B4
THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2021
A biking trail years in the making in Tillamook
got the green light. And I broke down. Like,
I lost it.”
Peterson said his agency partnered with
McLane and his crew of volunteers rather
than bringing in a consultant to manage the
trail project.
“For a trail like this, they’re truly the
experts,” Peterson said. “We have a lot of
design and trail planning skills within the
Department of Forestry, but we don’t ride like
these guys ride.”
By CASSANDRA PROFITA
Oregon Public Broadcasting
On a chilly spring morning, Ryan McLane
called out to a group of about 30 volunteer
trail-builders and their dogs on a gravel road
in the Tillamook State Forest.
They gathered in a circle fl anked by pickup
trucks with mountain bikes hanging off the
tailgates.
“Thanks for coming out,” McLane said.
“Welcome to Fear and Loaming, if you hav-
en’t been here. It’s been a long time coming.”
McLane has spent the last two years orga-
nizing trail-building days like this with a core
group of volunteers cutting through brush,
removing logs and trees, and digging out a
4-mile path that drops 2,500 feet through
dense Douglas fi r forest, clear cuts and alders.
But that’s just the fi nal push in his 16-year
struggle to build a downhill mountain biking
trail close to home.
He guided the trail-building crew toward
one of the last unfi nished sections of trail and
off ered digging tools and advice as he carried
a chainsaw to a large downed log that needed
to be cut and removed from the trail bed.
“This is all hand built,” he said, walking
past volunteers whacking roots with hoes.
“It’s not like we got a million-dollar grant and
there’s professionals coming out here with
excavators building all this. It’s a lot of work.”
The completed black diamond trail opened
to the public earlier this year. Its name is in
homage to both Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear
and Loathing” books and essay collections and
to the fertile soil trail-builders spent countless
hours digging through. The route winds its
way down Larch Mountain with exhilarating
20- to 35-foot jumps and optional bypasses
that McLane compares to a roller coaster with
choices.
“Do I want to do the huge loops or do I just
kind of want to get around this?” he said.
Two years of volunteer trail-building by
hand is a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the
time McLane spent just getting to the point
where he and his friends could start digging.
‘No dig, no ride’
Katherine Donnelly
The Fear and Loaming mountain biking trail descends 2,500 feet on Larch Mountain in the
Tillamook State Forest.
going up there?’”
They did some homework and found an
Oregon Department of Forestry recreation
plan for the Tillamook State Forest from
2000 that identifi ed a need for more advanced
mountain biking opportunities and allocated
10 square miles to future trails.
So, McLane and his friends went to the for-
est and found a spot where they could drive up
3,300 feet on existing roads and build a trail
with about 2,500 feet of vertical drop over
about 4 miles of terrain.
“Almost quite literally we show up with
shovels and say, ‘Alright! We’re ready. We
want to build,’” McLane said. “We’re in our
mid-twenties. We’re thinking this should be
easy. Just go build a trail, right?”
But it wasn’t that easy. The Oregon Depart-
ment of Forestry had a whole process for plan-
ning and approving new trails that the group
had to follow.
“They’re like, ‘Whoa, wait. We got to think
about this. We got to plan it,’” McLane said.
‘Why aren’t we going up there?’
When McLane was 25 years old, he and his
friends were spending a lot of time and money
just getting to the mountain biking trails they
wanted to ride.
“We were driving two hours one way and
two hours back and sometimes only riding for
an hour,” he said. “It was hugely ineffi cient
and expensive.”
It was 2005 when he started thinking about
whether they could build a trail closer to where
they lived in the Portland metro area — in the
Coast Range mountains about 20 miles away.
“At that time, there was nothing in Port-
land. Nothing challenging,” McLane said.
“We’d look behind us at the hills as we were
driving away and be like, ‘Why aren’t we
A huge crash
Randy Peterson, recreation program man-
ager with the Department of Forestry, said
there are numerous factors his agency has to
consider before approving a new trail. The
agency tries to minimize stream crossings and
environmental impacts, stay off major roads
and avoid confl icts with other forest uses like
logging or mining, both of which are visible
along the Fear and Loaming trail path.
“We went through a pretty detailed pro-
cess, and created a fairly comprehensive
plan,” Peterson said.
McLane said he spent years touring exist-
ing trails with Department of Forestry manag-
ers and talking about risk mitigation, forming a
nonprofi t with his friends to help organize the
project and writing a 30-page planning docu-
ment that he hand-delivered to the agency in
2009.
“And if you guys remember what hap-
pened in 2009, we had a huge crash,” he said.
“The market crashed, and people stopped
building houses. Lumber and logging, Oregon
Department of Forestry gets a huge chunk of
the revenue from that.”
Peterson said the recession hit right as they
were wrapping up the original trail plan.
“That really changed priorities for the
program and for the agency,” he said. “We
downsized. We laid off staff . We signifi cantly
reduced our funding, our expenditures.”
That meant the agency didn’t have the staff
to support a new mountain biking trail.
“We’re chomping at the bit to get a trail
in,” McLane said. “ And they say, ‘Sorry,
we’re under orders. No new trails.’ It was a
heartbreaker.”
McLane said after that, a lot of his original
group of friends gave up on the project and
moved onto other trails. Eventually, they dis-
solved the nonprofi t they had formed to help
fund the eff ort.
“We put fi ve years of our lives into this,”
he said. “It’s kind of like why keep getting our
hearts broken?”
But McLane kept checking in with the
Department of Forestry as the years went by.
“I kept knocking on the door because, I
don’t know, I hate being told no,” he said.
Peterson hadn’t abandoned the idea either.
About a decade after the project was set aside,
he managed to get it back into the agency’s
operations plan.
“Two years ago, I got a call on my cell,”
McLane said. “It’s Randy, and he’s saying we
Toward the end of the trail-building eff ort,
Liz Lachmar sat on the ground clawing at a
tangle of roots in the dirt with gloved fi ngers.
“My hands are working better for this one
‘cuz all these roots are getting stuck on the
shovel,” she said.
Lachmar said the tedious work will be
worth the eff ort later when she gets to ride the
trail.
“There’s a phrase mountain bikers have,”
she said. “They say no dig, no ride. It means
nobody would be mountain biking if we
weren’t building the trails. It’s a great service,
and it also pays us back because we get to ride
it after, and we can build it how we want.”
While everyone on the volunteer crew
takes some credit for the fi nished trail, they all
recognize that their investments pale in com-
parison to all the years McLane spent making
the whole thing happen.
“Ryan’s the one who stuck with it and kept
the vision alive and eventually made it a real-
ity,” said volunteer Ian Donnelly. “He’s defi -
nitely been the man with the vision.”
McLane said all the volunteers are like his
brothers and sisters now.
“Without them, we wouldn’t be any-
where,” he said.
McLane said there’s nothing like watching
the whole crew ride the trail they just fi nished
building.
“You’ve got all these people that are just
railing through the forest and they come out
to the bottom and everybody’s got this ear-to-
ear grin and they’re all slapping high fi ves,” he
said. “That’s amazing.”
Volunteer Eric Soetanto said trail-build-
ing has off ered a much-needed sense of com-
munity and outdoor activity during the pan-
demic and the chaos of the last two years. And
now he has an awesome place to ride close to
Portland.
“I just still have this feeling of unbelief that
this type of trail does exist literally less than an
hour from where I live,” he said.
McLane said it is hard to believe what it
took to build a trail close to home.
“When I started with this project I was 25
years old, and now I’m 41 years old,” he said.
“So here we are 16 years later, and we’re just
about ready to open the trail. It’s pretty excit-
ing. It’s one of the biggest things that’s hap-
pened to me.”
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