Portland

We stayed a few nights with a friend in Portland. While I've never been a big fan of big cities, Portland is one of the few I can handle. People here have a great appreciation for the outdoors, and there are an absurd number of ways to play nearby. Forest Park, which is immediately within the city limits, has miles of hiking and biking trails and offers some nice views of the surrounding area.

The real gem that I found about 90 minutes southwest of Portland is the Black Rock Freeride Area. The locals have somehow managed to create a fully-legit freeride park in the middle of some state-managed logging land. Pedaling up the fire road, the first thing you find is a play area of over an acre, with everything from progressive drops, to tabletop jumps, to skinnies. I could have spent the entire day in the "Basic Training" area, but I pedaled further up to run into a group of local riders. They turned out to be very friendly, and showed me their favorite trails. As we ascended we passed everything from fast, flowy singletracks to enormous wooden stunts seen in the New World Disorder videos.

We reached the top of the trail system after a gradual 3 mile climb. The trails have an incredible amount of work put into them, literally thousands of man-hours have been spent. All the berms are smooth and fast, the wooden stunts are worthy of any North Shore builder. In one descent we linked turns to drops to booters to ladder bridges and skinnies. If you are a freerider and you can get anywhere near this park, it is a must-do, and give some thanks to the builders for bringing some real freeriding south of the Canadian border.