CCC to Bessemer Road

Bessemer Road is destroyed just above CCC junction. Route info here: https://www.strava.com/activities/3569967160

I’ve been hearing/reading about the CCC trail and the Bessemer Road climb for a few years now and finally my buddy and Eric and I were able to take an afternoon to investigate. 

The CCC and Bessemer are east of North Bend, WA up the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie drainage.  The recently cleaned up Middle Fork is a treasure trove of outdoor exploration.  The CCC is reputedly rough and the Bessemer Road is well-known for it’s unrelenting grade so I decided this would be a good opportunity to dust off my Yeti hardtail which I converted to an all-road bike last year.  The 2.3” wide Rene Herse Rat Trap Pass tires would be helpful on the mostly single-track CCC and the triple chainring mountain bike gearing might just get me up the Bessemer climb.

Eric and I started in North Bend and started east up the Snoqualmie Valley trail.  We turned left onto Mt Si Road and followed that all the way to the CCC trail.  The entrance to the CCC trail is a bit obscure; it’s obviously an old roadbed but it is now reduced to a narrow single-track.  We had at least half a dozen significant stream crossings (meaning we had to carry the bikes across) with two crossings that had serious wet foot potential.

We hit the Bessemer Road with the intention of riding to the end and then doing a little hike-a-bike to the Campbell Global system near Lake Hancock.  The hike-a-bike portion came sooner than expected when we almost immediately encountered logs and rock piles on the road.  There had been a massive avalanche/landslide and after a few log crossings Eric and I decided to leave the bikes and investigate the carnage. 

Lugging a bike through the mess is certainly not impossible, it would have been a major delay of game, so we decided to descend the Bessemer Road to the Middle Fork Road and then return to North Bend.  We had a good rain shower on the way back which helped solidify that we had made the right decision.

I wonder if the Bessemer road is popular enough with hikers (as they seem to be the main users) to be repaired.  Over a quarter mile of the road is completely gone and repair would be a major undertaking.