Mima Mounds

We had our pick of events yesterday between Tour de Blast and the Capitol Criterium. Instead, we opted for a 55-mile country ride south and west of Olympia. The main attraction, besides solitude and beautiful roads, was the Mima Mounds.

We started from my rental house in Olympia and took the Chehalis Western Trail south. After 15 miles (and a few turns off the trail) we arrived at Millersylvania State Park - a great stopping point for a snack and water bottle refill.

We criss-crossed local roads past people’s farms and homes until reaching the booming town of Rochester. Nick has raced here before and pointed out the way to Independence Valley. We turned the opposite direction, though, and soon battled fierce headwinds as we approached the hills. We were rewarded as we turned north by a tail wind and made good time up to the Mounds.

They’re admittedly a little hard to see in the picture, but they’re neat in a Roswell-alien-like way. There are thousands of these over-sized gopher hills (about six feet tall and 40 feet across) in the Mima Prairie. They are made of silt and sand (probably left behind 13,000 years ago when the Vashon glacier retreated) and sit on a bed of gravel. Each mound has a “root” of silt that extends into the gravel below the mound. No one knows for sure how they formed. Theories include formation of polygonal ice wedges in soil near the edge of the glacier, burrowing by colonies of pocket gophers, and erosion or deposition by glacial floods around regularly spaced trees or shrubs of a long-vanished ice age landscape. What do you think?

For a turn-by-turn route description of a 35-mile variation of our ride that starts and finishes at Millersylvania State Park, click the map below.

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