Photos: Riding Chelan's Devil's Backbone

Let's face it: winter's coming. There's something about playing in the mud that makes me feel like a little kid again, but it simply can't compare to the moist, tacky carpets of dirt that I've enjoyed riding all summer. So as autumn turns into the darkness of winter, I'm never ready for the eight months of cold, wet mountain-biking purgatory that we Northwest riders must endure while waiting for the high country to melt back out.

Faced with this reality, every October some friends and I make it a point to head to Lake Chelan and the Devil's Backbone ridge in central Washington state—hopefully just before the snow starts coming down. This zone is just far enough from major metropolitan areas that riding trails out here requires a bit of an investment. The lure is an amazing concentration of epic trails just begging you to lay tire to dirt.

How epic? The Pot Peak Trail is a five-hour riding commitment, with 5,000 feet of elevation gain, some technical and exposed ridge-top riding, a few hike-a-bikes, and a brief death march through a scree field to get to the brass ring of the ride: a 10-mile, 5000-foot descent of gravity-fed gravy. And that's just one of four similar rides in this area.

With trails like this, the riding is beyond ridiculously good. But what makes the experience so memorable each year isn't just the riding. Nor is it the drunken debauchery that usually comes from riding all day and having a case of good brew stashed in the cooler. Rather, the people we meet are what really make this trip memorable. Sometimes they're regular folks, but at times we cross a landscape populated by characters straight out of a David Lynch flick.

This year it was definitely the latter.

The people that stood out the most were three moto riders we met as we started the ridge-top traverse in two inches of early season snow. These guys were awesome: knowing we were earning this ride through some serious sweat equity, they'd stop and clear obstructions ahead of us. Super cool. Then Alex, aboard an XTR-equipped Intense SS, managed to hold them off for almost the entire descent. Those guys had no idea how fast a mountain bike with a skilled pilot could move.

Then there were Brett and Craig, two rednecks across the road from us. Unlucky in hunting, but well armed with liquid solace, they were lured over to our camp by Cashbaugh's axe-throwing antics. Kind of funny how a bit of booze, some good chow, and time spent throwing sharp objects can break the ice. At one point, Brett really opened up with a confession: "Me and the wife are thinking about adopting a kid from Africa or India and doing our part for the world." Not exactly the type of thing you'd expect to hear from a hulking redneck hunter. A few turns around the camp on Alex's Intense even had him mumbling, "I gotta get me one of these things."

But the true hallmark of our Lynchian landscape came courtesy of the "Scorpion" hunters camped just down the hill from us. Cranking the Scorps' "Rock You Like a Hurricane" until midnight, they were still out looking for deer before 5 am. Despite their sleep deprivation, they managed to score a kill, and proudly came by our camp to show us the head.

Overall, the experience reinforced the idea that every mountain biker should make some sort of pilgrimage to a special place at least once a year to ride with friends and soak up the local flavor.