Oregon Timber Trail opens with 640 miles of singletrack, campsites & ghost towns
By Tyler Benedict - Posted on July 21, 2017 - 8:07 am
Looking for an epic adventure? Or several mini-epic adventures? The new Oregon Timber Trail is the fruit of 18 months of planning, labor and mapping, and it’s ready for you to roll.
The route is mapped, which you can download here, and features a diverse range of backcountry singletrack, alpine lakes, remote campsites, old growth groves, prairies, trout streams, antelope herds, rowdy flow trails, ghost towns and backwoods diners. They claim it’s 91% unpaved, and 51% singletrack.
While most of us won’t be able to take off for weeks at a time to ride it all at once, there’s four unique tiers and landscapes that let you and your buddies tackle it in segments. Click through for more photos, links and the press release…
From OTT: The Oregon Timber Trail is an iconic 668-mile backcountry mountain bike route spanning Oregon’s diverse landscapes from the California border to the Columbia River Gorge. Work developing the trail and route resources has been underway for eighteen months and this week the world gets to see the fruits of that labor. Today we have launched the official route and you can download it all here, http://oregontimbertrail.org/ride-the-ott/.
The OTT, (Oregon Timber Trail), is a world-class bikepacking destination and North America’s premiere long-distance mountain bike route. It runs south to north through a variety of mountain bike trails divided into four unique tiers segmenting the state like a layered cake. The Oregon Timber Trail can be sliced into as large a piece of that cake as desired; the route and terrain is suitable for a wide range of intermediate to advanced cyclists. The Oregon Timber Trail is inspired by the Pacific Crest Trail and other hiking trails in the National Scenic Trail system, but what sets the OTT apart is that it’s designed with mountain biking in mind and consists of more than 50 percent singletrack.
Riders depart from the California border, just outside of Lakeview, the highest town in Oregon. Within the first ten miles, riders will crest 8,000 and view the ride north. Ahead, the Fremont Tier is 190+ miles long, followed by the Willamette Tier at 140+ miles, then the 110+ mile Deschutes Tier, and finally the Hood Tier at 200+ miles. Dip your tires in the Columbia River, lay in the grass, and raise a toast to yourself — you just rode a mountain bike across the state of Oregon.
more at:https://www.bikerumor.com/2017/07/21/or ... ost-towns/
— but I'm not trying to be the Joie Chitwood or Evel Knievel of bicycling. So when I decide to get on my 'mountain bike', I'm still riding either a Schwinn Woodlands (CrMo tubing) or an early 1980s TREK (manganese steel). Both are rigid frames and I will depend on my own riding abilities to absorb whatever bumps and surface imperfections I might come across. And if the lack of all the high-tech suspension gadgetry means that I can't take my bike down the face of El Capitan or some super-rad, rock-studded, rutted trail with a 20-foot 'BANZAI!' leap of death in the middle, then I guess I can accept the fact that maybe I wasn't MEANT to ride my bike there.