The Salmonberry Trail

Built in the 1930s, this old Pacific rail line once connected the Oregon coast and Portland.  Flooded and repaired, flooded and repaired, it was finally abandoned and left for nature to grow over it. 

As we set out to ride this future rails-to-trails project on a morning in 2016, I thought riding on the pilings between the tracks would be the worst part of the day.  I was wrong.  By the end of the day, any section of pilings clear enough to bump over while on our bikes felt like pure luxury. 

We invented a new term that day: bushpacking.  Our credo: "you don't have to ride a bike, but you must bring one".  The bike was useful in helping me navigate steep climbs on foot, , and it also made a nice water and snack carrier.  Otherwise, it was almost completely useless on this epic adventure. The word epic is often overused, but in the case of this particular adventure, it felt perfectly appropriate. 

One rider carried a machete, but the woods were too thick for it.  We scrambled and rested, scrambled and rested.  One treacherous creek crossing featured a deeper than apparent current that almost took my bike away, and gave me a bloody ankle.

After the creek, we encountered a steep muddy cliff.  We just stood there and looked at it.  How could we turn back?  I didn't want to do all of that hard stuff again! We spied a knotted rope, tied to a tree near the top and decided to give it a try.  At that point, our group was split up and there were just two of us.  I was able (barely!) to scramble up the cliff to reach the rope.  Once I got the rope, I felt like a junior high student in gym class, but with more on the line than potential humiliation.  Once at the top, I was able to hang on to the rope and grab my bicycle as it was handed up.  Next, my friend, a tall guy with a big bike, handed his bike up.  I was able to put the rope through his front wheel and just hold it while he scrambled up to help me retrieve his machine.

This entire operation took around 45 minutes.  We laid at the top exhausted and covered in mud and sweat.  Just then, we heard people clapping.  Some hikers on the other side of the river must have spectated our entire ridiculous ascent.

The afternoon wore on.  I missed riding my bike.  We kept going, often seeing fallen trestle bridges, sometimes crossing those yet to fall.  Finally, we could go no further.  We hadn't seen the tracks in some time, and had been scrambling over boulders between a loud rushing river and a steep stone cliff.  There was nowhere else to go, so we turned back.

We found a tiny gravel path that led to a gravel road and took it with the hopes we could escape the Nehalem River valley and get back to civilization before nightfall.  It did, but only after a 45 minute walk up an extremely steep hill.  It was so steep that it was easy to stop and rest, you just leaned onto the hillside.  At one point, my friend said we might need to spend the night out here and we did a quick inventory of snacks.

A lifetime later we reached the top of this diabolical road (which we since learned is called Beaver Slide Road) and we mounted up and rolled east.  Sitting on the saddle never felt so good.  The vistas were incredible and we quickly undid the day's miles in an hour.  It had taken us eight hours to traverse 13 miles of the undeveloped rail trail.