‘OCVA’ film is about more than an epic bike ride

“How fast can you move until discovery is lost? How much slower do we need to travel to really see? How do we slow down but still arrive, and if not rediscover what is missing, at least be aware of what was lost?”

That’s not a typical opening line for a bike movie, but OCVA — released by Portland software coder, artist and composer Ryan Francesconi on March 27th — is anything but typical. OCVA stands for Oregon Cascades Volcanic Arc, the geological term for a connected range of volcanic peaks that Francesconi turned into a 400-mile mixed-terrain cycling route in 2016. When Francesconi isn’t creating music on his computer, he creating art on his bicycle, by carving lines in forests throughout Oregon. A master route-maker and accomplished rider, he’s one of the main organizers behind Our Mother the Mountain (OMTM), a large community of cyclists who prefer unpaved adventures deep in the woods.

OCVA is a 30-minute film narrated by Francesconi that mixes his deep love of the natural world captured in long clips, a poetic and politically-charged script, his original score punctuated by natural riding sounds like tires crunching through snow and disc brake squeals, and footage from a ride on the OCVA route completed with riding partner David Wilcox in 2022.

In an interview with Francesconi Monday (watch it below or on YouTube), he said his inspiration came from a sense of urgency after seeing the devastation of the 2020 Oregon wildfires. “So much is fragile right now. We were locked out of these areas for a couple of years. And then when I got back out to the Clackamas River area, I just couldn’t believe what was gone… I was so intimate with that particular landscape and it was, it is just, gone.”

Francesconi, 51, sat on the footage and the concept for three years before he began to mold it into the OCVA film. He said the current political climate, with the Trump Administration running roughshod over federal land agencies and public forests with policies that cut management positions and give away logging rights to timber companies, spurred him to act. “Suddenly there was this extra weight about these particular places that I’m looking at that are now endangered from a new angle,” he said.

Listen to the film and you’ll hear a healthy dose of transportation politics in Francesconi’s script. Part of that is formed from his political views, but it also comes from his experience as someone who’s lived without a car for 11 years. The opening scene is of his train ride to the starting point of the ride in Klamath Falls. “Traveling by train changes your relationship to time by requiring you to let go of control,” Francesconi’s voice proclaims. “This is at odds with the abrasive ego of transportation and entitlement in the US.”

When it comes to travel modes, “I think walking is the best, honestly,” Francesconi acknowledged in our interview. “But it just takes forever to get anywhere, and the bike is sort of the perfect balance from my point of view, because it’s actually not very slow, but it affords you the simple thing of being able to just stop anytime you want.”

Asked what he hopes people will take away from the film, Francesconi said humbly, “My only hope is that, people will make it to the end and I think that’s a pretty ambitious hope in this day and age when attention spans are so fragmented.”

OCVA comes out at the perfect time, when many riders are plotting their late spring and summer bike adventures. Francesconi says his film is a “call to be on your bike in in nature” and if possible to, “ride there and see what it feels like to look at everything before the trailhead rather than just driving to the edge of the wilderness and get out of the car and walk into it.”

“I feel like [riding to the trailhead] is the thing that gives you the respect from A-to-B and also gives you the respect for the land. That’s what I’ve learned being out of the car.”

You can watch OCVA in the player below or on YouTube or Vimeo.