace myself. I’m still jet- feel entirely comfortable. In my room, a big bay window
lagged. Luckily, this is just a overlooks the water, and a decanter of sherry and a plate of
chocolates rest on a side table, as inviting as Communion.
Eastsound ORCAS
Mt. Constitution
Now this is living, I think, as I treat my aching muscles to
Deer Harbor
Resort a cascade of hot water, then wrap myself in a fluffy towel
and loll on my queen-size bed, leafing through a copy of
Orcas GUEMES
Vogue and looking for perfume inserts. This is how any
Friday Harbor sane person travels by bicycle.
Guemes
Edenwild
VANCOUVER Anacortes
ISL A ND LATER THAT NIGHT, AT THE BAY CAFE, BILL
ANACORTES and I are trying to decide whether to opt for a vegetari-
Laurel Pine Inn SAN
Victoria JUAN an dish and then blow it all on strawberry pie, or to drop
LOPEZ the pretense and gorge on meat. Bill is a hardbody from
WHIDBEY Florida. He’s ridden across the country a few times, swims
STRA ISL A ND
IT OF JU
AN D every day, and has acquired the nickname Downhill Bill be-
E FUC
A cause he hates brakes. Bill is also somewhere in his sixties, I
ADA
CAN .S. am astonished to learn; before we were beset by the more
U BRITISH COLUMBIA
STORY EDITOR pressing problem of what to eat, we were talking about
5 miles Area of
DESIGNER detail what happened to the spirit of ’68.
Map by Joyce Pendola

CANADA
Port Pacific This is what you call a bonding experience, or at the very
U
Angeles Ocean Seattle .S.
COPY EDITOR least an icebreaker, because if hell is other people, the
Red Lion Inn WASHINGTON
biggest risk you take on an adventure tour is spending 24/7
PHOTO EDITOR WASHINGTON OREGON
IDAHO with a group of strangers. Fortunately, our crew of four-
TS IC

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C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / c n t r a v e l e r. c o m
OL

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SAN JUAN SHIPPED 11/15

Awaiting the
swells on Orcas;
ready kayaks
(left) on Lopez;
spoils of the
sea (right) at
Orcas’s Inn at
Ship Bay.

Milkshakes for
muscles at the
Lopez Pharmacy;
heading out from
the Edenwild Inn
(left); sweet mussels
(far left) at Sean
Paul’s on Orcas.
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS

STORY EDITOR
Exploring
DESIGNER
Lopez Reef
Park; flavorful
COPY EDITOR
tidbits (right)
at Sean Paul’s;
PHOTO EDITOR
bird-watching
off Orcas
(far right).
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Traveler
Condé Nast
SAN JUAN SHIPPED 11/15
Places&Prices
Multisport trips offer at least
three ways to experience superb
landscapes. For trips that also
combine rigorous days with
plush nights, turn to page 213.
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS
QUAD darken
highlites be-
hind P&P to
read
teen has everything from soup to nuts. (Jack, the head
guide, is a former dairy farmer and helicopter pilot who
was strafing villages in Vietnam while I was being tear-
gassed in DuPont Circle.) If there is a
common denominator, it’s the willing-
ness to appear in public wearing Lycra
shorts. As for the spirit of the sixties, it’s
morphed into something not unlike a
yin and yang of hard and soft, sin and
redemption. Or, as Jack says, “Some
people eat to ride. I ride to eat.”
“What amazes people is how you
can bike all day and still gain weight,”
adds Jack, as we amble back to the
Edenwild through the twilight, water-
skiers and tube riders cutting dark
swaths on the surface of the bay.
I’m not surprised, I say. “They should
just call this tour ‘Pedal and Pork.’”
STORY EDITOR
DESIGNER AFTER TWO POSTCARD-PERFECT DAYS ON LOPEZ,
we ferry to Orcas Island, thirty minutes away. Lying in the
COPY EDITOR lee of the Olympic Range, the San Juans enjoy a more felic-
itous climate than other parts of the Northwest; the sun
PHOTO EDITOR
has already warmed the air enough that I can watch from

the bow as we steam through what looks like a broken
necklace of enormous evergreen pearls.
The 172 islands that poke up out of the brilliant waters of
Puget Sound are, in fact, the lost peaks
of a receding continent. And by now,
our group has pretty much split into two
camps according to how each of us feels
about climbing them. Bill has ditched
me to hook up with Karen, a young
mountain biking–buffed technology re-
porter from Colorado, and Perry, a
mild-mannered lawyer who turns into
Superman when he gets on his bike. I
too have found my soul mates: two
teenage sisters from Houston.
Lindsy and Lauren have been
schlepped along by their parents,
whom they regard with some amuse-
ment. Ron and Ellis are hard-core.
They ride more miles in a week than
most people do in a year. This trip, the girls tell me, is just a
chance to shape up before they leave later in the summer for
cycling camp in Italy. When we regroup for lunch at the
base of Mount Constitution, the highest point in the San
Juans, Ron and Ellis join the others of their ilk to sprint up
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SAN JUAN SHIPPED 11/15
the 2,200-foot “hill.” The teenagers and I fill our pockets
with M&Ms and set out on foot.
The trail we have chosen—six circuitous miles—is steep
and rocky enough that we clamber on
all fours and then stop to rest. But it’s
beautiful in the forest, the sun slant-
After two miles,
ing down through huge ferns that
grow like mutant sci-fi foliage among I’m sweating
the stately pines, and preternaturally
quiet except for the occasional
breathless expletive.
so profusely that
“What was that?” says Lindsy,
whirling around.
I pull over
The underbrush rustles like in the
soundtrack of The Blair Witch Pro- to strip off my
ject; then Goose and Mike heave into
view. A nice laid-back couple from
Florida, they are not hard-core. At
jacket. This
least Goose isn’t; I’m not so sure
about Mike. What they are for certain
is a big mistake
is wildly compatible: Goose allows
Mike to urge her up the hills; Mike allows Goose to drag
him along shopping. And Goose can shop anywhere. One
day she collected an armful of driftwood, which the
teenagers and I decided were “pirate sex toys.”
From a perch
atop Orcas, the
vista encom-
passes the
islands of the
Northwest;
Bicycle Adven-
tures’ fleet
(below left).
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS
“Ooosh!” says Goose and collapses on a large boulder.
We’re just a few miles from the top, where the road crosses
the trail, but Goose is cooked. Then Lauren sits down and
refuses to budge. I soldier on with
Lindsy and Mike. This is supposed to
be a multisport trip, and I intend to
vary my routine even though it might
have been easier to ride up: On a bi-
cycle, you feel weightless; walking
uphill, every extra pound is a re-
proach. With each step I take, a
demon’s voice (part Lance Arm-
strong, part Anna Wintour) whispers
in my ear: “Fatso.”
Three hours crawl by before we
come out from the trees and perch on
a ridge that hangs like a balcony off
the side of the mountain. Sitting on
the edge of the drop-off, surrounded
by wildflowers, I feel as if I’m flying. I STORY EDITOR
definitely feel ten pounds lighter. I DESIGNER
can see snowcapped Mount Baker miles away, and Van-
couver Island, where we will be three days hence. Scat- COPY EDITOR
tered at a vertiginous distance from my feet are islands,
PHOTO EDITOR
for all their apparent uniformity(Continued on page 228)
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SAN JUAN RO SHIPPED 11/19
SAN JUAN ISLANDS
(Continued from page 113) as distinctly dif-
ferent as siblings.
U
NLIKE LOPEZ, WHICH IS BUCO-
lic and serene, Orcas bustles with ambi-
tious restaurants and shoppers. The
Deer Harbor Resort is so spanking new
that the landscaping hasn’t yet grown in.
From the hot tub on my deck I can watch
the seaplanes as they buzz in and out, shut-
tling tech millionaires from their offices in
Redmond to their weekend island retreats.
Orcas is also a jock’s paradise. Sports
cars, roof racks bristling with equipment,
career around hairpin turns; outfitters are
on every corner; and lures include five thou-
sand acres of Moran State Park and fishing,
scuba diving, and kayaking in Puget Sound.
Lauren has decided that she wants me to
be her kayaking partner—much to the cha-
grin of her parents, who are
more or less my age and seem A seal pokes
vaguely perturbed by my rap-
port with their children, even its sleek head
though I have switched from
Marlboro Lights to Ameri-
out of the
can Spirits in deference to the water, twitches
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS rigors of the week. After we
strap on our life jackets and its whiskers,
get a brief introduction to the and stares
rudiments of paddling, we
give the dock a good shove. I struggle to steer
us past the yachts moored nearby without
banging into Lauren’s paddle—or her head.
But what we’re doing is far from strenu-
ous. A sea kayak is designed to slice through
the waves like a hot knife through butter, and
it’s buoyant enough that despite our lack of
finesse, even I feel graceful as we glide across
the water. Deer Harbor is a lot like a pond.
There are no waves, no current, and no ap-
preciable threat except from the occasional
powerboat—or from Perry and Bob at-
tempting to ram us. We meander along the
shoreline past ropes of kelp as thick as my
waist, then out the mouth of the harbor.
We’re greeted by a seal poking its sleek head
out of the water, twitching its whiskers, and
staring with quizzical black eyes. The hard-
est part of this whole exercise is that I’m
doing all the work. Lauren sits up in the bow
like Cleopatra on her barge, indolently dip-
ping her paddle in the water.
This, I realize, is the secret of youth. I’m
trying to stave off middle age by pushing my
physical limits, but being young is all about
oversleeping and never lifting a finger.
STORY EDITOR
DESIGNER S E L F - C O N TA I N M E N T, I NAC C E S S I -
bility . . . who knows exactly what psycho-
COPY EDITOR geographic alchemy makes an island so hos-
PHOTO EDITOR
pitable to eccentrics. Whatever it is, the San
Juans have it in spades. As the week wears on

and we zigzag from island to island, we see
die-hard hippies and refugees from Silicon
Valley rubbing shoulders with born-again
Christians. On Shaw Island, a Franciscan
nun named Sister Dorothy runs the ferry.
And Victoria, on Vancouver Island, is a
heady brew of cultures—part British pomp,
part Pacific Rim exotic, part native North-
west indigence. We spend one morning
clomping noisily along the brick paths of the
world-famous Burtchardt Gardens, a for-
mer bauxite mine turned into a Disneyesque
Eden by a wacky millionaire.
In Victoria, the cushiness level of our ac-
commodations rises precipitously: Sunk in
the Jacuzzi of an enormous suite at the Lau-
rel Point Inn, eating grapes from a basket of
on-the-house fruit, I find the prospect of an-
other gourmet meal almost more than I can
bear. I resolve to eat only what Peggy eats:
oatmeal at breakfast; peanut
butter and jelly for lunch.
Peggy is my idol. A retired
third-grade teacher, she’s a
little bit of a thing, probably
five feet tall and a hundred
pounds soaking wet, but she
churns up the hills like the En-
ergizer Bunny. When every-
one else heads into town to
shop, Peggy goes hunting for
a gym—a partial explanation for why she en-
joyed Bicycle Adventures’ “Volcanoes of
Washington” trip, which includes a ride up
Mount Rainier.
“The first time wasn’t so bad,” she said,
“but we had to climb it twice.”
O
UR LAST STOP, PORT ANGELES,
is a far cry from the European sophisti-
cation of Victoria and the pastoral
charm of the San Juans. We shack up at a
Red Lion Inn and eat bad pizza for dinner.
It’s a blue-collar town, undistinguished ex-
cept for one famously sharp-eyed customs
agent who nabbed Ahmed Ressam en route
to blowing up LAX in 1999. At the tip of
the Olympic Peninsula, it is also the north-
ern gateway to Olympic National Park, and
that’s why we’re here, to ride up Hurricane
Ridge, climbing 5,200 feet in eighteen miles.
“You can do this ride,” Jack tells us over
breakfast. “It’s not that steep, it’s just long.
You just have to grind it out.” I stuff a pair
of leg warmers in my jersey to wear on the
freezing descent, and hurry out to catch up
with Lindsy, whom I’ve encouraged to at-
tempt this maniac feat.
Jack had said that the first five miles are
the toughest, but I try not to think about
that. I just concentrate on breathing into my
legs as the road angles up toward the park.
After two miles, I’m sweating so profuse-
ly that I pull over to strip off my jacket and
have a drink of water. This is a big mistake. I
lose my momentum and struggle to get
back up to speed. Peggy and Bobby, Bill
and Karen, Ron and Ellis, Perry—even
Goose’s boyfriend, Mike—have disap-
peared. I can still see Lindsy, so I keep spin-
ning my wheels—three, four, five miles?—
leaving the city far below as I climb.
I crest the hill, and I see a big patch of
grass in front of a cabin by the side of the
road. Suddenly I am as sleepy as a character
from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All I
want to do is lie down in that soft grass.
Which I do. Twenty minutes later, Jack
comes pedaling steadily up the hill in his cy-
cling sandals. “Everything okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say. I have had an epiphany:
Doing this for another ten miles is not only
impossible, it’s absurd. I flag down the sup-
port van when it comes by.
R
EGARDLESS OF HOW YOU GET
there, the summit of Hurricane Ridge
awards you with a prize: a panorama of
snow-sheathed glaciers that plunge into
dense green forest cut by rivers you can’t see
but can only hear.
I watch Peggy’s husband, Bobby, round
the final bend, pipe cleaner legs pumping, a
big grin plastered on his face. Next comes
Peggy, shaking her head as if she can’t quite
believe it. Then Bill and Karen . . . Perry! . . .
Ellis and Ron, who dismounts and raises his
bike over his head in a victory salute.
Shortly after noon, while everyone gath-
ers around the van to eat lunch and swap
war stories, Mike comes laboring up the
road, purple with exertion. Just before the
top, he stops and gets off his bike. He stag-
gers around, remounts, then seems to think
better of it. Finally, he cranks his way up the
last two hundred yards to the parking lot.
It’s like watching Rocky.
I could kick myself. I realize that I gave
up without a fight. Had I pushed harder, I
too could have enjoyed the uniquely sensual
pleasure of suffering for a goal. It would
have balanced the whole week, the yin and
yang of hard and soft. But my biggest ac-
complishment was eating all that food.
“How you feeling, Mike?”Lauren asks.
“I think I’ve gone numb down below,”
Mike drawls.
“Well, I guess Goose will be taking home
that piece of driftwood.”
Meanwhile, the riders pull on their leg
warmers and zip their jackets, ready for the
long, freezing descent. “You can ride down
too, if you want,”Jack says to me.
I could, except I decide I’d rather post-
pone that thrill. I want another shot, anoth-
er mountain. Same time, next year. ■
C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R / c n t r a v e l e r. c o m