Thru-Biking the Oregon Timber Trail
Mountain biking new trails through old growths in the face of a changing planet.
Sarina Chalmers ‘21
Mountain Bikepacking: An Introduction
Maddie in front of Broken Top Mountain [Photo] Sarina Chalmers
Bikepacking, as a method of long distance backcountry travel, is equal parts ingenious and impractical.
Via mountain bike, fifteen-mile singletrack descents can be knocked out in under an hour and monotonous trails with ‘green tunnel’ scenery stay interesting and playful on two wheels. Conversely, loose, rocky sections of trail, steep grades, and seasonal treefall can force experienced riders to spend an afternoon getting passed by backpackers while they wrestle fifty pound bikes over felled trees and across talus fields.
In the world of long distance trails, bikepackers’ fragile and technical equipment combined with their inexorable dependency on trail quality violate the simplistic wanderlust sensibilities of backpackers. The cycling community’s values likewise break from the bikepacking process. The weight and bulk of bikepacking setups, and the tendency of long distance trails to eschew descriptors like ‘purpose built’ or ‘flow’ make bikepacking an almost unrecognizable endeavor to most dedicated mountain bikers.
The truth —which will come as a huge disappointment to Thoreau-inspired outdoor essentialists — is that bikepacking will never solve any of your problems. The sport, instead, offers a unique and fascinating set of challenges that will consume hours, miles, and calories at a fantastically addictive rate. Drawn to this high effort, high reward method of travel, Madeline Strasser ’21and I set out to thru-bike the Oregon Timber Trail in June of 2021.
Our Route: The Oregon Timber Trail
The Oregon Timber Trail (OTT) is a relatively new backcountry route connecting the southern Oregon border to the northern border…
The OTT was designed in 2017 with mountain biking in mind and is a conglomeration of existing trail systems, forest service roads, and newly built linkage trails that span the entire state of Oregon. Divided into four segments: the Fremont, Wilmette, Deschutes, and Hood tiers, the trail is 69% singletrack and 91% dirt or gravel. It spans 669 miles in length and gains a total of sixty-nine thousand feet in elevation. The OTT’s ongoing creation and restoration have benefitted from over 10,000 hours of volunteer work across the state, however, many sections of the trail remain extremely rugged and unfinished. Recent unchecked wildfires have also reversed a lot of trail building progress and led to numerous trail closures.
Although we sought funding for a full thru-ride of the OTT, the 2020 Riverside and White River fires resulted in complete closures of the trail from mile 540 north. This forced us to end our trip in Detroit, Oregon, 130 miles south of the OTT’s northern terminus. The charred landscape of the devastated lakeside town we entered at the end of our ride underscored the fragility of the OTT and its wilderness areas in the face of climate change and consequential wildfire management practices.
Our Journey: The Fremont Tier
There were warning signs of instability on the OTT from the beginning of our trip…
Maddie’s set up on top of Morgan Butte [Photo] Sarina Chalmers
We left our car in Alturas, California —the closest vehicle access to the trails’ southern terminus — and began the Freemont Tier by climbing directly into the 2020 Crane Fire scar. The soil was black and the remains of trees stood like toothpicks spanning tens of miles across rolling hills. This was the kind of unnatural scar seen only after a fire burns too hot for too long. The trail and its markings were obliterated in all of the heavy burn zones. In a moment of shallow optimism Maddie and I gave thanks that the fire had been so recent:the skeletal remains of the hundreds of thousands of burned trees had not yet fallen. Although there were blowouts of downed trees every mile or so, the graveyard of still-standing tree corpses foretold a much more sinister succession for the scorched landscape. In the coming years, treefall will inevitably turn the first 50 miles of the OTT into a large-scale game of pick-up-sticks.
Our gratitude for the mostly clear trails took us out of the burn zone and directly into a blight. This trend, of moving from one environmental or logistical disaster to another would remain true for the entirety of our journey on the OTT. If we had knocked on every piece of wood we carried our bikes over during the first two days of the OTT, we would still have been jinxed: no amount of wishing could clear the trail.
![Blight induced blowouts across the trail. [Photo] Sarina Chalmers.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5dd9ad96c9509a1e158d2b2c/b69c45cd-337a-41c9-8fe4-9c35dd15f1bb/09E03AAF-B754-40A8-8B58-4A3E4B20E7CA.jpeg)
Blight induced blowouts across the trail. Day 2. [Photo] Sarina Chalmers.
Old growth blowouts blocked the route every few hundred yards for miles. Like sieves crossing the trail and extending into dense forests, the downed trees in the Freemont tier —we would later find out —had filtered out all previous riders attempting the OTT. In a lightly sarcastic Timber Trail facebook group post, Maddie assured those who dropped off the trail that the blowouts were passable with “a bit of strength and determination.”
And so, strong and determined, we pushed on. The rest of the Freemont Tier provided our highestelevation for the whole trail, 360° fire tower views, and one impressive day of single speed riding due to a damaged shifting cable. We pushed our wakeup times ever earlier as the summer heatwave hit the Pacific Northwest. We began riding at six a.m. each day to make up for the miles we would lose to afternoon temperatures in the triple digits. On day six we completed the Fremont tier in 103° heat, reaching our resupply in Chemult, OR. We had traveled 200 miles and climbed over 20,000 feet. We were at least a day behind schedule, but proud to have made it through the blowouts and heatwave without losing morale.
The Willamette Tier
Day seven marked the end of the heatwave and beginning of the Willamette Tier…
Lakeside bug net smiles at Waldo Lake – Day 10. [Photo] Maddie Strasser
We rode thirty miles before ten and stopped at Crescent Lake to wash our feet. We ate an entire box of Fig Newtons, one whole bag of Swedish Fish, and a King Sized Snickers bar. As we prepared to cross the Cascade Range for the first time, we said goodbye to the dry desert landscape of Southern Oregon and entered into stunning old growth forests, rife with streams, moss, and massive single track descents.
The promising picture of the Cascades, however, was quickly shattered, as the trail ushered us into the OTT’s second circle of hell. Less than half a mile into our climb, Maddie and I were plunged into parallel but solitary battles – an atmosphere of mosquitoes threatened to steal every bit of emotional strength and fortitude we had carried through the Fremont tier.
With pursed lips and squinting eyes, we sprinted through the fray. Stopping for even a moment was unbearable. Downed trees took on a new, terrible meaning. In the time it took to lift a bike over a fallen tree, ice cream scoops of sanity were replaced by multiple frequencies of high-pitched buzzing, and the desire to fully submerge oneself in the creek. If quitting had been an option, Maddie and I both agree, we would have quit then and there. Unlike heat and blowouts, however, there is no option to take a break from mosquitoes. And so we pushed through. At the top of our climb, we found a campsite and begged its inhabitants, a father-son duo, for bug spray. They rewarded us with 100% deet syrup which made the rest of the Willamette tier passable.
The trail into Oakridge –our second resupply– was a 30 mile, steep and technical descent with tight switchbacks and next level detours around ten-foot diameter downed old growths. We counted bridges as we crisscrossed The Willamette and its tributaries. No sooner had we completed the seven thousand foot plunge into our second resupply town, then it was time to climb back out of the valley and over the Cascade Range for the second time.
The end of the Willamette chapter in our OTT adventure gave us little reprieve. Our days featured nearly vertical hike-a-bike climbs, miles of trail replete with tropics-level overgrowth, and a consistent smattering of mosquito incubating lakes and bogs. Riding the Eugene to Crest portion of the OTT, we caught our first glimpses of the Sister's area volcanoes that would characterize the Deschutes tier.
The Deschutes Tier
Back on the eastern side of the Cascades, the landscape of Deschutes Tier was arid and more desert-like than the old growth forests we had experienced for the past five days…
Above-treeline forest service roads wove around Bend-area volcanoes and connected us to purpose built trail systems connecting sno-parks and eventually wrapping around the Mt. Bachelor ski area. Fourth of July traffic was heavy. As trendy locals in Ripton shorts and team kits rode past us, we became self conscious. We had been riding in the same chamois for ten days, and our bulky set-ups felt unnecessary and embarrassing around well groomed weekend warriors who politely asked if we were ‘going camping somewhere for the night?’ Leaning into our hygiene-centered discomfort, we rode a popular section of singletrack into the heart of Sisters, OR, our final resupply town. Mercifully, the trail out of town circles a small resort lake on the outskirts of town. There we were able to take a postmortem dip, washing away the brief urban experience and preparing ourselves for the final three days of the trail.
Maddie and Mt. Washington and a lot of sand – Day 13. [Photo] Sarina Chalmers.
Back on the eastern side of the Cascades, the landscape of Deschutes Tier was arid and more desert-like than the old growth forests we had experienced for the past five days. However: the trail was still made of sand and was deeply rutted in sections. As we wove through patches of sandbox-like trail, we felt grateful for our college-era exposure to riding in Pikes Peak granite pebble pits. Our final descent was a next-level luge course of feet-deep sand, not unlike the dunes of Southern Colorado. We reveled in the unfamiliar challenge of ski-biking down powder-sand slopes, feeling incredibly validated in our decision to travel South to North on the OTT. Southbounders be warned: traveling up the trail in this section would be an unjustifiably terrible experience.
The Hood Tier
We crossed the Cascades one final time before finishing the OTT in Detroit, OR. On our last full day of riding we climbed 6,788 feet in 30 miles and were rewarded with distant views of Mt. Hood from the top of Scar Mountain on the Old Cascade Crest Trail. 130 miles of trail separated us from Hood River, the conventional terminus for the OTT and my home. But as we descended into the smoldering town of Detroit, we butted up against hundreds of miles of closed wilderness which made backcountry access to the remainder of the Hood Tier physically impossible. The 2020 White River fire had swept through Detroit with so much gusto and finality, it fatally overshadowed the sense of accomplishment typically felt at the end of a 15 day adventure. Barred from continuing onto the Columbia River Gorge and Post Canyon’s familiar world-class trail system, we sat down outside at a vacant motel-turned restaurant. We ordered a large pizza and listened to the motel owner explain that she’d started serving food six-months prior after every single restaurant in town was burned to the ground. The disappointment of ending our journey amidst Detroit’s skeletal remains was nothing compared to the devastation suffered by the inhabitants of the once quaint lakeside town.
We started our journey in the scar of an unchecked forest fire, and we finished in one as well.
Fires from just the 2020 season threaten the future rideability of the OTT, and wildfires on the West Coast continue to burn at an untenable rate as a result of global climate change. Just weeks after we finished our ride, major sections of the OTT were being impacted by fires. As we returned to Alturas, CA, the once prominent Winter Rim was consumed by smoke. Amongst the misfortune of our changing climate and the disastrous future of the natural world, we felt grateful, one last time, that we had been able to ride our bikes across the Oregon Timber Trail; the first of the season and maybe some of the last to do so.
The OTT is on Northern Paiute, Klamath, Grand Ronde, and Warm Springs Land.
