The cemetery gates are open. They always are between sunrise and sunset.
To get from the Sellwood Bridge up to Terwilliger, a popular cycling route, you climb through the River View Cemetery. If you stick to the marked route, identified by circles and bike figures and arrows pained on the switchbacks, then you get an average 4.3% grade instead of the 8.0% you would get if you came up Taylors Ferry.
On this day, piles of slushy snow and translucent ice in tree shadow keep the blacktop wet. I pass three others and settle in to a comfortable gear, downshifting only where the grade drops. A Pontiac passes me. Four bright cones, unevenly spaced, warn of a funeral ahead. Tall hardwoods rise from the hollow where the ground drops off to the right, too sheer for burial plots. Their bare tops sway in a northerly gust before a burst of tailwind pushes me past four more cones.
I exit the funeral area in the steepest part of the climb.
Strava segment – Made it through the hardest part of life