The Oregon Timber Trail Alliance is dedicated to stewardship, education, community, and quality trail experiences throughout the Oregon Timber Trail corridor.

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Stewardship

Well-designed and well-maintained trails are a basic ingredient for a satisfying adventure on a mountain bike. And where trails become unrideable due to fallen trees, brush encroachment, or erosion, we rally our own volunteers to help restore them or encourage other mountain bike groups and the Forest Service to respond in kind.

OTTA volunteers have logged over 15,000 hours to clear and maintain trails since 2017. We:

• Helped restore 175 miles of the neglected Fremont National Recreation Trail and Crane Mountain National Recreation Trail in southern Oregon.

• Helped maintain and extend the Bunchgrass Ridge trail that connects Oakridge to Waldo Lake.

• In partnership with Trans-Cascadia and Alpine Running, helped restore trails along the Old Cascade Crest north of Santiam Pass.

• Partnered with Back Country Horsemen and Go Beyond Racing to begin restoring neglected trails west of Olallie Lake.

• Annually maintain a section of the Fifteenmile trail east of Mount Hood.

• Are installing signs and tags along the trail to aid navigation, especially in southern Oregon.

The OTTA will continue to secure funding and rally volunteers to help maintain trails in the OTT corridor.

Education

The OTTA believes we have a role to educate riders about the landscape they’re traveling through and provide them the skills to help maintain trails if they choose to volunteer.

We hosted a series of chainsaw certification courses, resulting in over 50 new certified volunteers who in turn cleared thousands of fallen trees.

In partnership with the Willamette National Forest, we developed a course to train volunteers about how to maintain trails.

The route guide we prepared informs riders about the history, ecology, and geology along the OTT route.

We’ve coordinated skills courses that cover bike camping, backcountry navigation, and camp cooking.

Community

Interacting with the communities along the OTT is one of the enjoyments of riding the route or when volunteering to maintain local trails. It is a chance to connect and find common ground with folks that may have different backgrounds and viewpoints.

The OTT route guide contains detailed descriptions about what these gateway communities have to offer for those who travel by mountain bike.

Our footprint may be small compared to other factors that drive the economies of these communities, but we like knowing that the recreational dollars we spend locally make some difference.

To that end we’ve:

• Hosted a series of educational and inspiring film nights to grow our community of riders.

• Partnered with Springwater Environmental School to educate students about the natural and cultural history along the OTT and incorporated their feedback in the OTT route guide.

• Teamed up with a landscape architecture course at the University of Oregon to develop a map and guide for the Willamette Tier.

• Helped the National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA) coordinate their first bike camping trip on the Deschutes Tier.

The OTTA will continue to engage with local communities and look for opportunities to foster a sense of pride and care for adjacent public lands.

Experience

The OTT is a unique network of trails and little-used roads that the OTTA has mapped and presented to the wider mountain biking community. The OTTA helps maintain some of the trails along the route but the success of having this long distance route is possible only because other mountain biking groups and the Forest Service are maintaining trails each year throughout the corridor. It’s indeed a joint effort and we’re pleased to be a part of it.

The OTT route isn’t static. A catastrophic wildfire will close off a section of trail during and after the fire, thus requiring us to come up with an alternate route for bikers. Logging operations or construction projects may close off a road for the summer and require a re-route. A trail might become abandoned from disuse or a new one built that prompts us to come up with a better alignment. The OTTA strives to respond quickly to these changes and get the word out to riders.

We’re always on the lookout for mountain biking experiences in the OTT corridor other than riding the entire route in one shot. We’ve mapped alternate routes (we call them bypasses) around a section of the OTT that a rider might choose because it’s easier or to hook up to make a loop for a weekend trip. We’ve defined two official loop routes up north that lend themselves to 2 to 4 day rides and take in some spectacular terrain.

How do we measure our success?

• Riders from 28 different countries have downloaded our route guide.

• We’ve had 200,000 unique website visitors.

• Bikepacker.com awarded the OTT “Best New Route” in 2017.

• 50 media outlets nationwide have published news of the route.