Oregon’s North Coast is a mercurial tangle of opaque and opposing forces. Impenetrable mountains tumble to the sea. Craggy headlands overhang a turbulent coast shaped by the push and pull of the tides. Sea, sky and imposing landforms loom and dissolve in the ever-present mist. Robust foothills and ridgelines steepen inland, rising like ghosts to cut and connect deep river valleys with names like Necanicum, Nehalem, Ecola, Miami and Kilchis. Let’s be honest – there are easier places to ride bikes.

Oregon’s Coast Range is a murky labyrinth of dense, dripping, jungle-like terrain, unforgiving gradients and isolated watersheds, much of it locked away behind private timber company gates. The weather can seem perennially grey, testy and petulant, prone to frequent and capricious change. Lush and alluring one minute, abrasive and menacing the next, the Coast Range — it would seem, contains multitudes both accessible and arcane. It stands to reason that some places aren’t meant to be fully understood.

Coastal towns like Cannon Beach, Manzanita and Arch Cape certainly feel like they’d make idyllic bases from which to wander, but turns out it’s kinda harder than you’d think. Oregon’s North Coast can be a tough nut to crack — for all the reasons mentioned above, but also consider that these mountains are quite possibly the most productive industrial timber land in North America for those very same reasons. Which is to say access can be limited at best depending on who manages what, where you ride and when.

The Coast Range is loosely connected by an intermittent patchwork of rough logging arterials known as mainlines. These are marginally functional for riding but certainly not our first choice as they tend to be characterized by wholesale swaths of forest indiscriminately plowed and roughly graveled to accommodate trucks and heavy machinery. Branching from these are secondary arterials, mazes of forest doubletrack, overgrown tertiary roads, dizzying fire breaks, abandoned spurs and so on. While some of these can be nice at times and obviously practical for connecting zone A to zones B and C, so to speak, logging roads and timberlands are generally pretty low on our list of ideal riding scenarios.

So why here?

The appeal here is a journey much more the exception than the rule. Generally speaking the baseline for the Coast Range is a lot of the same thing: highly uniform industrial-grade timberland without much in the way of prominent features, focal points, or obvious payoffs. Vexingly difficult yet somehow mundane. But when it’s good it tends to be really good and in this case, it’s magnificent. All the right elements align for subtle sequence of deeply-forested flow, stealthy, well-paced reveals and a satisfying blend of forest roads, backcountry gravel and undulant singletrack.

While this sampling is rather compact, just shy of 35 miles, note that it does ride more like a 60-mile day. Highlights include cozy proximity to Cannon Beach for ample food and drink, rich and verdant terrain in and around places like Ecola Creek Forest Reserve, the Necanicum River watershed, Klootchy Creek and Ecola State Park with plenty of subtle sidedoor connectors. The whole thing works on a manageable scale that will get you back to Cannon Beach in time for happy hour.

Klootchy Creek trails

The Klootchy Creek trails create a nice contrast to the Coast Range’s vascular network of timber roads, breaking the monotony of too much of the same thing for too long. Like any trail system, there is no singular way to approach Klootchy Creek, but here we opt for a mix of climbing trails and general access roads to the tippy-top of the system then keep to blue and green descending lines in the spirit of drop-bar accessibility. That said, there are only two black diamond-rated trails in the whole system, so most everything is realistically fair game.

Clatsop Peoples

Clatsop territory originally encompassed some 1,100 square miles, stretching from the mouth of the Columbia southward to Tillamook Head. Although regional bands roamed well beyond these areas, the Clatsop homeland offered dense forests of fir, pine, spruce and cedar, as well as fertile coastal plains, providing an abundance of game, berries, and edible roots. Its waters — the Columbia, streams and lakes, ocean tidelands — teemed with life including many species of salmon, sturgeon, freshwater fish, and shellfish.

The Necanicum River, draining the southern part of the Clatsop region, nurtures groves of fir, spruce and pine, as well as a rich ground cover of plants and bushes including salal, kinnikinnik, wapato and camas. The region was historically interspersed with meadows and berry thickets. Here, where the Necanicum empties into the Pacific, massive boulders and rocks identify the terminal moraine of the ancient Necanicum Glacier that covered the area in the last ice age. The catastrophic Missoula ice-age floods carved out the geology and formed the canyon of the Columbia and Necanicum Rivers as they exist today.

Necanicum River

The headwaters of the Necanicum River are located in the rugged peaks of the Coast Range near Humbug and Sugarloaf Mountains. From a maximum elevation of 2,846 feet, water flows northwest along the Necanicum Valley Fault to sea level at the mouth of the Necanicum estuary. The highest elevations in the watershed are rocky peaks made of Columbia River Basalt in the now-uplifted submarine canyon of the Columbia River. This implies that the Necanicum River formed on the side of the rising hills as the Columbia River lava complex emerged from the ocean, about 10 million years ago. Draining roughly 85 square miles of western Coast Range, the watershed serves as an important breeding and rearing ground for chinook, coho salmon, steelhead and cutthroat trout.

Most likely derived from the Tillamook Salish. Necanicum is thought to be an anglicization of Ne-hay-ne-hum, which was the name of an Indian lodge near the ocean and utilizes the prefix, ne-, meaning “place.” William Clark first marked it as Kil â mox (a variant that would eventually become Killamook, then Tillamook) to describe a “butifull river” that emptied into the Pacific, but later crossed it off his map and renamed it the Clatsop River in1806, though that name would not stick. The community of Necanicum was first known as “Alhers” as the area post office was named after Herman Alhers, the first and only postmaster at the location. Alhers himself changed the name of the post office to “Push” in 1899, that name being rather odd, the town finally settled on Necanicum in 1907 due to the obvious proximity to the river. While it is accepted that the original meaning of the name is lost to the mists of time, Postmaster Alhers maintained that Necanicum meant “a gap in the mountains,” though this seems unlikely as the location of the original Indian lodge was near the sea.

Ecola state park

Ecola State Park stretches for 1,023 acres from the north end of Cannon Beach to Seaside on Oregon’s north coast. The park encompasses hulking Tillamook Head, which rises over a thousand feet above the ocean, and miles of beaches, smaller headlands, coves, and iconic sea stacks. The rugged shoreline of Miocene lava flows, some 15 million years old, and slumping sedimentary rocks formed within an ancient mouth of the Columbia River. Ecola has also served as a frequent filming location over the years, ‘The Goonies’, ‘Twilight’ and ‘Point Break’ among notable titles.

Permits Required

Do note that the bulk of this route exists on private Lewis & Clark Timberland, behind gates requiring permits for access. Fortunately for non-motorized recreational use…ie…cycling, it simply amounts to signing a liability waiver. These recreational permits are free, unlimited and readily available online. They allow hiking and non-motorized bicycle recreation behind the L&C-managed gates throughout the area (see map in link for boundary details). This permit should cover the Klootchy Creek Trail system, which is actively patrolled, so be sure to print out and have a permit with you when venturing up into the zone. Here is an additional link for Klootchy Creek-specific permitting. Consider yourself warned.

NORTH COAST: CANNON TO KLOOTCHY

A couple of noteworthies include an optional detour at mile 1.4 to follow the Forest Preserve Trail, an impossibly lush section of primeval old growth, massive ferns, mosses and serpentine singletrack (refer to photo 1: gallery A for visual reference), the downside being that it is technically off-limits to bikes and presents just enough downed trees to act as its own deterrent. Not advocating a trail-poach, simply noting that it is there if you like that sort of thing. There is also an optional out-and-back to Indian Beach at mile 31. We highly recommend it but it does tack on another 600 or so feet of climbing near the end.

  • 34.7 MILES

  • 4245 FEET

  • ROUTE FORMAT: LOOP

  • SURFACE: 88% UNPAVED, 3% PAVED, 9% SINGLETRACK

  • TIRES: MINIMUM OF 45C. 2” RECOMMENDED. TUBELESS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

  • BIKE: GRAVEL/ADVENTURE/HARDTAIL

  • SERVICES: CANNON BEACH

  • FULL RIDE WITH GPS ROUTE

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