Distance: 29-mile lollipop
Elevation gain: 3160 ft

This ride comes from Oregonian FOB (Friend of Bestrides) Don.

This route has a specific sort of appeal.  It’s as isolated a ride as you can find on a road bike.   You’ll ride for 20 miles without seeing any sign of human presence—no houses, no fences, no “No Trespassing” signs, no directional signs, no street signs, no cars, no people, no nothing.  That 20 miles is through some of the most pristine, virginal forest I’ve ever seen.  Even though the route is dead simple (you literally need to negotiate one intersection), I’ve never felt so lost.

To add to the sense of isolation, both my GPS trackers (on my iPhone and my Garmin) had no idea where I was.  And when you’re in the comfort of your own home with a strong GPS signal, neither Googlemaps nor RidewithGPS will show you the route, because neither acknowledges there’s a paved road there.  And, if you can find the road, no source will tell you what it’s called.  I’m about 70% sure my RWGPS map has the route right, but don’t hold me to it.

So it’s an adventure.  The risk is, in reality, tiny—the route is simple, the road surface is sound—but the sense of risk can be high, and I would in fact take extra water, food, and clothing, because if you run into trouble god knows how long it will be before someone comes along. Since the usual route guides are useless, I’m going to describe the route in excessive detail.

All this may seem off-putting.  Rest assured, it’s a grand and memorable ride—one of my favorite rides in Oregon.  Its only problem is, once you turn onto Eagle’s Rest Rd., the road surface is unpleasant for the next 14 miles—at first coarse chipseal, then worse.  I wouldn’t do the ride without big tires.

Some of the comments below speak of previous storm damage and logging impact on the route.  I last rode it in 8/25 and the conditions were perfect.

(To see an interactive version of the map/elevation profile, click on the ride name, upper left, wait for the new map to load, then click on the “full screen” icon, upper right.)

https://ridewithgps.com/routes/40629686
(RWGPS erroneously shows a large chunk of the route as unpaved, but it’s all pavement.)

Begin the ride in Dexter, a tiny town notorious for containing the bar where the roadhouse scene in “Animal House” was filmed.  (You can start at the foot of Eagle’s Rest Rd, but you’ll be starting the ride with a leg-killing climb.)  Ride south from Dexter on Lost Creek Rd (passing Lost Valley Rd—lots of getting lost around here) for 3.6 miles, then turn L onto Eagle’s Rest Rd.  Here begins the 20 miles of virgin woods I promised you.

The afore-mentioned climb begins immediately.  It’s long, uninterrupted, and steep, often 10-12%, and made more difficult by the chipseal surface.  The woods are stunning—don’t let the climbing keep you from appreciating them.

At 8 mi. you hit a false summit.  At 9.6 mi. you hit the real summit.  At this point the hard work of the ride is done.  You roll up and down until mi. 11.7 mi., the one tricky spot in the ride: you reach a fork, and you must go R, though L looks like the primary road (see photo below).   Left fork goes down, right fork goes up—you did it right if you’re climbing (briefly) after the split.  My Garmin marked the new road as “Development Road 512,” but I’ve never seen that name anywhere else.

Once you make that R, you have no more decisions until Mile 23.5, when the road you’re on runs into a much larger, more developed road and you take it to the L.

After the fork and a brief climb, the road drops noticeably, then meanders up and down through less glorious woods (bare conifers, no understory) on a road surface that is often worse than the previous chipseal.  Not awful, but poor.

At mile 17.2, three things happen: 1) you turn north, back towards Dexter; 2) the road surface dramatically improves, to OK; and 3) you start to drop—at first steeply, then more gently, all the way to Mile 23.5.  Some of this descending is spectacular, and much of the foliage is as magnificent as anything I’ve ever seen.   Somewhere along this stretch my Garmin began identifying the road as “Lost Creek Rd.”

At Mile 23.5 you dead-end at the completely unsigned larger, fully-developed (double yellow line) road.  You are in fact at the intersection of Lost Creek Rd. to your L and what Googlemaps labels as “Hartunos Rd.” to the R (not that it does you any good to know this). Go L (actually continuing on Lost Creek Rd.) and you will soon close the loop at Eagle’s Rest Rd.  Continue on Lost Creek Rd. back to your car.

Shortening the ride:  The prettiest foliage is on the leg from the beginning of Eagle’s Rest Rd. to the fork at 11.7 mi. and (riding the route backwards) on the leg from the Lost Creek Rd./Hartunos Rd. fork to the beginning of the serious climb.  Either is a grand out-and-back, the first being a major climb and the second being nearly flat.

Adding Miles:  A few miles down Hwy 58 from Dexter is Oakridge, home of the Aufderheide ride and all the others mentioned in Aufderheide’s Adding Miles section.   If you go northeast from Dexter and cross Dexter Reservoir, all the roads around Fall Creek Reservoir are gorgeous and mellow, especially Big Fall Creek Rd and Ruben Leigh Rd—perfect for a recovery day or social ride.