Imagine you’re on a weeklong bike tour through Washington’s Gifford-Pinchot National Forest, camping along the way. For 200 miles, you never cross a paved road, but pass through numerous landscapes, from lush groves of mossy giants to aquamarine swimming holes and the rocky blast zone of Mount St. Helens.
This is the Loowit Tier, a newly finished bikepacking route that’s also the first section of the most ambitious mountain bike trail ever conceived. It’s the brainchild of the Orogenesis Collective, a group of West Coast adventurers who have spent years trying to bring the route to fruition.
Their long-term plan? To complete the Orogenesis Trail, a 5,000-mile bikepacking trail that stretches from the Canadian border through the Western United States to the tip of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula.
While the full trail is still years away from completion, several segments will become available this year. The collective, which officially gained nonprofit status this spring, just posted the full guide to the Loowit Tier on its newly published website. It’s the first of five trail segments that the group will publish this year.
Combined, the five routes offer 875 miles of bikepacking adventure on backcountry singletrack — and the Orogenesis Collective is just getting started.
“It’s raw and challenging to ride, but the landscapes you go through are just so much more wild,” the group’s executive director, Gabriel Amadeus Tiller, told GearJunkie this week. “It’s like a wilderness experience on a bike.”
Explore the Loowit Tier
Hosted and supported by Bikepacking Roots for the last 5 years, the Orogenesis Collective now has a fancy website of its own. Rather than simply offering maps and GPS coordinates, the route descriptions also include rich descriptions of the area’s geographic and cultural history, as well as numerous markers about landmarks and resupply locations.
You’ll learn the Indigenous origins of the Loowit name and how it connects to the spiritual history of Washington’s most iconic mountains. Practically, there’s plenty of info to make a smart decision about how to tackle the trail — and whether it’s the right level for your ability.
“This is not a section of the route that’s great for novice bikepackers, but there are many quiet dirt roads that parallel much of it if you would prefer a more leisurely tour,” according to the site’s route description.
The Loowit Tier was published last month, following a final test run by Dustin Raisanen. He’s one of the many volunteers who have helped the Orogenesis Collective with the extremely tough labor involved in bike trail creation and maintenance. In a trip report, Raisanen had nothing but gratitude for the experience, which saw him riding for 700 miles of the planned Orogenesis Trail in Washington.
His favorite part was the Loowit trail, though he acknowledged that its total elevation gain over 188 miles (about 33,600 feet) is a tough challenge.
“If somebody is looking to ride a really remote and beautiful section of trail. I wouldn’t change a thing!” Raisanen said. “I got to spend 17 days in the wilderness on my bike. Life can’t get much better than that.”
More Routes on the Way
While the Loowit Tier may be a bit ambitious for novice bikepackers, the Orogenesis Collective has several more routes in the works. In addition to four more routes — all in California and with far less elevation gain — the group is also throwing launch parties and group rides for these newly published sections.
Those include:
- August 17: Loowit Tier, Longmire Brewing, Packwood, Wash.
- September 21: Tahoe Tier, Yubaverse, Downieville, Calif.
- October (TBA): Ahwahnee Tier, Oakhurst, Calif.
- November (TBA): Ehmuu Tier, Idyllwild, Calif.
Later this month, the collective will publish its second segment of the continent-spanning trail: Winema Way. This route connects the Oregon Timber Trail to the Lost Sierra, Downieville, Tahoe, and the Sierra Circuit.
It includes “some legendary Downieville riding, but also explores roads and trails that few people ever see through basin and range country in the Modoc National Forest,” the group said in an Instagram post.
“It’s a favorite area of mine to explore because it’s more remote than many of the areas closer to metro areas in Oregon and Washington,” Tiller told GearJunkie.
Chip In
Sound fun? You bet. But trails like these only remain available as long as dedicated volunteers keep them that way. The remote locations of these trails mean that Tiller, Raisanen, and many others often hike or bike for many miles with the chainsaws and other equipment they need to maintain the trails.
Loowit Trail had remained impassable for years until Orogenesis Collective volunteers spent several thousand hours rehabilitating it. Those concerns are even more relevant as climate change fuels more wildfires, requiring even more frequent trail updates.
“We lose so many trails to forest fires every year,” Tiller said. “Just trying to stay on top of the maintenance issues that fires cause is a lot of work.”
So, along with enjoying these trails, consider signing up for volunteer events through the Orogenesis Collective or Bikepacking Roots.
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