Sunrise at Four Mounds

Day 3 - 26 Aug Spokane to Farragut State Park

We woke up to sunshine and set about getting our morning coffee and such.  We took our morning constitutionals in a nearby shack equipped with a toilet.  The shack was interesting, I told Chuck it was like a disc golf themed crack den, and he agreed it was a perfect description.  

Gordy and his wife were in the process of building a house on the property, an ongoing project that they’ve been working on.  We took a stroll around the place to see how it was coming along, and it seems to be a really nice house.  The notable oddity though was the kitchen. Gordy and his wife are both tall people, and as such, they designed the kitchen with their stature in mind. The kitchen, while well equipped and laid out nicely, had extremely high counters, closer to what you'd expect a bar's height to be.  It made us feel like we should be standing on a stool and looking for the cookie jar.  

Since I hadn’t been hugely productive with my journaling the previous night with Gordy outside the tent, I wanted to catch up some more.  Back out on the porch, I found the makings for an ad hoc desk and set about to getting things documented.  

Having some coffee in my "study"

I'd has some issues with my Buell pegs earlier in the trip. They didn't come with springs on them, like my stock pegs had. I didn't think it would be an issue though, as gravity should keep them in the downward position, right? What I hadn't taken into account that if I were riding at speed, the wind would be plenty enough force to push them upward if I were to take my feet off the pegs. This led to a few awkward moments on the previous days’ rides when a foot peg would fly up into the retracted position and I ended up kicking my leg like a dog getting its back scratched as I tried to get it back down.  Certainly not the safest maneuver to be performing on winding roads, and furthermore, any cool points I may have previously accumulated were automatically deducted.

Not one to sit idly by, Chuck decided to get MacGyvery with my footpegs while I typed away.  Armed with some pliers, a Leatherman, and some scavenged surveyor’s flags, Chuck did a not too shabby job of rigging up some springs for my pegs.  They seem like the only time they’ll come off is if I purposefully want to take them off, but I don’t really see why I’d want to do that.

Chuck's roadside engineering

We wanted to make good time, so packed up all our stuff before heading out to play Cape Fear, the signature course of Four Mounds.  We also wanted and make it out before Gordy showed up (apparently there’s a group of regulars that always play on Sundays).  Chuck got his bike all loaded up, and I just got all my things consolidated, ready for loading when we got back.

We played Cape Fear with only a couple hiccups in trying to find our way around (the multiple courses on the property sometimes overlap and it’s hard to determine which way you should go).  The day was quickly getting hot though, and we were going through water like it was...well, water.  The course is pretty big and rugged, with lots of lava-rock filled elevation, and stabby plants everywhere.  The course takes its name from Hole 9, which itself is called Cape Fear.  It shoots over 500’ across a nasty ravine where if end up short and/or left (the most common direction for weak/bad throws) there’s a good chance that you’ll never see your disc again.  Or if you do, you’ll likely come back bloody.  I forget what Chuck and I scored on that hole, but we both came out intact and with all our discs, so we were winners.  As tired as we were after that though, it was hard to believe we were only halfway through the round.

The eponymous hole.  If you zoom in, you can see a white dot to the right of the trees.  That's the  pin.

Spokane Valley from the other side of Cape Fear (basket lower right)

If you look closely, you can see two wild turkeys in the center.

One of the interesting holes on the course

Where the hell are we supposed to be shooting?

One of many baskets scattered around.

On hole 15, Gordy's truck came around the corner, and he had Wobbly Bob with him.  Bob is another big disc golf guy in Spokane and they were going around doing some maintenance before the Sunday rounds would start.  We shot the shit a while with them, talking about our tentative route and general disc golf small talk.  We didn’t want to be impolite, but we wanted to finish the round, get on the road and get some food in our stomachs.

We moseyed on and they took off to do more maintenance, until the 18th hole where they caught up again to throw the final hole with us.  We all had good shots, but Bob parked it.  Chuck asked Gordy if we could hitch a ride back to camp, and we hopped in the back of the truck. Gordy then took us to another corner of the property, in the opposite direction of our campsite, to show off a new hole he'd just put in.  We apparently weren't done with golf just yet.  It was soon over though and we were back towards the camp.  

A couple sportbikes grazing in the wild

For whatever reason, it took me way longer than necessary to get my shit together and Chuck was obviously losing patience with my lagging.  We were hungry, it was hot (especially in leathers), and it had been a while since he'd had a cigarette.  I felt bad, because I sure as hell wanted to get out of there too, but everything just seemed to take so long to get in place.  

Finally though we were on the road and looking for something to eat.  We'd wanted breakfast again, but it was too late for the place that Gordy had recommended, so we were just looking for anything that looked good.  Somehow though, we found a stretch of Spokane were no good restaurants exist.  We rode up and down several roads and it began to feel like the time we couldn't escape Yakima.  Tired of looking, Chuck made the call and pulled into a place called Zip's, which turned out to be a regional fast food burger chain.  

It was...food.  I can't say much more for it than that. My burger was basically McDonald's burger with Wendy's bacon on top and the fries were eerily similar to the frozen crinkle cut fries I've undercooked in my own kitchen.  The highlight was the soda machine that dispensed about 500 different flavors.  We scarfed the food down as best we could, tried not to dwell on it, and headed towards Idaho.

Our destination for the next two nights was Farragut State Park, a popular park on a former naval base.  Yes.  A naval base.  In Idaho.  Idaho, as it turns out, has lots of huge lakes, and this particular one, Pend Doreille, was large and deep enough that the US Navy had a training station there during WWII.  Now in more peaceful times, it's a state park and like Four Mound, has several disc golf courses on site.  

We were looking for a back way to Farragut, of course, and according to Google, there was a sweet road leading up and over Mt. Spokane.  We took it, and there were some pretty cool twisties on the way up, but our fun soon came to an end when we saw that it became a fee road, and that the road would be gravel at best on the other side of the summit, if we could find the correct one.  Kind of a bummer because turning around would make it about a 40 minute diversion, but there wasn’t much else to be done. So, heads hung low, we turned around, headed back, and found Blanchard Road, a road that Gordy mentioned, which led straight into Idaho.  It was a pretty cool road in parts, some of it having fresh virginal asphalt laid down where no lines even been painted yet. There were some nice turns over the crest of the hills on the border and Chuck wanted to turn around to have another run at them. But at that point, I was pretty pooped and just wanted to get to Farragut, so we forged ahead.

We made it into Idaho and headed south towards Farragut and stopped in a little town called Spirit Lake that seemed to be exceedingly friendly and had a nice little grocery store with a laundromat, several restaurants, gas stations and a liquor store.  Pretty much all  a weary traveller could ask for.  We got some easy food for the evening at the grocery store, some sandwiches and potato salad, and headed to Farragut which was only about 20 minutes away.

In order to get a spot at Farragut, we had to reserve online and by the time we were trying to do it, there were only two campsites available.  One with water and electricity in the RV area, and one in the tent area, with no water or electricity, that was right by the bathrooms and camp host. I had tried to consult with Chuck, but was unable to reach him, so I made an executive decision to go for the RV site, figuring that it would probably be quieter and wouldn't have to worry about the camp hosts so much.

Well, in hindsight, we may have been better off with the tent site.  The RV site, while having nice amenities like a picnic table, firepit, water and electricity, lacked any sort of personality.  It was a basic slab of asphalt with a rectangle of gravel attached.  And there were lots of families, with lots of kids.  They were generally well behaved, but still, there was always noise and commotion around.  On the plus side we only had one neighbor.  And while we were settling in to the campsite, a not-unattractive mom walked by with her young daughter.  The little girl was utterly transfixed by us--greasy, smelly, leathery visages that we were.  The mom  started chastising her playfully, telling her  she was “too young to be interested in boys...cute boys,” and glanced at us with a bit of a cougarish gleam in her eye.  I think she may have had a couple glasses of wine, but she nonetheless made two scruffy dirtbags blush.

We had our sandwiches and potato salad for dinner, and treated ourselves to some nice hot showers. They were the first we'd had since departing on Friday, and they hit the spot.

 Our not-so-special campsite