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Talk to many mountain bikers in Portland and they’ll tell you the city is single-track poor, especially for a town that celebrates road cycling and adulates bike commuters. Many of the malcontents will mutter about opening more hiking trails in Forest Park to bikes. Sure, they can ride the fire lanes, but almost all the single track is reserved for hikers.
There’s a solution: Rocky Point (aka the Tualatin Mountain Forest, aka the Scappoose Trails). It’s a 40-mile tangle of single track just 30 minutes north of Portland on Highway 30. And just because it’s close doesn’t mean it’s mediocre. The trails are plenty challenging, unless you’re Kilian Bron. (Look him up and watch the $@&!ing videos.)
Off-piste cyclists have been riding the hills and gullies of Rocky Point since the 1970s, sticking mostly to logging roads before anyone thought to put a shock on a bike. A decade later, pioneering mountain-bike riders started cutting trails through the timberland.
The place became legit in 2018 when the nonprofit Northwest Trail Alliance negotiated a lease with Weyerhaeuser, the landowner, allowing access. That was terrific, but now and then you’d show up to ride through woods and find yourself in a really sad clear-cut.
Such trauma is less likely now. The Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit that has been creating parks, gardens and trails for 50 years, bought Rocky Point this past May and turned it over to Oregon State University to use as a research forest—with recreational access.
To ride Rocky Point, you must pay $40 to NWTA for an annual membership. It sends you a tag for your seatpost as proof of payment. Sure, you could go ride for free, but that would be a dick move given all the work the alliance does to keep the trails in shape and spicy.
See the rest of Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2025 here!
