In Bend -- Crater Lake, 7.27.2009

Monday was our gap day, between the Cascades Cycling Classic NRC stage race (prior blog) and the United States Cycling Federation Junior National Road Championships (next blog). On Tuesday at 4 PM, NCVC's Steven Kendall launches in the 15-16 Year old road race, at which he has a good chance of victory. I needed a break, a vacation day, so I drove down to Crater Lake National Park, about two hours south of Bend. Crater is a spectacular bicycle ride and photo-shoot location. I rode the 33 mile loop, stopping to take pictures with my Canon G10 and better, when I was attached to my car, with the Canon 5D. I had an overpriced dinner at the Crater Lake Lodge.

The ride was great. (Garmin capture above.) 33 miles, with 3,570 feet of climbing, at an altitude of 6,500-7,700 feet. It hurt, as good rides are supposed to. From the Rim Village area, heading clockwise (for better access to the overlook points), the first three miles were a hard climb that had me panting considerably. Then I settled down and did mostly a journeyman ride around the crater, until the last three mile climb back to the Village, which also hurt. Below are a couple nice 5D pictures from the outing. (I haven't yet processed the G10 images.)

Disappointingly to a perfectionist like me, I got some dust on the 5D sensor, so I'll need to do some cleaning and I had to do some touch-up on the images in post-processing. I think at least a couple shots warrant high-quality reproduction -- e.g., canvass prints at Mpix, -- so I'll wait until I'm home when I have my big system and high resolution screen for final editing. (I'm working with a small Macbook laptop during travel.)