Washington: San Juan Islands : Peaceful, Easy Wheelin’ : Scenic, inexpensive and even largely flat, the rural archipelago is a sensible place for sensuous biking

Steering my gear-laden mountain bike along the cliffs of San Juan Island, I was suddenly overcome by a fit of laughter.

It was midway through a weeklong bicycle tour of the San Juan Islands, but delirium from fatigue wasn’t making me laugh. It was the absurd perfection of everything: the cloudless sky, the ocean breezes, the expansive view of Puget Sound, its steel-blue surface stretching to a horizon of snow-capped peaks.

To top things off, a pod of killer whales was swimming along the coast on a route parallel to my own. Every few minutes the whales surfaced, their enormous dorsal fins churning out of the water less than 100 yards offshore.

To many travelers, a self-sufficient bike tour may not sound like a laughing matter. Traveling by bicycle, especially one laden with clothes, camping gear and food, is a lot tougher than fiddling with the radio in a rental car. But the rewards of bike touring make it worthwhile. For one thing, all the pedaling makes you eat like a horse and sleep like a sloth.

On a more aesthetic level, your senses, freed from the confines of a car, revive themselves. You find yourself recognizing crops by their smell and marveling at how loudly ravens’ wings flap in flight. And unless you cycle like Tour-de-France winner Miguel Indurain, there’s ample time to study the landscape, ponder clouds and shout salutations to every cud-chewing cow.

There’s plenty of opportunity for bovine bonhomie on the bucolic San Juan Islands in Washington’s Puget Sound. Checkerboarded by pastures, fields and forests, the San Juans are tailor-made for bike touring. The roads are quiet, distances are short, campsites are plentiful, hills are mostly gentle, and the scenery is stunning.

Best of all, if you decide to trade inns for campsites, there’s no more affordable way to explore the San Juans. Springtide, the seasonal magazine published for the islands’ visitors, reports that tourists spend an average of $85 per day on the San Juans.

Camper-cyclists, who pay little--if anything--to ride the ferries from island to island, and who pay nominal fees for campsites, would have to buy colossal amounts of pasta and peanut butter to spend even a third of that amount per day.

Though there are more than 400 islands and rocky outcrops in the San Juan archipelago (more if you count at low tide), the three largest islands--San Juan Island, Lopez Island and Orcas Island--are most suited to bicycle exploration. Though only a few miles apart, each island has a particular character. San Juan has a colorful history and killer whales (orcas) frolicking off its coasts; Lopez is known for its rural landscape and cyclist-friendly flatness; Orcas is renowned for the old-growth forests, pristine lakes and mountains in its interior.

As with most visitors to the San Juans, I began my tour at Anacortes, Wash., about 80 miles north of Seattle and the principal ferry port serving the islands. Accompanying me was my cousin, John Benson, from Seattle. Having just married and graduated from veterinary school, John had to be gently coaxed away from his wife and job search, but once we were on board the ferry, he was as anxious as I was to wheel his bike off the boat and begin pedaling. He was also loath to squander funds, and agreed that our first stop ought to be westernmost San Juan Island, since cyclists do not pay for eastward ferry rides. From San Juan we would then hop free-of-charge from island to island back to Anacortes(.

When the ferry ride, a two-hour churn among mist-shrouded islands, ended, we steered our bikes through the quaint streets of Friday Harbor, loaded up with bagels, cheese, apples and peanut butter at a grocery store, and headed across the island.

It was my first experience cycling with panniers--saddlebags that attach to the bike’s frame--and once I’d learned how to grapple with the extra weight, I found that the added momentum and steadiness made downhills a joy and uphills only slightly more hellish.

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It took us less than two hours to pedal to the island’s far shore, site of San Juan County Park. Here, we found one of the best reasons to tour San Juan on less than four wheels; only cyclists and hikers were allowed to pitch tents on a grassy knoll above the water, where we enjoyed the best view of any campsite on the island.

At the centrally-located park, we were also well-situated for exploring the 16-mile-long island. At the southern end is American Camp, part of the San Juan Island National Historic Park. American Camp was the venue for the San Juans’ most famous incident, the Pig War of 1859--so-named because American and British forces came to the brink of battle after an American settler shot a pig owned by British soldiers, who’d claimed the island as their own.

Eventually, England and the U.S. turned to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm I to mediate the conflict. He decided the island belonged to the U.S., thereby settling the last disputed boundary between Canada and America and reserving a sacred place in island history for a murdered pig.

Nobody could say exactly where the pig was gunned down, but the park still offered the island’s most beautiful scenery: wind-whipped fields and coves littered with driftwood. Resting on a log in curiously-named Grandma’s Cove, John and I were held in the thrall of the Olympic Mountains, all but their shining crests lost in haze. Then, as if on cue, a pair of orcas surfaced not far off shore, the sighing of their blowholes eerie and spine-tingling in the hush of twilight.

At the northern end of San Juan Island, offering more history and an alternative to bike-touring’s spartan lifestyle, is Roche Harbor Resort.

Since 1886, the resort’s gracious Hotel de Haro, adorned by long balconies and surrounded by flower gardens, has hosted U.S. presidents and scores of tanned yacht captains who lash their craft to white-washed piers. Resort rates were beyond our budget but, thankfully, even yachtless pedal-pushers are welcome in the resort’s grocery store, restaurant, and huge, spooky, neo-Roman mausoleum built by John McMillin, Roche Harbor’s first owner.

In the early summer months, however, the island’s most popular attractions are three pods of killer whales who live off San Juan’s western coast. The orcas, which number about 100, are best viewed from San Juan County Park itself and from nearby Lime Kiln State Park. When John and I visited Lime Kiln, a group of orcas swam by a few hundred yards offshore. Thinking we’d seen the show, we pedaled off. Grinding up the road above the park, we saw that the orcas had made a U-turn and were passing only a dozen yards from the rocks, where more patient whale-watchers shouted ecstatically.

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Though Lopez Island, San Juan’s eastern neighbor, doesn’t boast anything so dramatic as waters full of killer whales and historical parks devoted to martyred pigs, it does offer something any cyclist can appreciate--a lack of hills. Once off the ferry, John and I adapted readily to Lopez’s mellow pace, and pedaled lazily across the island to Spencer Spit State Park on the island’s eastern shore. Like San Juan County Park, Spencer Spit reserves the choicest, beachside campsites for cyclists and hikers, who pitch tents among huge, wave-sculpted pieces of driftwood.

On Lopez’s gently rolling roads, farmers in pick-ups waved at us whenever they bounced past. Tourist literature accords Lopez much hoopla for its residents’ habit of waving to every passerby. Some of these waves seemed grudgingly offered, which is hardly surprising--I’d get pretty sick, too, of waving at each of the 1.5 million people who visit the San Juans every year.

When not waving, John and I mused idly about what the wave-happy residents of Lopez Island call themselves. (Lops? Lopes? Lopestics? Lopezoids?) “We’re Lopezians,” answered Brittany Hayes, 16, definitively. “Pronounced LopEEshans.”

While wielding a scoop at the ice-cream stand in Lopez Village Park, Brittany warned that some Lopezians see it as their civic duty to remind visiting cyclists, hypnotized by Lopez’s languid character, to stay alert.

“There’s a committee on the island,” said Brittany, “whose members drive around with squirt guns and sprays bicyclists riding down the middle of the road.” Sounds like more fun than waving.

There’s not much to Lopez besides farmland, roads, and beaches. There’s nowhere to buy groceries besides the Lopez Village market. It made our daily schedule blissfully simple: eat breakfast, ride for an hour to a beach, ride to another beach, ride to Lopez Village, shower in the town park’s public bathrooms, provision ourselves with groceries and cheap red wine at the grocery store, ride back 30 minutes to Spencer Spit, crack open the wine and build a cooking fire.

After Lopez’s flat roads, the hills on 57-square-mile Orcas Island, the largest in the archipelago, were a bit daunting. At least, John and I were prepared to be daunted, since every guidebook, ferry employee and islander we encountered relished telling us how hilly Orcas was. Actually, when we got off the ferry and headed for Eastsound, Orcas’s largest town, we found the same sort of quiet roads, rising and dipping among stands of dark pines, rolling fields and picturesque farm houses.

But we knew one hill, the most intimidating in the San Juans, still awaited.

Among the features of 5,000-acre Moran State Park, a few miles from centrally located Eastsound, are two large freshwater lakes, 30 miles of hiking trails, 151 campsites, and 2,409-ft.-high Mt. Constitution, the highest point in the islands. From the beginning, John and I realized that the five-mile-long ascent of Mt. Constitution would be the crowning glory of our journey. Besides the physical accomplishment, we would be rewarded with what is reputed to be one of the best views in North America.

Fortified with a camp-cooked meal, prepared in our Moran State Park campsite among lofty, old-growth pines, John and I tackled the hour-long, muscle-searing, lung-pumping climb. The view from the top was, in fact, stupefying, with the hills and curves of Orcas Island and surrounding islands drifting in and out of swirling clouds. The descent was even more thrilling. Swerving back down the switchbacks to the bottom of the mountain, my eyes watered, my stomach crept to my throat, and my fingers ached from clenching the brake-levers.

Having achieved our summit, and having had our fill of bagels, steaks and Gato Negro wine, we rode 17 miles to the ferry landing and the journey back to Anacortes. To us who had pedaled all day, every day for a week, this last ride seemed almost effortless. I felt as though I’d discovered the traveler’s ideal. I was under my own power; the pace was unhurried but steady enough to cover some ground, and room and board was practically free.

I was tempted, once back on the mainland, to reunite John with his wife and then hop back on my bike and start pedaling south. There’s a lot of nice road between Seattle and San Diego.

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GUIDEBOOK: San Juan Island Hopping

Getting there: LAX to Seattle: United, Alaska and Delta offer nonstop service; Southwest and Reno Air offer one-stop service starting at $158 round trip, advance purchase. Ferries to San Juan Island, Lopez Island, Orcas Island and Shaw Island depart the mainland at Anacortes, Wash. For schedule information, call Washington State Ferries, (206) 464-6400.

Bicycles: Rental places in Seattle include: Greg’s Greenlake Cycle, 7007 Woodlawn Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98115; tel. (206) 523-1822; $18 per day, $100 per week. R&E; Cycles, 5627 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105; tel. (206) 527-4822; $25 per day, $150 per week. Where to stay: (In summer, camping reservations are recommended.) San Juan Island: San Juan County Park; tel. (360) 378-2992; $15 for standard site, $5 for bikers-hikers; outhouses, no showers, firewood available. Roche Harbor Resort and Marina; tel. (800) 451-8910; guest rooms, cabins and condominiums, starting at $48 per night in off season, starting at $70 from May 10-Oct. 1. Lopez Island: Spencer Spit State Park; tel. (360) 468-2251; $10 for standard site, $5 for bikers-hikers; includes two eight-bunk shelters, no showers; two coin-operated showers at Lopez Village public park. Orcas Island: Moran State Park; tel. (360) 376-2326; $10 for standard site, $7 for bikers-hikers; showers, boat rentals, hiking trails.

For more information: The San Juan Islands Visitor Information Service, P.O. Box 65, Lopez, WA 98261; tel. (360) 468-3663.

--D.G.