Last week, the consensus around Seattle held the sun was about to disappear. Rain and clouds were in the forecast, and people who could scurried out to soak up the last of the precious rays until who-knows-when.
(I haven’t gone through a winter in this city yet, but people who have tend to speak of the annual occurrence like a grueling endurance test – just hold on and keep plodding along until you reach the end of the grey and the sun breaks back through, and you forget all about what you just went through until it happens again a few months later.)
So with the sun still hanging in the sky, energizing the city, I rode out to check out my new backyard. I’d moved into an apartment across the street from Woodland Park less than a week earlier, putting Green Lake just around the corner as well. An exploring expedition was in order.
Rowers on Green Lake
I had expected all paths to lead to Green Lake, but the paved path from the zoo entrance at Fremont led instead on a winding loop back to 50th Street and the exterior of the park. My road tires weren’t meant for the crushed gravel paths going the way I wanted to, so I let the path move me out of the way of the open meadow and surrounding wooded grounds of the park onto the streets, where I could once again easily turn north toward the lake.
Even on a weekday afternoon, the path around Green Lake was relatively full, primarily foot traffic. Joggers, walkers, runners, strollers shared space with roller bladers along with myself and a handful of other bikers.
I’m sure anyone who considers themselves a serious cyclist finds the Green Lake path frustrating – the equivalent of a bunny slope when there are black diamonds to be had, without the unwheeled masses. But at this point in my slow push toward fitness, the smooth level path worked. After sessions of feeling like I was fighting my bike, gravity and myself in an effort to haul myself up a hill toward my destination, the easy loop around Green Lake allowed my to get in a rhythm where everything ticked by easily. I wasn’t going flat-out in deference to the folks on the path, but was able to get enough speed to feel as though the bike was ready to pull out ahead of my even without further effort, more like floating around than struggling through. For those of you who can pull off this feeling regardless of the terrain, I’m envious.
Green Lake arch
Even with the relative crowds on the path, the park around Green Lake still holds a few slightly hidden treasures. As I slipped off the path to explore some of the surrounding hills and find some space from the pedestrians, I turned around and saw this arch, an apparent memorial to some forgotten person or ideal. The arch and space near it were almost completely ignored in favor of the path on the other side of the building or a playground on the other side of the trees. Except for two kids lounging on its base, finding a moment of stillness as everyone bustled about them.
Hidden trail to Green Lake
After a few loops around the lake, I turned back to home. A quick look at the map on my phone seemed to show a path back south on the other side of Aurora Avenue, so I set out, finding myself on a narrow graveled path above the cars bunched together in rush hour, with a steep slope on one side dropping to the highway artery and the fence marking the zoo boundary on the other.
Without knowing the zoo was there, it would not have immediately been obvious what was beyond the fence. The view was of a service road and drab maintenance buildings. Partway down the path, however, the smell – if not the sights – of the zoo become apparent. And after a short while, the path ends, meeting the original path in Woodland park that drove me back to the road just after a small tunnel. On my first way through the tunnel, I hadn’t even noticed the trail, unassumingly branching off, hardly seeming like an authorized route.
Once again, my bike had taken me to a spot I would have otherwise missed. As I stopped to take in the unlikeliness of the path I’d just taken, I turned around and caught a glimpse of a sight that is anything but hidden, as the setting sun left the top of the Space Needle silhouetted above the drivers headed home.
Traffic, and Needle, at dusk
And one more thing. In my last post I forgot to thank Seattle Bike Blog for kindly linking to a few of my posts on the blog, and also mentioning them on Twitter. There were a few other sites as well, but Seattle Bike Blog was really the first to find these posts and share them with many more people than I would have reached on my own. Thanks, too, to everyone who has stopped by to read these posts. I hope you’ll come back as I continue to share my experiences and discoveries biking around my new hometown.
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