[00:02] Every time I'm on this trail, like I have this sense of pride.
[00:06] This idea that you're creating this trail, this experience, that someone in the future's gonna ride and enjoy...
[00:14] That's what keeps us coming back.
[00:19] The Tillamook State Forest is just magic. There's something about it where you can just go get lost and get into a place and see a new thing every day.
[00:29] I've been escaping to this place for 20 years. It's like wow, this place is special. It's therapy.
[00:39] My name is Ryan McLane. I grew up in the West Portland area, pretty close to the Tillamook State Forest, probably 20, 30-minute drive.
[00:48] As a preteen growing up, sometimes you just gotta get out. So the bike was the escape. That was my chariot to get the hell out.
[00:57] You get on the bike and you just ride. You could just go, do whatever, wherever. It was so free.
[01:04] In the mid 2000s, there was no good compelling riding in the area. And so we did some sleuthing around, and we found a plan for the Tillamook State Forest that said, "We set aside this whole area for more advanced mountain biking opportunities in the future." And there was nothing there, no one had taken the reins and actually did anything with it. And we were like, "Let's build trails."
[01:30] My name's Marissa Jensen, and I'm currently working as a firefighter here in Oregon. Westside Trail Federation is a non-profit organization here in the Pacific Northwest. We are focused on building technical downhill mountain biking trails in a place where a lot of those don't exist. Like the Tillamook State Forest, which has just the most amazing terrain, and it's a perfect fit.
[01:59] So when we decide that we want to put a trail in the forest, it really starts with looking at LiDAR maps, figuring out where to start a trail, where to end a trail, which ways work, which ways don't work. You look at drainage, creeks, canyons, riparian areas, you want to stay away from those.
[02:22] Then you just go to the area of the mountain and you walk it. And you see if that's possible. So I can start to come up with an idea of, "That might be cool, I'm gonna put a little pin on top of that."
[02:35] And that's where the vision comes in, like okay, we're gonna bench cut this, this is gonna be the feature, you know, we're gonna jump here...
[02:45] So once a trail is flagged and approved, it really depends on what the forest has in front of you. But it really is just moving earth at that point.
[03:00] So on a big dig day, we do a safety meeting, we talk about what the plan is, we talk about what our goals are. Everything that we build is hand-built. So a person with a tool in their hand, chipping away at the forest.
[03:21] We're all just grabbing tools, hiking into the trails, sometimes we're hiking in a few miles.
[03:31] And the tools are a huge variety, like anything that you can think of that's gonna break ground, move dirt, chainsaws for actually removing trees if we need to or removing stumps.
[03:46] There's a lot of obstacles to work through. Um, but we get through it. And if we can't get through it, we'll put rocks around it, we'll turn it into a feature, we'll go over the top of it.
[03:58] I think we've got 30 to 40 people out in build days side-by-side. People of all walks of life building a trail. They're motivated.
[04:13] Every dig day seems like it gets bigger. Every event each year we put on just gets bigger and better. There's so much momentum. Nobody's in it for anything other than just the love of building trails.
[04:27] We build it, we wait a season, we let the snows pack down the soils, and then come spring, we call it quality assurance testing. But really it is, it's just builders shredding the crap out of a trail. And that's the absolute best part.
[04:54] Every time I'm on this trail, like I have this sense of pride, where it's like this is a thing that I'm a part of. I moved some of this earth to make this happen. It makes me smile like every time I ride it.
[05:08] This idea that you're creating this trail, this experience, that someone in the future's gonna ride and enjoy, is just beyond who you are right now. It's, it's bigger than us and that's it. That's it. That's what keeps us coming back.
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