Going round the Bend

North America » United States » Oregon » Bend
August 23rd 2008

Published: September 4th 2008

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mcthommos

Detroit

Motor City and the home of motown and techno was a deal smaller than we expected.

Bend is a city sitting at 4000 feet in the high desert in Oregon, around 2-3 hours drive from Portland. The scenery is pretty wicki wicki wild wild west round here. Bend is a bit of an MTB mecca in the US but doesn't seem to hold the status in the UK of Moab in Utah or Fruita in Colorado. Like Whistler it has numerous shops where a great trail map is available with topography, recommended routes etc, we didn't get lost once and minimum stopping to read the map was required. I imagine Bend would be popular with the singletrack type crowd too, lots of nice eateries, a great sandwich and bottle shop with a cycling theme and several local breweries that sell jerseys with their brew names on. There are loads of bikes in the town and we met a number of people on the trails (including two super-friendly ex-SF firemen whom we bumped into most days) who had relocated there for the riding and lifestyle (there is good skiing locally in the winter). The whole town is also covered by a free public wireless network......
Someone on the Singletrack forum called 'bearback' tipped us off about it, cheers

MTBrew

mate cos it was freakin' AMAZIN! Whereas Whistler was miles of endless gnarliness, Bend was miles of endless, dusty, winding singletrack and was total and utter bliss.
A typical Bend ride goes like this - drive out 15 minutes to trailhead. Climb for a couple of hours through sparse forest on winding singletrack, mainly twiddling the granny gear. Stop for lunch, swat mosquitos. Traverse for an hour through high desert forest and brush. Drink some water and swat more mossies. Descend for two hours on gentle, sweeping, dusty singletrack. Pretty amazing really. Days one and two featured rides pretty much exzactly like these, although day two's descent (on 'skyliner's trail) was fast, dusty and a bit tricky in places. Day three we rode the crater rim trail of the Newberry Volcanic memorial which is a double laked volcanic crater, similar style but not so challenging, though the views made up for it. Day four we rode the Mrazec trail. Like a lot of stuff here it is best done as a shuttle run but due to our lack of shuttlability, we had to turn it into an epic, 4 miles of singletrack, then 6 along the road, then 2.5 on

X-Country ski shelter

We saved some dollars on lodgings in Bend

jeep track, then a 6 mile singletrack climb. This left us at 6500 feet with 2500 feet of descent to do back down to the car 17 miles away. CUM ON! Obviously not very steep, this was nearly 3 hours of winding through forest and bush on more sweeping singletrack ending with a rocky trip down a canyon to the park where the car was. We liked Bend so much we squeezed a final ride in on the day we left for San Francisco, 16 miles, again nearly all singletrack, finishing down the whoops trail, which is where the local dhers ride loops, starts with loads of natural dusty turns, then runs through a big whoop section, then into a man made section of whoops, doubles, triples, berms and step-downs. Loads of fun and you'd be jumping more and more the more runs you did. So in 5 days we did well over a hundred miles, most of them on singletrack. The only criticism would be that technically it is not too challenging, although there is a new trail network being built in the area that is designed to tackle that. We will definitely be going back, hopefully with others

McThommo

so we can get some shuttling going on.
Bend then:-
Technical:-5
Physical:-7
Fun:- Off the scale
Ideal bike - four and four
Oh yeah, it was ideal for learning to drift too!

Best shop we visited:- Sagebrush Cycles

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