Outside Features

Would anyone pay close to $300 dollars to spend three nights camping at a highway rest area?Twice a summer, for the last four years, more than 300 people from all over the country and as far away as Australia do just that; many of them consider it a bargain. They come for one reason: Mountain Bike Oregon(MBO), a three day festival in Oakridge featuring some of the best singletrack mountain biking in the nation.
“There are miles of amazing single track. It's right up there with places like Moab, Crested Butte and Park City,” says Abbey Hippely of Santa Cruz Bicycles. Riders and industry reps agree – Oakridge has quietly developed a reputation as a premier mountain biking destination.

I used to live in Los Angeles, where every bike ride exposed me to air thick with pollution. I would try to ignore it and not think too hard about what I was breathing. Frequently, local news people would report almost gleefully that exercising for a given amount of time, say 45 minutes, when the air was particularly bad was akin to smoking a pack of cigarettes. The message seemed to be that one should exercise inside like an animal in a cage, or just forget it and eat something instead.
Last week's forest fire was a good reminder of the clean air we consistently enjoy in Central Oregon and how easy it is to take it for granted. After only two days of not riding outside, I had full-blown cabin fever. Fortunately, the wind began to usher out the smoke on Friday. By Saturday, it was almost completely gone.

To say that former pro snowboarder and voiceover artist Kris “Jaymo” Jamieson can be overly enthusiastic is putting it mildly. So, a couple of Saturday's ago, when he went off about the greatness of the new Sandy Ridge trail system near Brightwood in the shadow of Mt. Hood, I figured if the riding was half as good as he indicated, it would be incredible.
And, as it turned out, he was right and the ride was worth the extra drive. Sandy Ridge is pretty amazing. It's a small trail system at present, but one that's slated to be expanded over the next several years.

A rerun of Thursday's stage of the Tour de France was on the television behind the bar as people settled onto their barstools at Three Creek Brewing in Sisters. Sipping a beer, one patron commented that it might have been neat if Lance Armstrong at least won a stage to finish his career.
The guy next to me replied, pointing at the television set, “Yea, but hey, Lance's teammate, our local guy, is doing really well.”

July in Central Oregon has cyclists of all affinities putting rubber to pavement and dirt. While I shuddered to see the well-meaning father pulling his toddler up Skyliners Road in a bike trailer a few days ago, mostly I am giddy to see so many people riding bikes of all kinds for so many reasons. True bike love.

Going Fast
If you missed it, there's still a small window of time to see it. If, on the other hand, you've been out enjoying the wildflower display this year, you've witnessed perhaps the best one in the past thirty years.
The combination of cool late spring weather along with more than normal precipitation caused the rash of brilliantly colored flowers. For many hikers, mountain bike riders and trail runners, areas like the Maston Allotment, which normally don't get much by way of wildflowers, were suddenly strewn with red, yellow, white and purple blooms for weeks. The display at the Maston, for example, was particularly striking as it livened up what is generally a pretty blah landscape.