busygizmo

This one is on our every year list, often more than once. We've always done it from the eastern side since we really like being in the Methow in general. But this past year we managed to get a spot on the Mazama Ride that the Redmond Cycling Club puts on every year. They limit the number of participants to how many the can fit at the Mazama Country Inn and they get a lot of returning riders who have priority on sign up. It was a great opportunity to do the ride with support from Marblemount to Mazama one day and then the reverse the next day. I'd highly recommend it if you like organized rides that are not crowded but with a sense of comradery on the road.

Mazama

It's funny, but we don't typically do too many organized rides but this past year we managed to get on four of them including the above. We rode the Crest the Cascades over McKenzie Pass, Ride the Hurricane up to Hurricane Ridge and finished the year with the Mt. Baker Hill Climb. We obviously like climbing. We also spent a couple of days at Ashford and rode to Paradise on consecutive days, once right from our cabin and the second day from the Stevens Canyon side. We did another ride to the Washington/Rainy pass from Winthrop and managed to get down to Mt. St. Helens to ride up to Windy Ridge.

I'm not sure what this year has in store, last year was supposed to be a non-riding focused year and then it just went from ride to ride. We'd had four years in a row where we had been in training mode for riding goals we had each of those years so we were thinking a year when we didn't feel obligated to always be training would be good.

We did talk for a while about doing this ride in Montana but it filled almost immediately with returning riders and when I inquired they already had 50 folks on the waiting list.

https://bicycleridesnw.org/brnw-montana-2020/

I do have a couple of bucket list rides I'd like to do at some point, Chinook Pass from the east, Mission Ridge and a climb up a Forest Service road north of Ellensburg called Lions Rock that is supposed to be comparable to the McNeil Canyon climb that features in the Chelan Century. There are a number of climbs in the Wenatchee area to go along with the Mission Ridge ride, the only issue would be timing it to avoid snow and heat. We snowboard at Mission and I wouldn't want to be on the road when they are still open until mid April and when we rode the Wenatchee Century a few years ago the temperature hit 97F that day and hit triple digits the next.

Further afield I look at this guy's website for inspiration:

Home Page - Jay's Essential Bike Rides

He has pretty strict criteria for his rides with lack of traffic and quality scenery being near the top. He doesn't think much of rides in our state, mainly because the amount of traffic, but has a long list of rides in Oregon and California. The handful I've done are really great rides, it's just unfortunate how long the drives are. Southern Oregon and Northern California are certainly sweet spots for great rides.

mtnbud mentioned the Selkirk loop, we did then WACANID ride a few years and were pretty disappointed. There were nice stretches especially between Nelson and Creston and the layover in Nelson was probably the highlight but there are way too many miles when you are on the shoulder next to high-speed traffic. Sometimes the shoulders were very narrow and we had terrible weather during our week so it was borderline scary at times navigating a narrow wet shoulder next to heavy traffic. the people that ran it were terrific but the riding left a lot to be desired IMO.