EDIT: I first did the RIMROBOD (Ride the Interior of Mt. Rainier Out and Back in One Day) ride in 2017 on my old road bike, a Trek 5500. Starting at Longmire, I figured 121 miles with 15,600’ of climbing for the out and back to Sunrise. I recently did the ride, slightly shorter as I started at Cougar Rock campground, on October 7th, 2023. This time I used an altimeter and Strava which produced different stats: although the distance checked at 118 miles, I logged 13,594’ on Strava, and when I imported the GPX file to map the ride the total came to 13,435’ elevation gain. In my original iteration in 2017, I arrived at Box Canyon on the return leg around 9 PM and took a 3 hour nap, finishing in the dark. This time around I used my Salsa Cutthroat, and finished the entire ride at 6:25 PM (started at 5 AM) for 13.5 hours of total time. The Salsa has much better climbing gears and I was able to spin easily up the climbs, conserving energy in the process. 2023 also saw greatly improved cycling fitness for me, which helped tremendously. I am retiring my original video of RIMROBOD with this more recent iteration with more accurate stats. Also, my 2017 ride was in July, a week before RAMROD (Ride Around Mt. Rainier in One Day), but I must say the fall colors were a poppin’ for this October ride and made for extreme eye candy and olfactory bliss, highly recommended! Hopefully, the Stevens Canyon Road will be open during the week sometime in 2024, as doing this ride on a weekend involves serious traffic.

I took inspiration from RAMROD (Ride Around Mt. Rainier in One Day), touted as a hard ride with 150 miles and 10,000 feet of climb, to put together RIMROBOD (Ride the Interior of Mt. Rainier Out and Back in One Day), with a shorter distance of 121 miles but total climb of 15,600 feet, all within the Park boundaries. This 36 minute video chronicles this ride, including some sweet descent shots. I mounted a GoPro Hero 5, encased in a GenusTech aluminum housing with an Eclipse variable ND filter, on my left shoulder to capture the event. Stats for the bike captured by Map My Ride.