Oregon Backcountry Discovery Route July 2013

Just finished 802 miles of the OBCDR with a friend (Jon). Planning this trip took more work than we thought it would. It seemed easy at first thought, but ended up taking a lot of time. Most of it was spent figuring out our route(s) and ultimately learning to use our GPS units well enough so as not to get too lost out there. We were both newbies. A fair amount of time was also spent on preparing and equipping the bikes. Jon rode an LC4 and I rode a 500EXC. I have a KTM 990 Adventure and was tempted to take that but in retrospect it would have been slower most of the time than the 500, especially in the rocky or technical areas. There was a couple of rocky sections that lasted for 20-30 miles each.

Jon did not have a large fuel tank on his bike so he had to carry additional fuel. I had installed a 5 gallon tank on my bike and never came close to running out since Jon's fuel anxiety had us stopping at every fuel opportunity we could find. The 500 averaged about 50mpg.

We did the whole route 2, and parts of routes 3,4 and 5. We started our ride south of Bend and worked our way NE to Prineville where we caught route 4. We followed route 4 to it's east end and picked up route 5 south to the Summer lake area. We then caught route 2 and went west until the end where we caught route 3 north back to our start. The ride took us four days to complete. It was very fun although a little rushed on the last two days as we had to do about 250 miles each day to stay on schedule. It would have been nice to have a little more time to explore. Our last day, it took us 11 1/2 hours of riding with little more than gas stops and a few short breaks.

Our trip covered various terrain including forest dirt, gravel, some pavement and rocky sagebrush desert. We usually would not see anyone else for hours at a time.

We saw some very cool parts of Oregon including vistas at almost every turn. Wildlife sightings included a bear, pronghorn antelope and countless deer. Of course we also encountered many free range cattle every day. Many of whom seem very concerned with our presence but couldn't manage to get out of our way!

In the future we would like to ride more of the northern part of route 5 since it looks to be really nice country up there.

I'll try and paste a link to some pictures:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/98701960@N02/sets/72157634584191620/


Ryan

Yo Ryan. You skipped over some low lights and highlights of the ride!

- The very first route turn on like mile 2 of your track to Prineville--closed trail? Lost already.
- Easy mapped road through 4-Corners OHV and across the Crooked River...turned out to be whooped-out trail 38, dead ending at a fence on the edge of a cliff, and no bridge across the river anyway.
- LC4 seat rack failure and abandoned hardware on the trail. Needed to lighten the load one way or another.
- Awesome go-fast bunny trail tracks through overgrown old roads over near S Fork John Day River and about Wickiup Lake. Handguards next time out for me.
- Great guy in the John Day Napa store who cleaned out and donated the oil jug for spare LC4 fuel. Saved my bacon.
- What about trail-blazing the sacred frog swamp to avoid back tracking for miles? I still think that was a good call and no laws were broken.
- The "Gap Ranch Incident" 3mph first soil sample on the trip for your EXC.
- Or the failed LC4 log crossing train wreck. I'd still be pinned there while my corpse mummified if you weren't around to pull the hippo off of me.
- Re-fueling scramble while the T-storm was bearing down, only to have the LC4 flood and get stubborn on the re-start. The straight-leg push to get the bump start fix was genius, IMHO...and rain held off until we got under the roof at the Christmas Valley Chevron!
- Fast, stand-up 2x riding for miles with no dust, cruising through super scenery. Power sliding corners to see who would hang it out furthest. Many full brake over-shot corners on the edge of disaster. Snow mobile trails! Lots of Coors Lights nightly.

Even with the sore ass, was tons of fun and still amazing we pulled it off with no (real) spills, no breakdowns, no map/GPS meltdowns and no flats!
Priceless!

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This sounds like a good trip. Do you guys have gps tracks for it?

Tracks are posted several places.

I have complete set of Tracks for all 5 routes on GPSXchange.com but always looking for corrections (new closures) higher resolution Tracks and waypoints like Gas.

Looks like you guys had a good ride
Plan on riding Route 5 from north to south this coming July.

I'm gonna hit Route 4 from Sisters to Seneca and time permitting route 5 north at end of August, any words of advice? The maps they sent me are somewhat difficult to interpret and based on your write-up its not only because I'm slow

I had the best navigation results with the gps