Routecrafting

I was just happy to be there. Wheels crunching central Oregon dirt. It was dusty, loose, raw, exciting and different from everything I knew. A landscape of red cinder, high desert and ponderosa pine. It was my first time in the Metolius. The skyline of volcanic peaks felt exhilarating. Primordial. Ancient. Convinced there wasn't a bad road to be found, my buddies and I put a finger on the map, shrugged and off we went. Did we know where we were going? Absolutely not. It was 2016. We were new to adventure riding. Doing it wrong was standard procedure. 

In our haste, we ended up making everything much harder than it needed to be. Climbing all the best descents, riding far too much of the same thing for way too long, roasting on  sunbaked tarmac, oblivious to the cool, shady trails nearby. It seemed like we approached it all in the wrong direction and missed everything cool, an appropriate metaphor for our misdirected energy – all hot to trot with nowhere to go. Seven years later I would revisit the region with a lot more experience and a new route in mind. Still curious, I wanted to give it another try with fresh eyes and a revised approach.

My name is Ron Lewis. I develop and catalogue adventure cycling routes under the name omtm.cc. Along with my partner Ryan Francesconi, I’ve been staging DIY ride events, building and sharing routes throughout the Pacific Northwest for over eight years. Simply put, we aim to create and share the type of riding we enjoy – which is to say creative, visually compelling and sometimes weird, open-ended rides that fuse elements of gravel, mountain biking, randonneuring and bikepacking – which seems as apt a definition for Adventure Cycling as any I’ve come across.

The intention here is to pull back the curtain on route development to provide some insight into the ingredients and architecture behind platinum ride experiences. Routecrafting can be an imprecise affair – a dark art whose mechanics shape your experience, yet operate in the background, out of sight. I hope to share a few philosophical building blocks but leave plenty room for one’s own creativity and sense of discovery in the process. 

When I eventually returned to take another crack at the Metolius, I was seven years older, it was still just as dusty and loose, but this time I was able to stitch together a rousing cross-section of lines. Every ingredient fell into place – meandering rivers, volcanic buttes, alpine lakes and prodigious stretches of singletrack. In my post-ride glow I thought ‘I can’t WAIT to come back and ride this with friends!’. If the compulsion to share is a litmus test for a good route, this one possibly qualified as great. Unlocked and absolutely stunning, the Metolius hit all the right beats that day in large part, because this time around, I knew what I was looking for and exactly how to find it – which feels an awful lot like doing it right.

But you don’t have to take my word for it, give the route a go for yourself.

Follow Ron @OMTM.CC

Visit OMTM's full route Directory HERE.