See the Washington segment on 5,000-mile mountain bike trail along West Coast

GIFFORD PINCHOT NATIONAL FOREST — Craving a novel Evergreen State adventure this summer? Saddle up your bike and ride the Loowit Tier, a 197-mile mountain bike route in the state’s southern Cascades range that was unveiled to the public last month.

When the snow melts, riders traveling between Packwood, Lewis County, and the Columbia River Gorge will have their first chance to cruise through dark forests, push up grueling climbs, ride alpine ridges with stunning views, skirt the edges of a volcanic eruption and cool off in remote glacier-fed swimming holes on a stretch of trail that, until now, would have been difficult to access via bicycle.

The route follows single-track mountain bike trails, unpaved roads and 4×4 tracks through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. It’s the first segment to launch as part of Orogenesis, a 5,000-mile bikepacking route conceived by avid long-distance mountain bikers that takes you through the mountains from British Columbia to the tip of the Baja Peninsula.

When complete, the project’s backers claim it will be the longest mountain bike trail in the world. And while that audacious concept may sound like a pipe dream, it’s actually tantalizingly close to fruition. The route as it stands includes just 501 miles of paved roads, which means there is already a way to ride 90 percent of the spine of the West Coast without touching asphalt.

Orogenesis is designed for bikepacking, or traveling by bike with overnight gear on dirt trails and off paved roads. If it sounds like the mountain biking version of the Pacific Crest Trail, that’s exactly what the route planners have in mind — scratching a long-held itch for West Coast adventurers who want to ride long distance through mountains on two wheels but must contend with federal wilderness restrictions that keep bikes off much of the Cascades and Sierras high country (PCT included).

Now, thanks to several intensive years of creative mapping, on-the-ground scouting, lost trail restoration and public lands advocacy, a decades-old vision is becoming a reality.

When the last 10 percent of trails are built or restored — including key sections in Washington — and Orogenesis becomes fully operational, the route is poised to become one of the world’s next great outdoor adventures.

In the meantime, this summer you can get a taste for yourself.

Mountain building = Orogenesis

From the driver’s seat of a truck while showing the Loowit Tier to The Seattle Times last month, Gabriel Tiller, executive director at Orogenesis Collective, was surprisingly nonchalant about the boldest trail concept on the West Coast since oil magnate Clinton Clarke cooked up the PCT nearly a century ago.

That’s because Orogenesis isn’t Tiller’s first rodeo. The graphic designer-turned-bike touring guide took on a smaller project in the last decade: the Oregon Timber Trail. Tiller and a team mapped out old logging roads and forgotten trails to craft a 690-mile route the length of the Beaver State that launched in 2017. That same year, intrepid bikepackers unveiled the 1,730-mile Baja Divide from San Diego to the tip of the Baja Peninsula.

“We just looked at them both on the map (and thought) ‘We’ve got to connect those now, it’s already half done,’ ” Tiller said.

That realization sparked exploration of bike routes through California, while Tiller said a West Coast project of this scale naturally had to include Washington as well. (They’ve also already begun exploring an extension north into British Columbia.)

The idea simmered through feasibility studies and scouting missions from a network of West Coast bikepacking enthusiasts while Tiller focused on stewarding the nascent Oregon Timber Trail. In its first five years, wildfire consumed 30 percent of the route, generating countless dead trees and wiping out trail that needed to be rebuilt, all in addition to the typical winter blowdowns.

“Just keeping up with maintenance on that scale — I still don’t know how to do that — and that’s also going to be Orogenesis’ biggest challenge,” he said.

In 2021, Tiller stepped down from running the Oregon Timber Trail. The next year, he brought the more ambitious project to a boil when he founded the Orogenesis Collective with $200,000 in fundraising.

As for the offbeat name, it means “the geologic process of mountain building.” A friend introduced the term, and it stuck with Tiller, who sought a moniker more evocative than the standard formula of “place name plus Trail” like the PCT or Appalachian Trail. And it fits — plate tectonics formed the Cascades as well as the Sierras and the Baja Peninsula. More simply, Tiller said, the name resonates because “the goal is to follow the mountains.”

Trail forensics

In just three years as an official entity, the Orogenesis Collective has achieved remarkable progress. In addition to the April launch of the Loowit Tier, official routes for four segments in California will come online later this year. “I’ve gone over every inch of it on maps over and over,” Tiller said. “The most eye-opening thing for me is just realizing how close it already is. We just need to do some maintenance and build a little bit more trail. It’s a big, grand idea, but it already exists for the most part.”

Still, both maintenance and trail building required considerable effort. Earlier this month, Tiller attended an annual chain saw training at Gifford Pinchot to certify sawyers from Washington and Oregon for trail maintenance. Mountain bikers, hikers, horseback riders and many others have pitched in over the last several years to restore the nearby Klickitat Sisters Trail (also known as Klickitat Trail #7).

The Orogenesis Collective has contributed 1,000 hours of volunteer labor over multiple summers to this trail alone, the kind of incremental progress that has slowly fleshed out the debut Washington section. From June 21-22, the group will host a campout and trail work party near Trout Lake, Klickitat County, to reopen the last abandoned segment along the Loowit Tier ahead of the summer riding season.

“Before there were so many roads, there used to be a much larger network of trails on the forest that have been abandoned,” Tiller said. The 17-mile Klickitat Sisters Trail, for example, was a footpath used by the Cowlitz and Klickitat Indigenous people thousands of years ago.

“There’s already been that impact to the environment, so it’s much easier to bring those trails back to life and usher them through the approval process,” Tiller said.

Tiller pores over old maps, archival U.S. Forest Service documents and vintage mountain biking guides to suss out lost trails that could be brought back to life. He and like-minded bikepackers across the West Coast rack up miles behind the wheel and in the saddle to investigate potential routes.

What Tiller has undertaken is “daunting” according to David Wiens, executive director of the International Mountain Bicycling Association, “except when you realize there’s expertise sprinkled all along the route in the form of mountain bikers, trail builders and mountain bike organizations.”

Cultivating that community of like-minded adventurers has been critical to Orogenesis’ rapid success.

Tiller’s forensic trail detective work also benefits from modern-day tools like laser-created lidar maps that reveal where an overgrown trail once was, now invisible to the naked eye — like the Lone Tree Trail that he showed a reporter on a break from the chain saw training. If that trail could be restored, it would shorten the Loowit Tier’s mileage and increase the percentage of single-track riding — the holy grail for mountain bikers, vastly preferable to forest roads possibly shared with motorcycles and 4x4s.

The hardest nut to crack is new trail. Tiller has been trying to build 1.5 miles of trail near his home in Mill City, Ore., for four years, but the project is mired in environmental review the same as if it were a timber sale or logging operation.

“It’s a hammer for a small, narrow, single-track trail,” he said.

There’s potentially help on the way from the other Washington, however. In October, Tiller lobbied on Capitol Hill with other cycling organizations ahead of the successful passage last year of the Biking on Long-Distance Trails Act, which directs the Department of the Interior to create at least 10 long-distance bike routes nationwide. Like the National Scenic Trails Act that paved the way for the PCT, and more recently the Pacific Northwest Trail, Tiller hopes that the new law will spur long-term support — from easing permitting to installing signage — that will make Orogenesis a permanent feature of the landscape.

Washington section: Colemonti Crossing

The rugged and remote Loowit Tier requires mountain bikers to carry multiple days worth of food between small towns and backwoods camp stores — there are no resupply options for the first 100 miles heading north to south — and of course, you’ll be sleeping out along the way. With 33,000 feet of elevation gain, long sections will likely require pushing uphill, so-called hike-a-bike. It will take the average experienced bikepacker at least five days, and it might be worth budgeting 10.

But for White Salmon, Klickitat County-based mountain biker Dustin Raisanen, who last year, over 17 days, became the first person to ride a preliminary route through the length of Washington, the Loowit Tier was hands-down his favorite.

“It’s probably the most scenic overall,” Raisanen said. “You just have beautiful 360-degree views, and when you descend into the Lewis River, it’s just swimming holes everywhere.”

Raisanen’s feat christened the Colemonti Crossing, as the entire roughly 700-mile Washington section is named — the word is Chinook jargon for “cold mountain” — starting from the Oroville-Osoyoos Border Crossing in Okanogan County and heading south. But he was forced onto 20 miles of Highway 12 from White Pass down to Packwood. It’s currently the most dangerous section of the entire 5,000 miles of Orogenesis, with no viable alternative as the route must detour around Mount Rainier National Park, which prohibits mountain bikes on its trails.

To overcome the crux inhibiting a completed Orogenesis route, the collective has thrown its muscle behind a local advocacy group, Packwood Trail Project, which has since snowballed into the larger Upper Cowlitz Valley Trails Coalition, to sketch out 22 miles of new trail between Packwood and White Pass on National Forest land.

But gaps on long-distance trails that take years to remedy are nothing new. The first PCT thru-hiker finished in 1970, even though it took two more decades before the trail was officially completed in 1993. This summer, professional ultra-endurance backcountry mountain biker Kurt Refsnider, who has ridden long-distance routes on multiple continents, hopes to tackle the full length of Orogenesis as it currently stands — a beta test maiden voyage.

“For the cohort of bikers excited for long backcountry riding on single-track, there is nothing out there that stretches beyond one state,” Refsnider said via phone days after returning from completing Iceland’s Vatnajökull crossing across Europe’s largest ice cap. “Orogenesis is being designed with the mountain bike experience in mind — there’s nothing like it anywhere in the world.”

With Refsnider potentially paving the way this year, in years to come, the Loowit Tier will account for just one-third of a grand new Evergreen State adventure. For bikepackers able to prove their mettle, Orogenesis will eventually offer a spellbinding ride through Washington as captivating as our state’s justly famous portion of the Pacific Crest Trail.