Distance: 71-mile out and back
Elevation gain: 4820 ft

This ride has one spectacular virtue: isolation. If you like riding where there are no cars, no cyclists, no signs, no fences, no mailboxes—just nature—this is your ride. It’s very good riding, with fine scenery, a nice road surface, and nice road contour, but there are other Oregon rides in Bestrides just as good or better in those regards. But on no other Oregon ride will you be so alone. In four days of riding these roads—on weekends no less—I saw zero bikes and only a handful of cars. And, while there may be rides in California with similar isolation, the road surface will almost certainly be poor. Only in Oregon do they see fit to keep the surfaces of roads no one uses so pristine.

71 miles is a lot of miles, so we’ll talk later about cutting it down, but it’s all good stuff and I wanted to tell you it’s there because no one seems to know about it. In fact, the route connects with a remarkable number of attractive roads, so adding on miles is highly recommended, if you’re an ironman or you have another day to spend in the area (see Adding Miles). If you plan to shorten the route, the riding goes from good to better to best, so I’ll encourage you to cut from the Wimer (southern) end.

Despite the mileage, the ride isn’t all that hard. The elevation gain, only a little over half our 100 ft/mile benchmark for difficulty, doesn’t lie. You’ll climb noticeably 4 times on the ride, a 2-mile climb and a 1-mile climb on the way out and a 4-mile climb and a 1-mile climb on the way back, all of it moderately pitched (5-7%). The rest of the route is imperceptible climbing or descending, just enough to avoid flat/boring.

This is non-coastal southern Central Oregon, which is pretty dry, so the woods don’t have the rainforest lushness of the rides on the coast or around Cottage Grove. No ferns, no mossy maples, no riparian alders. But still very pretty, I promise—like the other Bestrides rides around Ashland and Grants Pass.

A lot of people don’t like out and backs, and those people will immediately start thinking about making this ride a loop. Indeed, at the turn-around you could continue west on Upper Cow Creek Rd. and ride to Azalea, a little community on Hwy 5, but from there finding an alternate route back to the trailhead in Wimer is a big ask—you’re going to end up riding an enormous number of miles. Your other loop option is to turn R at the top of our route, onto Upper Cow Creek Rd. heading east and turn R on Applegate Creek Rd., which will drop you back at the top of W. Fork Evans Creek Rd., but it’s all dirt. So I’m leaving the ride as an out and back—if you find a workable loop route, let me know.