Public Lands

Bend Bulletin: The Future of Central Oregon’s Wilderness is at Stake

Published: May 20, 2018

Hikers could be turned away at the South Sister trailhead. Mountaineers could see day-of weather dash their plans after having secured a wilderness permit weeks or months in advance. Visitors could be required to buy a permit to use the wilderness.

Any or all of these restrictions are included among five options being considered under the U.S. Forest Service’s Central Cascades Wilderness Strategies Project. The regulations would alter the way the public interacts with wilderness areas in the Deschutes and Willamette national forests, including the Three Sisters, Mount Jefferson, Diamond Peak, Mount Washington and Waldo Lake wilderness areas.

Monday is the final day to weigh in on what’s been a months-long public comment period en route to a decision by the Forest Service about which restrictions to put in place. So far, the Forest Service has received more than 580 comments expressing concerns about the restrictions or applauding the possible changes.

The Forest Service hopes to push back against rocketing user numbers that have damaged popular trails and led to illegal campfires and littering, officials said. Even law-abiding visitors, in too great a quantity, put undo stress on the designated wilderness areas’ fragile ecosystems. Ultimately, the Forest Service intends to return the more popular sections of the five wilderness areas to their pristine, natural states while allowing public access.

The proposed regulations, however, are not groundbreaking. Versions of each of the U.S. Forest Services’ five strategies — ranging from no changes to high-level restrictions to almost all visitors — exist elsewhere.

Of 445 wilderness areas managed by the Forest Service, 32 percent have some sort of a permit system, and about 20 areas have caps on the number of permits given out allowing users access, referred to as a limited entry permit system, said Lisa Ronald, wildlands communications coordinator at the University of Montana’s Wilderness Institute. She manages Wilderness Connect, a public land information platform. Permit systems can be wilderness-wide or specific to a location or trailhead. The group’s website houses the only federally recognized comprehensive database about all Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service and National Park Service wilderness areas.

It’s difficult to compare the regulations of various wilderness areas, Ronald added, because each restriction is tailored to the nuance and needs of a particular wilderness. An isolated wilderness area in Alaska, for example, may have an elaborate bear safety regulation that may not exist in a limited entry wilderness area in Southern California — or potentially, in Central Oregon.

“Permit systems are not unique, yet they are not necessarily widespread, either,” Ronald said. “But they are something that will be increasingly used in wilderness management. I don’t think there is a choice, necessarily, as use increases.”

The Forest Service’s Central Cascades Wilderness Strategies Project expects to release a draft decision in late summer. Those who had already commented on the proposal will have the ability to object to the decision. A wilderness strategy would be implemented by Memorial Day 2019.

‘Untrammeled earth,’ trammeled

Wilderness areas in the Deschutes and Willamette national forests make up 182,186 acres of the combined 3.1 million-acre forests, or 15 percent. In 2016, more than 130,000 people visited Three Sisters Wilderness — a 181 percent increase since 2011. Visitors to the Mount Jefferson Wilderness, which saw nearly 30,000 visitors in 2016, jumped by 119 percent in the same five-year period, according to the Forest Service’s tally of the free self-administered permit system it has operated since 1991.

“When we look at this continued explosive use, it’s just unsustainable,” Forest Service spokeswoman Jean Nelson-Dean said. “We’ve felt the need to take action now so that the legacy of wilderness that we have here in Central Oregon is the same legacy that we will leave to future generations.”

Increased visitors has resulted in eyesores and ecological hazards. Wilderness rangers are often left to clean up the messes left behind, including human waste and makeshift shelters , and to deal with the cumulative impact of too many users.

“Even if people are doing the right things, there are still places that are very impacted,” Nelson-Dean said.

In 2016, 56 percent of the use in the Three Sisters Wilderness — the largest in Central Oregon at 448 square miles — occurred on five of 48 trailheads, Nelson-Dean said.

“It’s a matter of getting people to somewhat plan ahead, encourage people to go at different times and trying to get people to go to other areas that are also lovely parts of the wilderness experience. We’re trying to disperse use over space and time, so we can maintain these iconic places. There are more beautiful spots than just these five, highly used spots. Because that’s part of our message: We have lots of really great country. But not everyone has to go to the same place.”

Five-pronged trailhead

The Central Cascades Wilderness Strategies Project offers five potential strategies, although some characteristics common to all of them are in effect: Motorized equipment and bicycles are prohibited. Group size is limited to no more than 12 people and 12 horses or mules. Storing personal gear is limited to 48 hours. Sites closed for rehabilitation must be left alone. Tethering any pack or saddle livestock within 200 feet of a high water mark of a body of water is prohibited.

From there, the plans differ, and restrictions increase, with plan No. 1 mandating no changes, and plan No. 5 providing the most protection, including limited entry permits for day and overnight use for all five wilderness areas.

Plans No. 3 and 4 were developed primarily with the written feedback from the public, said Beth Peer, interdisciplinary team leader for the Deschutes National Forest. In plans No. 2 through 5, campfires would be prohibited at elevations beginning at 5,700 feet, except for in the Waldo Lake Wilderness. Plans No. 2 through 4 feature a mix of free self-issue permits at wilderness trailheads. Plan No. 3 focuses on high-use areas only while plan No. 4 also accounts for displacement from the high-use areas by implementing more limited entry permits. The Forest Service does not have a preferred plan, Peer said.

Preserving nature

The proposed restrictions will resemble those in place at the Obsidian Trail in the Three Sisters Wilderness and Pamelia Lake in the Mount Jefferson Wilderness, delicate areas with historical and ecological significance.

The Forest Service hopes to strike a balance between and public access to those lands and the preservation of their undeveloped, natural conditions, Peer said. The agency is compelled by Congress to do so.

“That’s an important piece that the public should understand,” Peer said. “We want to maintain access for people. We’re not trying to close it off or shut people out,” she said.

The Wilderness Act of 1964 created the National Wilderness Preservation System. Today, 765 wilderness areas, managed by various agencies, are scattered throughout the country, covering more than 109 million acres — larger than the state of California, according to the Forest Service.

Heightened restrictions and daily use caps would shore up protections in the Central Cascades wilderness areas with those already in place at some of the country’s most popular wilderness areas, such as those found outside large metropolitan areas.

Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest, for example — which is home to Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument and Mount Adams Wilderness, sandwiched between Portland and Seattle — and the Arapaho & Roosevelt National Forests, near Boulder and Denver, Colorado, have seen a mix of user quotas and fees. At Mount St. Helens, climbing permits are required for elevations above 4,800 feet and are sold in limited quantities. In the Arapaho & Roosevelt National Forests, day fees are required in certain recreation areas.

The most regulated wilderness in the country may be the remote, yet intensely popular Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest, Ronald said.

In the Central Cascades, heavily trafficked wilderness hot spots include the west side of the Mount Jefferson Wilderness and the east side of the Three Sisters, which are easily accessible by Willamette Valley residents and Central Oregonians, respectively, Forest Service officials said. Crowds complicate the Forest Service’s dual mission of preserving wildernesses’ pristine character and keeping them accessible to the public.

“When you look at what happens when you have an increase in use, you get both ecological impacts, such as the overuse of campsites, social trail development, the widening of trails — impacts that are more ecological in nature,” Nelson-Dean said. “The crowding is also an impact to the social quality. You get a change in the experience that people go wilderness areas to have.”

Engaged equestrians

At several Forest Service open houses on both sides of the Cascade Range, hikers, mountaineers, equestrians and hunters expressed concerns that their wilderness access may be restricted.

Kim McCarrel, the vice president of public lands at Oregon Equestrian Trails, said her community understands the need for regulation.

“I’ve seen a lot of things (in the wilderness areas) change,” McCarrel said. “They are getting more crowded. I rarely speak to an equestrian who doesn’t recognize that, as well. … The wilderness is near and dear to our hearts.”

Equestrians who visit wilderness areas often launch day trips from one of 10 various horse camps outside the wilderness boundary. Finding parking for their trucks and horse trailers at adjacent trailheads is challenging, with parked cars often blocking spots designated for horse trailers, McCarrel said. Jerry Bentz, the president of the Back Country Horsemen of Oregon, a nonprofit with about 450 members, shares McCarrel’s frustration.

“We haven’t been able to use those heavily used areas for several years,” Bentz said. “We don’t even try.”

Most wilderness horseback riders are fine with reserving a permit and paying a fee. Bentz also acknowledges need for regulation, but he thinks the five strategies feel rushed. Bentz is most inclined to support plan No. 4, which calls for limited entry permits not only at high-use areas but also the areas that would experience overflow.

“The Three Sisters and Mount Jefferson Wilderness areas are crazy crowded. It’s like walking in downtown Portland,” Bentz said. “That’s not what the wilderness is supposed to be.”

Miffed mountaineers

Mountaineers are bracing for restrictions common to four of the five strategies: limited entry permits for day and overnight use. A daily cap on particular dates between May 1 and Sept. 30 means mountaineers will have to lock in their reservations long before they’ll know if the weather will allow the trip.

Chris Jensen, 30, often visits the Central Cascades Wilderness areas. He has climbed and skied most wilderness-designated mountains in the Central Cascade Range. Jensen, of Portland, doesn’t oppose paying fees.

“I care about the environment, how we’re treating it, and about debris getting left behind,” Jensen said. “There is a need for more resources.”

Jensen worries that out-of-town climbers and mountaineers will feel an extra push to reach the summit even if the weather turns bad halfway through an expedition.

“You read about so many climbing accidents that involve bad weather,” Jensen wrote to the Forest Service. “In my experience, having a permit for a specific date encourages climbers to ascend into deteriorating weather conditions. The climber may feel that this is their only chance.”

Mountaineers who frequent Mount St. Helens have needed climbing permits since 1987. To work around the reality of permits being sold out during ideal dates, Cascades Climbers, an online forum, established Purmit.com, a separate website where users can sell or solicit permits.

“The resale site is fine — bit of a crap shoot because people can be so flaky,” Jensen said. “It’s easier than dealing with the official Mount St. Helens Institute website, where all permits are sold out until late October.”

The Mount St. Helens permit system resembles that in plan No. 5 for the Cascades. But local mountaineers won’t have to deal with the additional reservation required for exceeding certain elevations on Mount Adams or Mount St. Helens. In all proposed Cascades strategies, no permits will be required outside the high-use period from May 1 to Sept. 30.

Jess Beauchemin, a personal trainer and nonprofit wilderness guide leader, has read the Cascades proposals. Beauchemin abides by the “leave no trace” doctrine and said her impact on the wilderness areas is minimal. She said the idea of requiring permits is “a slap in the face” that would significantly limit access to wild spaces.

“Those are super important to all of our mental and physical selves,” Beauchemin said, adding that she’s unimpressed by the Forest Service’s interpretation of its usage data.

“The places were you’d expect use to be high — like Devil’s Lake, Broken Top, Tam MacArthur Rim — a lot of their (usage) graphs spiked on the weekends and were pretty low mid-week on almost all of the trailheads across the wildernesses,” Beauchemin said. But under plan No. 5, limited permits would be required even at low-use times.

“It seems like they’re trying to solve problems that don’t exist,” she said.

But the problems are big enough that they prompted local tourism marketers to suggest that tourists visit alternate attractions in wilderness areas, rather than mentioning the most popular sites.

“People are completely entitled to go where they want, but from a marketing perspective, if the Forest Service is seeing that a place like Green Lakes is getting more use than it can handle, what could Visit Bend do to help out?” said Kevney Dougan, president and CEO of Visit Bend, a tourism promotion group.

Visit Bend asked the Forest Service for input on its visitor guide before going to press to make sure the photography and information didn’t mention high-use trailheads, naming instead lesser-known, but just as beautiful areas that can handle the use, Dougan said. This approach has also informed how Visit Bend talks about wilderness areas in its social media channels and blog.

“We’re blessed with an abundance of opportunity, Dougan said. “Let’s make sure we’re talking about places that can handle the opportunity.”

Bend Bulletin: Equestrians, Mountain Bikers, Vie for Trails

Published: April 20, 2017

When Kim McCarrel recently saddled up Bella, her chestnut-colored Tennessee walker, and set out on a group ride at Maston Trailhead in the Cline Buttes Recreation Area, a mountain biker darted into the periphery. Ears pricked, Bella slowed her trot and trained her attention toward the juniper trees through which the cyclist disappeared. Because cyclists and horseback riders use distinct trails at Maston, however, the encounter was little more than a fleeting annoyance for the mare.

Thanks to a 2009 plan the Bureau of Land Management drafted with the input of land users, including the Central Oregon Trail Alliance and the local chapter of the nonprofit Oregon Equestrian Trails, horse riders and mountain bikers at Maston Trailhead northeast of Tumalo enjoy separate — if sometimes parallel — singletrack trails. Seventeen miles of horse trails and more than 12 miles of mountain bike trails loop through homesteader ruins, located 15 miles northeast of Bend. Tailoring such trails to particular uses enriches Central Oregon’s recreational offerings, McCarrel said.

“We are so lucky because we have so many trails. We have such a variety of riding opportunities,” said McCarrel, rattling off pine forests, juniper groves and rocky badlands as potential backdrops. “Trail riding is a wonderful way to be in nature with my horse.”

The Deschutes National Forest features 13 horse camps — campsites with corrals, water guzzlers and other horse amenities — some whose maintenance Oregon Equestrian Trails and other equestrian groups and activists have assumed. The local Oregon Equestrian Trails chapter, which counts 100 members, adopted Sisters Cow Camp and Swamp Wells Horse Camp, both of which, due to volunteer maintenance, remain no-fee campgrounds. McCarrel, who has authored five Pacific Northwest equestrian guidebooks and is also the Central Oregon chapter chair of the OET, knows that if she and her peers intend to enjoy Central Oregon’s wealth of trails that allow equestrians — minority users among hikers and mountain bikers — they must help lead as stewards of the land.

“If equestrians don’t champion our rights to use the trails, who is going to do it for us? We need to stand up for ourselves and be willing to work cooperatively with the Forest Service and BLM, and with other trail user groups, to resolve issues with respect to trail access,” McCarrel later wrote by email.

In Central Oregon, there are 1,800 miles of trails available to equestrians, mostly on Deschutes National Forest and Bureau of Land Management lands. Most of those trails are dedicated to mixed use. Mountain bikers and hikers who also use them must yield to equestrians.

Each year, there are between 10,000 and 20,000 equestrian visits to Deschutes National Forest trails and five wilderness areas, estimated Chris Sabo, Forest Service trails specialist.

As for many of the BLM trails east of Bend, McCarrel credits the bureau, which manages 400,000 acres in Central Oregon, with spearheading an effort to ensure users have access and sufficient space to recreate in a variety of ways. When recreationists don’t have dedicated spaces, collisions and near-collisions can result in injury. McCarrel spoke anecdotally about horseback riders being particularly vulnerable.

“If a mountain biker rounds a blind corner, there is a horse in front of them — whether they’re going the same direction, it doesn’t matter — it startles the horse, the horse does a 180 (-degree turn), and the horseback rider gets tossed,” McCarrel said. “If you land in a pile of rocks, you’re going to be hurt more than if you fall in a pile of sand.”

The Maston Trailhead, completed in 2012, served as a reference point for subsequent BLM trail projects. Another BLM priority is to streamline the decades-old user-made trail networks that crisscross its jurisdiction, particularly in the Cline Buttes Recreation Area. The bureau is working to install three more trailheads on its perimeter, which presently features five, said Greg Currie, the bureau’s landscape architect. The planned nonmotorized trail development will happen this year and in 2018 in the southern and western parts of the Cline Buttes area. A northern section will be dedicated to off-highway vehicles.

Taking in nature, at a trot

Trail riding, which often happens at a trot (about 4 mph), allows equestrians more time to take in their surroundings. After all, the hoofing is left to the horses. On this particular day at Maston Trailhead, McCarrel and a friend delighted in the sight of junipers filled with swallows. Such observations may be lost on trail users who move at a quicker clip.

Charley Engel, a longtime equestrian activist who is a former member of OET, said when he and his wife bought a ranch house east of Bend in 1986, they were thrilled they were within 3 miles of the nearest trailhead at Horse Butte. However, Engel, who has since salvaged and maintained about 60 miles of equestrian trails around Horse Butte, bristles at the increased popularity of mountain biking on the trails.

“Mountain bikers and horseback people go out for different reasons,” said Engel. “The majority mountain bikers go out to go fast. They want a nice downhill run or they want to ride something really technical and challenging to do. Horseback people travel at a much slower pace; it’s an entirely different vibe. We’re more out there to enjoy the peace and the quiet and the slower pace.”

Soon after a mountain pine beetle infestation wiped out timber in the Horse Butte area in the late ’80s, the Engels spent summers piecing together area trails. They soon joined Oregon Equestrian Trails (which preceded McCarrel’s leadership), with which they adopted and re-established about 60 miles of trails between Horse Butte and the top of Paulina Mountain. The 1996 Skeleton Fire, which burned nearly 18,000 acres east of Bend, including the Horse Butte area, was a mixed blessing to the local equestrian scene.

“(After the fire) it was really bleak country. It took vision on our part to know the forest would recover and it would be another good, popular place (for trails),” Engel said.

The Forest Service used funds from salvaged timber to help OET’s effort to re-establish trails numbered 61, 62 and 63, as well as build new trails. Since then, Engel carried a handsaw and a branch cutter to trim any errant limb. However, he has not ridden in the Horse Butte area in the past five years since mountain bikers have taken to the trail system as a winter holdout until melt-off in higher elevations opens up more popular trail networks.

“Slowly but surely, the mountain bike usage has taken over on trails,” Engel said, who now typically rides with his wife in the Ochoco National Forest. “They’ve displaced horses to the point that I won’t ride trails that I built myself because of the bike traffic.”

Engel, who is no longer an OET member, hosts “Calling All Cowboys,” a “cowboy music” program, twice per week on KPOV. He doesn’t want to disparage an entire group, and acknowledges mountain bike groups such as Central Oregon Trail Alliance have assumed trail maintenance responsibilities. Engel said he has no interest in advocating for exclusive horse trails in the Horse Butte area.

“Why would you go build a new horse trail system when there is already a horse trail system in place?” Engel said. “It would make sense to build a new mountain bike system.”

Bruce Schroeder, a COTA board member who often mountain bikes at Horse Butte, said horses and mountain bikes don’t mix well. He understands how the region’s mountain biking boom may vex long-time equestrians.

“I get their perspective. There are way more winter riders (at Horse Butte) than there were six or seven years ago,” Schroeder said.

COTA and OET have worked together to install and maintain trail markers along Central Oregon’s 150-mile Metolius-Windigo Trail. Schroeder said COTA would be interested in working with OET to create separate trails for horse riders and mountain bikers, but so far discussions are only in preliminary stages.

Sabo, who hikes, mountain bikes and has ridden horses on wilderness patrols, appreciates various trail-user perspectives. As for the ever-popular Horse Butte area, where he recently mountain biked, Sabo said historical perspective can go a long way.

“(The Horse Butte) trails were intended primarily to be used by equestrians. They put in quite a few hours, and they are the stewards of those trails. It’s important for non-hoofed users to be on their best behavior and not to take the attitude that it’s strictly a bike trail. We need to keep that trail courtesy in mind wherever the various uses overlap. Sooner or later, mountain bikers will encounter equestrians.”

Bend Bulletin: Bikepacking the Cascades

Published: June 7, 2017

I may be problematically susceptible to suggestion. Friends recently invited me to ride along on their three-night/four-day bikepacking trip. We would climb almost 16,000 feet in a 155-mile loop on gravel and paved country roads on the west side of the Cascades, a two-hour drive from Bend. It would involve summiting snow-capped Bohemia Mountain and sourcing drinking water from creeks and rivers, where we’d also bathe and wash our clothes.

I was in.

Bikepacking involves saddling a mountain bike (or, in our case, knobby-tired, road touring bikes and one meant for cyclocross) with all manners of bags, racks and baskets. The point of hauling everything on your bike and not on your back means you feel the breeze and not a heavy, sweat-soaked rucksack.

The plan was simple. Beginning and ending in Oakridge, a former timber town that is slowly experiencing a rejuvenation as a base camp for mountain bike adventures, our trip was inspired by ride leader and Bend Velo bicycle mechanic Tory Sox’s previous cross-country mountain biking trips through the nearby ridges and valleys. He was acquainted with 5,000-foot elevation gains and losses in single-day outings, so why not string them together into a bikepacking trip and invite his wife, photographer Katie Sox, Will Gurney, a Eugene bicycle mechanic, and myself. Tory is also a frame builder, and he and Katie rode steel touring frames he fashioned with these kinds of bikepacking trips in mind.

Camping via two wheels most likely dates to the bicycle’s popularization in the late 19th century, but bikepacking as we know it today is an offshoot of bicycle touring, which involves thin-tired road bicycles that became widespread in the 1970s.

Bikepacking got its chunky tires spinning in the mid-1990s, according to Grant Petersen, the founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works, based in Walnut Creek, California, and a champion of bicycle touring and camping.

“We started doing overnight campouts, something we called Sub-24-Hour Overnights, which is abbreviated as ‘Sub-Two-Four-Oh,’” Petersen said. “If you’ve got a job, a family, responsibilities, you’ve got to be somewhere tomorrow morning, but you have a background that includes a lot of hiking, backpacking, mountaineering, and you’ve got the know-how and still got the gear, an easy way to do that is to load up a bike and head out into the local hills along the fire trails.”

While our trip might as well be called a Sub-96-O, our ride kept in the spirit of Petersen’s concept, which will undoubtedly inspire in us shorter and more-local bikepacking trips in the future (see side bar for Petersen’s Sub-24-O checklist).

“You do that once and then you want to do it again,” Petersen said. “And then you want to explore other areas. It’s self-perpetuating, like anything that is fun.”

Packing, mechanical tweaks

As for food, we brought canned fish, packaged toast, nuts, hard cheese, cured sausage, dehydrated fruit and freeze-dried dinners, to which we added creek water we boiled with compact gas stoves. Energy bars and gels rounded out our provisions — utilitarian quick fixes for when the climbing got rough. Our drinking water, which we pounded, also came courtesy of the various creeks and rivers we rode and camped alongside. Toilet business, both one and two, was handled behind bushes. Toilet paper, sunscreen, bicycle tubes and mosquito repellent were communal goods, passed around as liberally as trail mix. At one moment, Katie dribbled a mocha-flavored gel onto Tory’s energy bar.

“That’s about as crunchy as we get,” Katie said with a laugh.

With sunny, warm and dry weather in the forecast, we packed minimally, which is to say there was little redundancy among our clothing, save for socks (a fresh pair for each day) and chamois-padded cycling shorts (two per person; wash in creeks as desired). Since the weather was ideal, I didn’t need the two-person tent I’d packed into my seat bag, particularly because the hammock I’d also shoved in there was a suitable way to sleep each night. This extraneous stuff weighed my seat bag down to the extent that the it pinned my caliper brake cable to the frame, causing my brake pads to press my rear rim. For the entire first day, which consisted of 45 miles and nearly 3,000 feet of elevation gain, I rode with additional resistance on a bike that already weighed around 45 pounds. Tory, dumbstruck, remedied this situation by securing a rock on my seat stays’ braze-ons — or little mounting nubs — with two zip ties. This served as a brace to the brake cable, and again my wheel freely spun.

“I’m not worried about your paint job,” Tory Sox said.

Daily gravel grind

Like traditional camping trips, our days began and ended with sunlight. After breakfasts of instant oatmeal and espresso, we filled our water bottles — we each carried three 16-ounce bottles — and set off, our bikes lighter from the provisions we devoured the night before. Each of our four days featured a climbing section, which typically spanned 5 miles, gained 2,000 to 3,500 feet, and took three hours or more to ascend.

“When I’m climbing, I get into my mountain-bike-climbing mindset,” Katie Sox said during the first day’s climb. “I don’t look more than five feet ahead of me, and I think about something pleasant, something that doesn’t have to do with climbing this hill.”

The Western Cascades

Our bikepacking trip took us along secluded BLM and Forest Service roads of varying levels of maintenance through the Western Cascades, outcrops found mostly on the west side of the Cascades. Formed 40 million years ago, the ridges and valleys resemble indiscernible limbs entwined beneath blankets of Douglas fir, western hemlock and cedar. The Western Cascades, much older than the high Cascades (which are only about 2 million years old) are a mix of rock that includes basalt and granite. The native Kalapuya tribe inhabited the area for millennia. The arrival of white settlers was hastened by the 1850 Donation Land Claim Act, according to an Oregon State University paper titled “The Bohemia Mining District: A Historical Reconstruction.” The Bohemia Mining District, which we explored on our second day, is named for James “Bohemia” Johnson, a suspected murderer and an immigrant. Johnson discovered gold-infused quartz in City Creek, which flows at the base of the mountain that would bear his nickname.

On our second day, we stashed our extraneous bags in foliage near the City Creek before climbing Sharps Creek Road, an unmaintained thread of gravel that winds up Bohemia Mountain, which, at nearly 6,000 feet, leads to the tallest peak in the Western Cascades. Signs near the top warned visitors of lethal gas, deep water pits, broken ladders and decrepit mine shafts. While they were unintentionally attractive invitations to explore, we were too set on our climb to get sidetracked. Snow banks soon blocked the road to the still-snow-covered summit. We hiked through 10-foot-deep corn snow and at one point reclined in it like sunbathers at the beach. It was an invigorating way to chill our taxed bodies.

Our descents down these mountains and ridges presented distinct challenges. Many feature grades that range from 10 to, at its most extreme, 20 degrees. They tested our endurance on the way up and our bike handling skills on the way down as we carefully picked our lines past rocks and ruts. Miscalculated routes resulted in several pinch flats. Despite a few slips and skids, no one wiped out. Some descents, such as on Rock Creek Road and Bear Bones Road, which were paved with chip seal and blacktop, respectively, offered sure-wheeled respite from the previous days’ nerve-pinching downhills. More than once we let out ear-piercing howls that rang through the sprawling Umpqua and Willamette National Forests.

Clear waters’ murky past

Despite the delicious translucence of the area’s river and creek waters — which range from aqua marine to light emerald — high levels of mercury and naturally occurring arsenic can still be prevalent throughout the area. (A minerals administrator for the Umpqua National Forest did not respond to several phone calls I made regarding water quality.) During the Bohemia Mining District’s heyday, mercury, which was used as a key agent in separating gold from ore, leached into the water table. However, the creek and river waters, as fresh as they tasted, seemed impossibly pure. No one got sick. Throughout the bikepacking trip, without cell phone reception, we forgot about social media accounts and news feeds. We kept a close eye on our provisions, the constant yet manageable aching in our legs, and our skins’ redness, both the result of too much sun and not enough bug repellent. The sound of nearby rushing water was our campsites’ soundtrack since we didn’t bother with a stereo. Falling asleep to a choir of frogs and waking to birdsong activated a dormant sense of connectedness to the natural world. On the fourth and final day when we rolled into Oakridge, we felt tired and elated. While the poutine we washed down with cask beer at a local gastropub was welcome, we nonetheless began throwing around ideas for future bikepacking trips where we’d again forget our daily obligations and conveniences.

“I just want to keep riding my bike,” Katie Sox said.