Team Teriyaki Donut in the Ballard Street Scramble 2007

Introduction

With Omar out until late July at best, Teriyaki Donut is me, Greg Barnes, on a bike pulling our 4-year old, Emmett, in a Burley trailer. We live in NE Seattle, so we know Ballard fairly well. I figured we would visit all the nearby hills, and we did, with the exception of Queen Anne.

We ended up with a perfect score of 1000 by visiting all the checkpoints, which is (I believe) the first time anyone other than a single man on a bike has earned a perfect score. We rode around 28 miles.

Our route:

44 [boat sign], 27 [Archie McPhee], 28 [leaded windows], 34 [corner windows], 46 [Ballard Commons], 47 [tricycles], 21 [old street name], 35 [church stairs], 42 [Ballard High], 32 [Whittier School], 23 [Sandel Playground], 44 [Wilson School], 55 [Green Lake], 33 [Phinney Ridge house], 24 [guardrail], 22 [corner bench], 25 [West Woodland Elementary], 38 [corner statue], 35 [red door], 53 [14th Ave NW Boat Ramp], 29 [mural], 37 [Winston Building], 54 [Locks], 52 [Fort Lawton], 43 [Magnolia church], 31 [Dravus utility building], 26 [SPU], 56 [onlinemetals.com], 51 [Shilshole building], 45 [numbers on curb]

Our route, courtesy of Gmaps pedometer.

Notes

• Given the Series Championship standings, and since we'd come close a few times, I was planning on visiting all the checkpoints all along. As it turned out, this was a great Street Scramble to try, since it required fewer than 28 miles to sweep the course. We could have traveled fewer miles if I had planned the route better. I had two main ideas in the back of my mind: First, we should cross the Locks early, since it's nearly impossible to get a Burley trailer across the narrow walkways on a sunny, crowded day. Second, I wanted to climb Phinney Ridge as far north as possible.

  My original route ignored the first problem and had us proceed basically clockwise north of the ship canal, and clockwise south, crossing the Locks near the end. After crossing the Ballard Bridge, I realized it was a far better idea to climb Magnolia from the Locks than from Dravus, and that it would be better just to not cross the Locks at all, so we modified the section south of the ship canal to proceed counterclockwise, recrossing the Ballard Bridge at the end. This would not have been a bad route, had I also left the downtown Ballard checkpoints until after recrossing the bridge. In the end, we covered the area between the Bridge and the Locks north of the ship canal twice, which was obviously not necessary.

• I had the idea in my mind that 34 [corner windows] was on Ballard Avenue, so we took the north sidewalk after 24th Ave NW to pick up 28 [leaded windows]. I soon realized we needed to go an extra block.
• Those shells at Ballard Commons (46) are pretty neat, as were the tricycles (47).
• Biking to the start, I decided the old Ballard Street names along 24th were sure to be a checkpoint. Having visited them all a few months ago, I knew the answer to checkpoint 21 before visiting (one answer I recognized as one of the old names, the other two I did not).
• We saw foot teams up through 35 [church steps] and bike teams through 32 [Whittier School]. That sea serpent was also very cool, although the gates into the schoolyard were impossible to negotiate with the Burley. I had to run in to count the teeth.
• We were originally going to head up to Sandel Playground using 8th Ave NW, but realized the street drops down too much after 85th, so we did some zig-zagging to get there. Another hill I forgot about was the steep rise east of Greenwood, but we made it up, anyway, and took 90th straight east to Wilson School.
• Heading south from Wilson, we took Ashworth Ave N, which was a mistake, since it required four non-signalized arterial crossings. We were lucky to get a break in the traffic at N 85th at all, and should have jogged up to Wallingford Ave N.

• Leaving Green Lake, we took the arterial (Winona) to get an easy crossing of Aurora, and it paid off with a green light. This also meant a difficult climb up Phinney Ridge (83rd is easier), but not as bad as if we had gone up near the zoo. Once we were on the ridge, we chose to head south, picking up both Phinney Ridge checkpoints before heading down the hill. We had explored the parks (some of them mere triangles) on the west side of the ridge before, so we were able to follow the ridge line pretty well to checkpoint 24, where again we had a tricky arterial crossing. After the checkpoint, we took the sidewalk on Market down one block to 1st Ave NW to descend the hill to the nearby 22. On the way down we saw a couple of foot teams, as well as Dave Enger, who was heading counterclockwise.

  Just after 33 [Phinney Ridge house], I stopped for an energy bar, and felt a cramp in my right shoulder. Coupled with the sweat and sunscreen dripping into my eyes, I was not in a very good mood. I overmedicated myself with Aleve, and thankfully the pain went away fairly quickly. But the sweat remained a problem the rest of the ride, particularly when climbing hills.

  On the way back north to the checkpoint at West Woodland, we overshot the school by two blocks because I thought it was on 3rd Ave NW. At the north end of the schoolyard, we saw Dave Enger again, lifting his bike over a chain. We could not do the same with the Burley, so we had to go completely around the block to a more accessible entrance.

• We just where the 14th Ave NW boat ramp was, so finding 53 was no problem. We overshot the entrance to the Ballard Bridge by one block, but that was no big deal. More troublesome was the bridge itself, which is widely reviled as the worst bike/pedestrian bridge in the city (I think it sucks for cars as well). We were going to take the sidewalk, but on our approach saw the large 'knob' in the concrete barrier that narrowed the sidewalk and made me doubt we could take the sidewalk. Instead, we rode on the car lane. The merge heading north is thankfully not as bad as the merge heading south, and we were followed by a couple of cars that came up the ramp with me, so I didn't have any fears that we would end up like the bicyclist who was hit on the bridge just the day before. This also saved us from the extremely hazardous merge at the north end of bridge.
• Throughout the race, Emmett was surprisingly chatty and interested in how we were doing. I'd tell him how many points we had, and he say things like "We're doing pretty well." After the locks, I told him we had 7 checkpoints to go and over an hour (1:10) to do them. He thought that was enough time. Soon after, he fell asleep.
• From the Locks, we chose to take the sharp incline up to the pedestrian bridge over the railroad tracks. I'm always amused by the sign that tells you to 'reduce speed' as you approach the bridge. On a previous Night and Day, I had decided this route up to Fort Lawton was better than the alternative (west on Commodore Way then up through an old Discovery Park road that is closed to cars), but that was because I thought the climb up from the Discovery Park entrance wasn't too bad. It turns out I was wrong; that hill is just as bad. I'd say the two routes are roughly equivalent; it's more a question of which one you're more comfortable with, and the weather at the time (the backroad in Discovery Park is pretty well shaded). It took us around 15 minutes to get to the Fort Lawton checkpoint from the locks, including a stop at the entrance to the Fort Lawton cemetery where I had to clean my glasses for the umpteenth time.
• After leaving Discovery Park, I was pleased to see that the hill east from the park was actually a downhill. After 43 [Magnolia church], there were 48 minutes left and 5 checkpoints. Including the segment from the last checkpoint to the finish, that gave us around 8 minutes per segment. The first of those segments, however, would be the hardest one, as we had to climb Magnolia. The most direct route was straight east, but I knew (and could see) that it was very steep. With the trailer, I was also concerned about steep downhills, and Dravus is extremely steep, so I decided we would head south until the hill looked more manageable. Just after Mounger Pool, it looked good enough, and we headed up the hill straight east.
• It was not a checkpoint, but Ella Bailey Park (just east of Magnolia School) has spectacular views. It was a checkpoint in a race I did later the same day, and navigating to it was not a problem, since I had just been there a few hours earlier.
• It took around ten minutes to get to 31 [Dravus utility building], but I knew the next two checkpoints would be faster. We got to SPU with 32 minutes left, so we were back on schedule, and it only took four minutes to get the answer for 56 [onlinemetals.com], even with the short Nickerson hill. We didn't even have to go all the way down the short hill to 56, since the sign was big enough to read from half a block away. That left us 28 minutes for the last two checkpoints, with two main obstacles: the Ballard Bridge, and a short climb up Sunset Hill from Shilshole to the finish line.
• In one sense, we were again lucky on the bridge, since traffic northbound was slow, so the usually difficult merge onto the bridge lane wasn't too bad, and no one could complain about how slow we were going. But then traffic stopped, as the bridge was going up. So much for saving time by avoiding the Locks. Luckily, this was our last difficulty, as the route out to Shilshole was, of course, basically flat.
• To find the building at 51 [Shilshole], I noted that it was almost surely in the 7000 block, based on the streets to the east on the map. Of course, there aren't a lot of addresses on Shilshole to let you know when you're in the 7000 block, but the building itself was pretty easy to spot and its address (7001, I think) let us know we were in the right place. We reached checkpoint 51 with about 10 minutes to go.
• 45 [numbers on curb] wasn't too hard to find, and another case where we could read the answer from half a block away. We had about 5 minutes left to get back to the finish line, and made it easily, with over three minutes to spare.
• I had emptied my water bottles with about 15 minutes to go, and decided to forego water rather than refilling them with Gatorade from the trailer. So the watermelon at the finish tasted very good.
• There were a lot of interesting checkpoints on this Scramble, including, as already mentioned, the shells in the Ballard Commons (46), the tricycles (47), and the sea serpent at Whittier Elementary (32).

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