Skagit Valley Tulips

The ride starts here.

Saturday morning we had sloppy snow and rain mixed. I've been watching the weather reports for weeks, trying to plan a ride to the Skagit Valley tulip fields, but the actual weather never seems to coincide with predictions. So I decided to go on Monday, whatever happened. I got lucky.

I cheated a bit and loaded my bike on the bus to ride between Bellingham and Mount Vernon. Just for reference, it's a bit less than a ten mile ride from the Ferndale Post Office to the Bellingham Transit Center.

I walk my bike across the bridge. Car traffic is fast,
and both the car lanes and the sidewalk are narrow.

It's been awhile since I've been to Mount Vernon, so I was surprised to see a new Park & Ride lot, the Chuckanut Transit Center in Burlington, by the new roundabout at the Hwy. 11/I-5 overpass. I stayed on the bus all the way to the Skagit station in Mount Vernon, which is also an Amtrak station.

Old downtown Mount Vernon is tiny and not very bicycle-friendly. (The newer shopping district on the other side of the freeway is Bicycle Hell.) To reach the tulip fields you cross the Skagit River on the Hwy. 20 bridge, which has no bike lanes and only one sidewalk. But once you get over that obstacle, MacLean Road has nice bike lanes and marked Tulip Routes on the farm roads that pass the most colorful fields.

I could have gotten off the bus at the Chuckanut Station and ridden generally south-west on Josh Wilson Road to Avon-Allen Road, then to MacLean Road to reach the tulip fields. You can also by-pass the bridge by riding south on old Hwy. 99 to the tiny town of Conway on Fir Island Road, which crosses the Skagit River, then loop back north to see the fields.

On this trip, many of the fields closest to the main roads were just plowed mud, maybe waiting for crops of potatoes, corn or pumpkins. I zigzagged around for miles. Then I'd see a thin line of red, yellow and pastel in the distance and ride five miles or so toward it, to find acres of colorful fields on both sides of the road.

Early-blooming daffodils begin to fade before the tulips bloom

Some of the fields are still budding, waiting for a few days of sun for the flowers to open. During sunny spells, you can bike past fields of green shoots with pale buds in the morning - maybe head for lunch in LaConner, reputed hang-out of novelist Tom Robbins - then ride by again in the afternoon on the return trip, after a few hours of sun, and find fields of brilliant color.

The roads are flat for miles, but sometimes you'll fight headwinds and sideways gusts.

So here's a bunch of eye-candy to lure you out on the road.

 

Alpacas this time, maybe next year's SmartWool