Our Website and Social Media Manager, Jake, just recently returned from a weekend in the mountains outside of Packwood, WA to help the Orogenesis Collective with trailwork campout weekend. He’s more than a little sunburnt and full of fun stories to share about his time volunteering.

The Orogenesis Collective is a massive project with the goal of creating the longest mountain bike (and bikepacking) route in the world. Spanning 7300 km this trail will one day travel from the Canadian Border in Washington all the way south to the Southern tip of the Baja Peninsula. It will effectively join together multiple routes in progress through Washington, California, and Mexico. It also includes our home state’s already completed Oregon Timber Trail which largely happened because of this guy:

Gabriel Amadeus, a longstanding figure in the Portland cycling community, spent the last several years realizing the Oregon Timber Trail, and has now transitioned to working with the Orogenesis Project to turn their great vision into a reality. Part of that work has been organizing trail work events like the one outside of Packwood to provide maintenance and groundtruthing to current gaps in the Orogenesis route.

The Klickitat Trail #7 was the primary focus of this weekend’s volunteer event. Jake arrived late on Friday night (leaving straight from work at the shop). Basecamp was adjacent to Jackpot Lake, near the trail itself. After a little breakfast and tailgate coffee the volunteers had a chance to meet each other, go through safety protocols (led by both Gabe and the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance who were also our weekend liaison to the National Forest Service), before dividing into two groups for the day to set about the day’s work.

Jake was part of the Westbound Group, setting off on foot with the primary goals of clearing brush, correcting drainage issues, and removing fallen timber from the trail.

Each of the groups had a Forest Service Certified Sawyer to handle the big timber, and help provide guidance to the group for the day.

Of course as most folks who have adventured in the PNW know, even during mid summer there can be some issues with snow once you get above 4600 ft.

And issues there were. Not bad issues per se, but it’s pretty tough to clear a trail that’s still under 2-3′ of snow. Much of the Westbound Groups work ended up being on an initial climb, and the spending a fair amount of time determining the trail location under the snow via gps.

There’s a small spur trail that leads up to Lookout Peak which was amazingly clear of snow itself. Even more amazing was the 360 degree views from the top. With a clear visibility of Mt Adams, Mt Hood, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt Ranier off in the distance. It also provided a solid vantage of the Dark Divide region immediately to the south (ultimately an area the Orogenesis project will pass through).

Back in camp for the evening all of the volunteers had a chance to get to know each other better as they swapped stories while swatting mosquitos. Volunteers had traveled from all over the PNW and even as far as San Francisco to help with the trailwork. In addition to our contingent-of-one from Sellwood Cycle Repair there were folks from Back Alley Bike Repair out of Seattle, Woodpecker Cycles in Olympia, Forager Cycles in Port Townsend, and Chris from Broken and Coastal Magazine who is also an athlete for GORE wear who generously helped sponsor this event and Chris brought along a lot of speciality apparel from GORE to share with the volunteers.

That night there was a small “changing of the guard” of sorts as several volunteers made their way towards home, while others arrived from new places. Some arrived just in time for Jake’s campfire stories about vasectomies. Ahem, apologies for that… There’s no excuse.

The following morning everyone set off on bikes as one group to tackle the Eastbound section of trail.

Needing more work (and covered by much less snow) this rugged section of trail is part of a 2000 year old connector between the Klickitat People and the Tribes of the Cowlitz Valley, and has many earmarks of a trail built through necessity. Often narrow and traversing just below the ridgeline it offers it’s own unique views of the surrounding topography. While it’s on the Forest Services active trail registry it’s fallen into much neglect over the years, and definitely required a lot of clearing to turn it into a viable cycling route.

All told the group of weekend volunteers cleared the westernmost 7.5 miles of this 17 mile long trail, minus anything covered by snow anyway. All “snow shoveling” was done in hilarious fashion by attempting to surf bikes across a couple snowbanks and failing miserably. More “snow displacement” than anything.

If you have always wanted to get on board and volunteering with trailwork we highly recommend it. Not only is it incredibly rewarding work, but you often have the first opportunity to ride the very trails you’ve just freshly cleared and will often meet many amazing other people along the way.

In addition to reaching out to the Orogenesis Collective regarding their next work party we can also happily recommend the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance, as well as the closer-to-portland Northwest Trail Alliance and Oregon Timber Trail.