Scholastic mountain biking league is flourishing, despite few places to ride

Portland has become a hotbed of scholastic mountain biking — despite a dearth of easily accessible local trails to ride and train on. That was part of what I learned last night when I met up with the Portland Metro Composite Mountain Biking team for their weekly practice at Gateway Green Bike Park.

PMC MTB is made up of riders from middle and high schools throughout the city. They’re a part of Oregon Interscholastic Cycling League which is sanctioned by a group known as the National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA). Oregon’s program began in 2017 and has grown steadily ever since. They just had their first race of the season on Saturday and Team Director Duncan Parks was eager to congratulate the 50 or so riders and coaches who showed up for a weekly practice session last night.

“Make our circle nice and tight everybody, bring it in so we can hear,” Parks exclaimed as he shared remarks before practice. “I hope everyone is feeling stoked after the first race weekend,” he continued. “If you raced on Saturday, give yourself a pat on the back.”

Parks (in images above) and a crew of volunteer coaches (including a few who don’t have kids on the team and love riding and teaching so much they show up every week) deserve a pat on the back too. The team has swelled in recent years to 74 riders — with about one-third of them being females. “We’re really proud of that,” Parks shared in an interview after the riders fanned out across the park to different coaching stations where they worked handling, trail-riding, and other skills. “We really push getting enough girls together so we have a critical mass, because we’ve found that when girls have other girls to ride with, they stick with the sport and they really thrive.”

Roosevelt High School Senior Eliana Umberhandt is a living testament to that statement. She’s been on the team since 2019 (when she was in sixth grade) and can remember when she was one of just five girls on the entire squad. “I kind of suffered through the first two years, being kind of alone, and I didn’t really feel like I was getting the skills like everyone else was. And then when we got two new girls when I was in eighth grade, I decided they weren’t going to have to suffer like I did”

Umberhandt reached out to other women in the Portland bike racing community and began organizing all manner of group rides. “This past Monday,” she shared with me through a smile, “Some of the high school girls and I did a century together… it’s been really fun for me to see how this community of girls has evolved, from just me being the only girl at practices when I was 12, to me being almost 18 and seeing all these little sixth-grade girls — and they’re smiling and their parents are coming up to me and telling me how much their girls love this team.”

In addition to riding together, the team volunteers at trail-building work parties. Liam Danon was eager to tell me about his experience doing trail maintenance work at Rocky Point. “We can build the berms, mend the trail with a hose and rakes and stuff. It’s really fun!” When I asked why a kid his age seemed to like doing yard work in his free time, Danon replied, “It’s just fun. You get to be with your biking community and you can ride the trails later and say, ‘Hey, I built that!'”

Team Director Parks and his coaching staff have built something very special. But their growth has been limited by an issue that has plagued off-road cycling in Portland for decades: the lack of nearby trails to ride on.

“Training spots are a real challenge for us,” Parks said. Read trail riding opportunities are about an hour and-a-half drive from Portland. That means it’s impossible to train and practice on the type of terrain they compete on during the week. Instead, they make do with local park where they lay out cones and test the limits of their creativity trying to recreate natural obstacles. Gateway Green is great, but it offers just two miles of total singletrack.

“We urgently need more access to ride close-in for a weekday practice,” Parks continued. “Forest Park huge, but almost nothing is legal for bikes in terms of singletrack. Firelane 5 is great, but it’s like this long [holding fingers about 10 inches apart]… the riders are ready for something new.” Parks described opportunities to improve bike trail access at Forest Park, including a location in Northwest Industrial Area where Portland Parks recently built the park’s first dedicated parking lot and a new entry to Firelane 1. Unfortunately, Parks didn’t make any improvements to bike access and the current route offers only an extremely steep unpaved road climb. “We could build a great singletrack that would connect what is essentially an unused parking lot, to the whole heart of Forest Park, and we’ve got the riders to do it: This team put 300 [volunteer] hours of build time in last fall.”

17-year old senior Caleb Griffin said “there’s not much going on” in the way of bike trails near his home in southeast. His closest place to ride is Mt. Tabor. “It’s fun, but there nothing for mountain bikes only. Everything is over-ridden and over-populated, so it makes it kind of sketchy and unsafe for walkers and bikers.”

The success of this team and the joy expressed by its riders can’t be fully dampened by a lack of trails. Umberhandt and her teammates have made lemonade out of lemons and the energy and excitement around among the riders for the upcoming season was palpable.

“I’m definitely excited for this season, as it’s my last year on the team,” Umberhandt shared. “To see that this is the legacy I will be having on the team, where I started this community for everybody,” she said before trailing off in thought. Then she bubbled up and added, excitedly: “It’s made college applications really easy because I already have all this awesome material for my essays!”

— Learn more about the team at pmcmtb.org. View a short video of this story on YouTube.