RIDER1: Rolling.
SPEAKER1: This trail is, it's pretty amazing
and kind of breaks the mold of what we have out here.
SPEAKER2: I just still have like
this feeling of unbelief, you know.
This type of trail does exist
literally less than an hour from where I live.
RYAN: There's a lot of jumps,
we've got
15
to 20 jumps.
And I think our largest jump is 35 feet
and that's pretty big.
[rider screaming]
SPEAKER3: It's a rush. It's always a little terrifying.
You are peddling as hard as you can for this lip.
You can't see the landing.
You know it's down there and every time I hit it,
it's like, "All right, we got it. Time for the next one."
SPEAKER4: Yeah. I think I smile
for hours after every ride.
SPEAKER3: The best part is that adrenaline rush
that you get from riding something that you made.
RIDER2: All right.
[group chattering]
RYAN: Thanks for coming out.
Welcome to Fear and Loaming if you guys haven't been here.
It's been a long time coming.
Today we're going to be doing some building,
some riding, and we got a lot of people.
We're just going to walk down that way a little bit.
Cool. Anybody needs any tools or anything else?
Let's get these dirty.
My name is Ryan McLane.
I'm kind of the trail manager out here.
I think the first thing we want to do
is get everything down to dirt.
Oh hell yeah. This is going to look so good.
This is all hand built.
This isn't like we got a million dollar grant
and somebody's coming out,
a professional and they're like with excavators
building all this. It's a lot of work.
Jeez.
RYAN: Ooh it's looking good guys.
It's taking shape.
He is not helping.
We start with like bare forest.
So we come through and we've had to clear everything.
LIZ: Oh yeah, this goes real deep.
We got to get all the old log out of there
till we get to this like this stuff right here.
RYAN: So we gotta move the whole mountain basically.
Pretty much. [others laugh]
This whole thing is just completely organic.
My hands are working better for this one.
Cause all these roots,
like they're getting stuck on my shovel, so.
There's this phrase, mountain bikers have
that they say, "No dig, no ride."
That means like nobody would be mountain biking if we,
if people weren't building the trails basically.
So it's a great, a great service.
And it also pays us back. Cause we get to ride it after,
you know, and we can build it how we want.
ERIC: We live in such a weird time where, you know,
you see a lot of other things happening
in the city of Portland and it's kinda disheartening.
And then you come out to this place.
You have people with different background,
you know, different ages, different belief,
religion, you know, orientation.
The only common denominator we have,
we all love riding mountain bikes.
One of the cool things about
cutting a new trail and being able to ride it
is remembering what it did look like, you know,
when there was brush everywhere,
you're cutting through trees and things like that.
And so being able to look back now
and see what it's turned into, it's,
there's a sense of fulfillment.
[chainsaw roars]
Ryan's been working you know,
15 years trying to get this going.
We live like 20 miles away from here
and we were driving an hour and a half,
two hours in other directions.
And we'd look behind us at the hills as we're driving away,
and be like, "Why aren't we going up there?"
So we found a plan that Oregon department of forestry funded
and it says, "You've got all this terrain
and not enough bike trails to satisfy the need."
So almost quite literally,
we showed up with shovels and say,
"All right, we're ready. We want to build."
Well, they're like, "whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait.
We got to think about this."
We went through a pretty detailed process,
created a fairly comprehensive plan.
We put together, I think it was a 30 page document
and we hand delivered that to them in 2009.
And if you guys remember what happened in 2009,
we had huge crash.
When the recession hit,
that really changed the priorities for the program
and for the agency and we downsized, we laid off staff.
RYAN: And we're chomping at the bit to get the trail in.
And they say, "Sorry, we're under order. No new trails."
Two years ago, I got a call on my cell.
I took it and it's Randy.
And he's saying,
That'll work.
"We got the green light."
And I broke down. Like I lost it.
It's still like to this day, it's like,
you got that much time.
It's like, it's super cool.
You'll have them during the week?
RIDER: Rolling.
KATHERINE: You know, you start in a really dark,
like steep area, surrounded by Doug firs.
And then you come out into like a clear cut section
that's almost like a high desert vibe.
And then you kind of dive back into the darkness.
You come into the alders,
which is honestly my favorite part.
It's magical. The lighting is like, ahh.
RYAN: You got all these people that are
just rallying through the forest
and they come out at the bottom,
and then you look around,
everybody's got this ear to ear grin
and they're all slapping high fives.
And yeah, that's amazing.
DEREK: Ryan's organized a group of people who
I mean, none of us knew each other
before we all came together
and now we're all fast friends
and he's just brought this community together
around this one trail in a way that I've never seen before.
[riders shout and cheer]
Yeah.
RYAN: These people are my brothers and sisters.
Without them we wouldn't be anywhere.
SPEAKER5: How was it?
It was so much fun.
SPEAKER5: Did you guys like it?
I live for this.
RYAN: When I started with this project,
I was 25 years old.
You gotta build it if you want it.
You build it. They will come.
That's right.
And now I'm 41 years old.
So here we are, 16 years later.
[riders chatting]
Yeah. Great.
RYAN: And we're just about ready to open the trail.
It's one of the biggest things that's happened to me.
It's pretty cool.
RIDERS: Wooo. Woohoo.