Mountain Bike Road Trip in the Willamette Valley
The secret to Willamette Valley mountain biking is hidden in plain sight: you don’t have to travel far from the I-5 corridor to find solitude and sweet singletrack. Rural life quickly replaces rush hour with rolling hills, where the same famed Willamette Valley soil that produces iconic wines makes for great trails. Combine the ease of access with world-class amenities for a memorable mountain bike road trip where the pace of life is slow and the trails are fast.
Silver Falls State Park
Note: an Oregon State Parks pass is required; phone service at the trailhead can be spotty, so be sure to purchase your pass before arriving. Be sure to arrive early to find a parking spot, especially on weekends.
Begin your road trip at Silver Falls State Park, east of Salem. Often considered the crown jewel of the state parks system, Silver Falls has attracted throngs for its namesake cascades for nearly a century, but the purpose-built bike trails developed in the last decade have quickly become a fat-tire favorite.
A low-angle climb up graveled Lookout Mountain Road accesses the top of built-for-bikes Catamount trail. From the open meadow—a regenerating remnant of the 2020 Beachie Creek Fire, which scorched the timber around the park—dive into berms in mature forest on the Catamount Backside trail before doubling back for a nearly four-mile descent back to the trailhead. The main Catamount trail serves up a series of high-speed side hits and smooth rollers interspersed with short, punchy pedaling sections; it’s as heart-pounding as any cascades in the park.
Afterwards, head west of Salem to the quaint town of Independence and the Independence Hotel. Located on the Willamette Valley Scenic Bikeway, the Independence boasts both boutique and bike-friendly features, including in-room bike storage and a bike maintenance room just off the lobby. Grab an apres-bike cocktail and some crowd-favorite braised brussels sprouts at Territory, the hotel restaurant, before heading west ten minutes to the bucolic college town of Monmouth for pizza and beers at Yeasty Beasty. Their creative takes on chewy sourdough-crust pies have graced top-five lists and television segments for good reason.
Black Rock Trail System
The zero-stoplight town of Falls City may seem an unlikely home for a dirt destination, but Black Rock’s bike roots run deep: the trail network hosted multiple iconic mountain bike film segments during the early 2000s, and its legacy remains intact two decades later. One lap on the immaculate trails maintained by the Black Rock Mountain Bike Association under the Hollywood glow of open forest and you’ll be catching epic video clips of your own.
Three top-to-bottom trails form the core of the trail network, all accessed via an easy dirt road climb. Granny’s Kitchen, the double-black jump trail that made Black Rock famous, features massive, trick-ready lips and expertly sculpted shark fins. Banzai Downhill offers a mellower alternative that all skill levels will enjoy, with swooping turns and small to medium tabletop jumps, all easily rollable. Sickter Gnar tosses some rock and large drops into the mix, including the show-off stepdown over the climb road known as Fish Gap.
Post-ride, drive south 30 minutes to the pastoral college town of Corvallis. Although it’s home to Oregon State University and a mere ten miles west of I-5, Corvallis stays quiet outside of game day, and the bustle of campus quickly gives way to farmland. It’s also one of the state’s most cyclist-friendly cities, with dedicated bikeways on wide, low-traffic sidestreets that access city’s-edge singletrack.
For a funky fat-tire basecamp for exploring the area’s trails, check in to the Hotel Corvallis. Part of the growing movement of renovated motor courts, the Hotel Corvallis combines retro charm and cyclist-friendly touches such as custom-fabricated bike hangers in the rooms. From here it’s a short walk to Block 15 Brewpub, where, from the sidewalk seating you can enjoy people-watching and casual, scratch-made pub fare.
McDonald-Dunn Forest
Note: trails on the west side of the trail system, including As You Wish and Word to Your Mother, cross Starker Forests timber land and require a free annual permit that must be picked up in person at the Starker Forests main office.
Begin your next day with a coffee and smoothie from Bodhi Café down before pedaling to McDonald-Dunn Forest. Managed as a research forest by the Oregon State University College of Forestry, the 11,250-acre McDonald-Dunn Forest has cultivated a collection of great trails under its firs and ferns. No Secret, the first officially sanctioned mountain-bike-specific trail to be built in the OSU Research Forests system, features plenty of stumps and side hits under a blanket of shin-smacking ferns. Connect it with the swoopy rollers and root droops of Play Time before doubling back to the west side of the trail system via the technical rock moves of Word to Your Mother. Finish with a fast, poppy descent on As You Wish before pedaling pavement back to the trailhead.
Alsea Falls Trail Network
Stroll Corvallis’ downtown core before rounding out the road trip with a day at Alsea Falls, thirty minutes to the south. The roughly dozen miles of trails at Alsea Falls deftly mix machine-built berms and jumps with narrow, natural-feature sections chock-full of roots and chunk, all under a thick canopy that provides shade on sunny days and shield from drizzle during the wet months. A long but never terribly steep 1900-foot climb over a mix of gravel roads and trails accesses the trails, with the difficulty level of descents getting progressively higher as one ascends; beginner and intermediate riders need not commit to a big climb or big jumps to enjoy the trail system.
From the top, the black-diamond Misery Whip whisks riders into a series of big doubles, shark fins and berms, before flowing into a scaled-down version of the same features on Whistle Punkthe. Highballer speeds down twisty ridgetop singletrack that alternates tight turns with high speed straights, and the beginner-friendly Springboard weaves and rolls through a glorious slice of Oregon forest.
