Biking Seattle

I lived in three different places in the first three weeks I was in Seattle. We drove in from D.C. with a heavily-loaded car and landed in Wedgwood, where we rented a room while apartment hunting. We found one, but it wasn’t available until after our time in Wedgwood ran out, so in between we found a room in Mt. Baker.

My first biking trips in Seattle started from these temporary spots, where I discovered my new city really did have an inordinate amount of hills and started to learn how to avoid them. Moving around also gave me a beginning course in the geography of the city, although I still feel like my mental map is mostly blank.

Now that I finally have a permanent residence in Seattle, my map is slowly starting to take shape around the new apartment. I’m living across from the South side of the zoo, putting Green Lake essentially in my back yard, giving me a nice place to take in some of the last rays of sun before the rains came.

Most routes away from the apartment start off downhill. I assume I’ll get very acquainted with the surrounding hills fairly quickly. As I continue this biking experiment, perhaps I’ll even stop cursing them each time.

But sitting at the top of a hill means getting away quickly, and on what passes for my commute it’s certainly more helpful to have the quick trip going (when I have to be somewhere at an appointed time) than coming back. The first time I made the trip between home and the university for class I stepped out the door and coasted down Fremont on my way to the Burke-Gilman trail for the first time.

I’d heard about the Burke-Gilman trail. After telling anyone from Seattle my plan to use a bike as a main mode of transportation to Seattle residents, the response generally went along the line of, “That’s great. You’ll love it. Except for the weather. And the hills. Yeah, you’re definitely going to want to figure out how to get to the Burke-Gilman trail.”

The streets of Seattle generally have a few cyclists here and there. Everywhere I’ve ridden, I’ve noticed a few other people on bikes. But the smattering of bikers on most roads are just the scouts, making way out from the main hive on the Burke-Gilman. The city north of the ship canal generally funnels people to the trail, where the density of bikes reaches fairly epic proportions during rush hour.

It’s easy to see the appeal. A trail devoted to bikes that traverses the city west-east and then turns north is reason enough. Add in the fact it’s mostly flat, which is reason to go well out of your way to stay on the trail and avoid the punishing elevation gains, losses and gains again most routes feature. A straight line from A to B has nothing on a flat vertical graph to make biking feel like the proper way to get somewhere, and not just a devious method to make my thighs burn.

The trail isn’t quite what I expected, at least in the section I’m using. It’s not a track with designs on isolation. There is no wall of trees along the length to take you out of the urban environment. It’s a trail that runs alongside roads, occasionally crossing them, and is only concerned with getting you from one spot to another on a bike. It’s just what I wanted for a commute.