Whiskey Tango Fondo

Over this past weekend, I did the Whiskey Tango Fondo, a 90-ish mile, 10k-ish feet of climbing (I think the target was 100 miles and 11k, but road closures shortened it a bit) ride out in the Eastern Sierras. Yes, before you ask, I did have several songs from Wilco’s Whiskey Hotel Foxtrot bouncing around my brain all day.

Historically, I haven’t really enjoyed big races, but since this one is not a race, I thought I’d give it a shot since it’s a beautiful place and not that far from home. It turns out removing the racer bros does indeed make it a more enjoyable experience! Who’d have thought. This reminded me more of the early-era gravel events I’d been to, before they got taken over by people who cared about winning. It’s just a bunch of people with one goal: finish.

The ride started at 6:30 am in Independence, California at the Inyo County Courthouse. Fun fact, this courthouse held a preliminary hearing for Charles Manson for possessing stolen property after him and “The Family” were arrested outside of Death Valley. This was right before he was finally brought in the Sharon Tate murders.

Anyway, the actual bike ride started with a long and steady climb that nicely divided up the (50 or so? There were nearly 500 people registered, but it seems like the bulk did the 70 or 50 miles versions, which started later in the day) riders into smaller groups. I was, as is apparently usual in these sorts of things, somewhere in the middle. Not fast enough for the fast guys, but faster than the slow guys. I spent most of the day going back and forth with just a few other riders, including a delightful German guy and one dude who went into the port-o-potty at the foot of Whitney Portal and who I never saw again (RIP).

One of my favorite parts of the ride was through Alabama Hills, which I wish I would have stopped to snap more photos in. It’s a crazy little area that sort of resembles Joshua Tree, but also sort of resembles parts of Utah? There are even several arches in the area, and the rock formations are often other-worldly. It’s no surprise that tons of movies were filmed here.

Eventually, many hours later, came the climb to Whitney Portal, a campground used for folks looking to climb Mt. Whitney that sits at about 8,500 feet. The road had just been opened for the season, so there weren’t many people out. For the majority of the climb, I was thinking about how cool the name “Whitney Portal” is, and how I don’t think I’ve heard of any other climbing basecamps using “portal” before. Seems like a no-brainer that every other site like this should copy if they don’t already because it sounds cool as hell.

After the portal, it was a long, long, long descent, then a grueling 15 or so miles of flat dirt roads that felt harder than any climb. The elevation profile on this ride was very silly:

Afterwards, there was a little party at the end with burritos, beer, and whiskey. I couldn’t stomach much food yet (the ride took me just under 8 hours, which, 8 hours of eating weird bike-friendly space foods and/or junk food really wrecks havoc on your stomach, even though I tried to eat as much whole foods as I could), but later that evening mustered enough strength to hit up Copper Top BBQ about 15 minutes away from where we stayed. Never in my life has meat covered in BBQ sauce tasted so good. They also had an incredible (vegetarian) “green chili,” that was nothing like Colorado (or New Mexico) Green Chili, but was instead closer to a three-bean chili but with green chilis mixed in. I plan to figure out how to rip it off at some point.

And since I’m usually the one behind the camera, a rare Thorin sighting from the official photos, this was toward the very end of the day:

Full route was: