Long journey
MOSES LAKE — Ron Tebow has been a long trail, and it’s a long way from finished.
“I’m halfway now,” Tebow said Friday. “Warden is right on half, 120 miles.”
Tebow and his horse Olie have been riding the 251-mile Palouse to Cascades Trail, the primitive route that runs from the Washington-Idaho State Line to North Bend on the outskirts of Seattle. It combines the John Wayne Trail east of the Columbia River with the Iron Horse Trail west of the river.
Tebow, 70, loves to ride and loves to sightsee, and this was a way to combine the two, he said.
“The perspective from sitting on a horse is different than it is on anything I've experienced,” he said. “So, I thought, I live in Washington, why not look at it, see what it is? And then somewhere along the way, I got hooked up with the John Wayne Trail (the part of the route that’s east of the Cascades), and I thought, ‘It goes all the way across the state. Well, that's perfect. Let's just ride across there and see what there is in this state.’”
The Palouse to Cascades Trail is built almost entirely on the bed of the defunct Chicago-Milwaukee-St. Paul-Pacific Railroad line, sometimes called the Milwaukee Road.
Tebow is making the ride in 20- to 25-mile increments while his wife Sue drives the truck with a living quarter horse trailer from stop to stop. Some parts of the trail are easy to navigate, but others, well, they aren’t.
“We went across a bridge over by Revere that was ties, and I could see they were starting to rot,” Tebow said. “And I'm not so sure (Olie) didn't poke a foot through between them. He didn't fall or lose his balance or anything, but I would never go across that bridge again. I would do pretty near anything but go across that bridge.”
The two trails connect at the bridge over the Columbia River at Beverly, and from there, the terrain rises until Tebow reaches the Snoqualmie Pass Tunnel. According to the Palouse to Cascades Trail Coalition, that tunnel is 2.3 miles long, the longest tunnel on a rail trail in the U.S. Even in the summer, the coalition says, the tunnel is chilly, and Washington State Parks recommends that those who venture through it wear a headlamp.
Tebow’s not making the ride to prove anything or set any records, he said, so he’s not too concerned about riding every inch of the tail. Several areas in the eastern part of the route were impassible because of fallen bridges or fire damage, and rather than take the prescribed detours, he just drove on around them and resumed his ride on the other side.
When it’s over, Tebow said, he’s just going to go home and be satisfied with having made the ride.
“It's almost like it's not an accomplishment to me,” he said. "It's just a thing I've done.”
Ron Tebow stops on the 295-foot-long Tekoa Trestle that carries the Palouse to Cascades Trail over a large valley.