Celebrations before the 2014 ride. It usually rolls around sundown.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

Oregon’s biggest pay-what-you-will group ride of the year is three days away. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

Portland’s World Naked Bike Ride will start rolling at 9 p.m. Saturday from Mt. Scott City Park, SE 74th Ave and Knight St., in what’s currently forecast to be a rain-free night after a warm day, with late-evening temperatures in the high 60s and a low of 54 degrees by early morning.

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I missed the World Naked Bike Ride this year so I’m hoping you can fill me in.

There are not many things that would keep me away from this ride. It’s not only one of the most fun and inspiring nights of the year for me personally, but the recap and photos I usually post are by far the most popular of the entire year (by a mile).

(Don’t feel sorry for me not being there, I was at another event where love, celebration and optimism filled the warm night sky — the wedding of your favorite bike journalist Michael Andersen to his wonderful partner Maureen Young!)

So… How’d it go?

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Barb Grover soon after her double
mastectomy last year.
(Photo: Barbara Hart)

Barb Grover doesn’t have breasts any more, and doesn’t mind who knows it.

As part of her cancer treatment, the Portland woman had a double mastectomy one year ago next week. On Saturday, to celebrate, she’ll be joining thousands of other people to ride through the streets of Portland with nothing on.

She’s invited other post-mastectomy women and their supporters to join her at whatever level of clothing they wish. She’s dubbed it “Critical Mastectomy.”

“Once the treatment is over, we go about our lives and look like we’re assuming a normal day to day,” Grover, 54, said in an interview Thursday. “And most of us have scars. That doesn’t get talked about a lot in public. We see Angelina Jolie and she looks like her old self again. But that’s not the path that a lot of women choose, or can choose. … This is what it really looks like, people; this is what it’s really like. It’s not awful. It’s just different. We just need to be a little more open about it.”

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Gearing up in Normandale Park in 2014.
(Photo by J. Maus/BikePortland)

Portland’s annual Pedalpalooza festival starts on Thursday and will wrap up June 27 with Oregon’s biggest pay-what-you-will bike ride of the year, which also happens to be the largest clothing-optional bike ride in the world.

The 2015 edition of Portland’s World Naked Bike Ride will begin gathering in Colonel Summers Park, at Southeast 17th Avenue and Taylor Street, at 8 p.m. The roll-out will start at 9 p.m. and the ride is so big it usually takes an hour or more before all of the participants are moving.

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(Photos by J. Maus/BikePortland)

Portland’s annual love affair with cyling sans clothing once again swept through the city tonight as thousands of people took part in the tenth World Naked Bike Ride (WNBR). [Read more…]

(Photo J. Maus/BikePortland)

1) It’s not about sex. The WNBR is about loving your body, loving low-car or car-free life, demonstrating the power of bikes in mass motion, metaphorically conveying the vulnerability of people on bikes, experiencing the city in a new way and loving the friends and new friends you’ll see before, during and after. And although all of those things are almost certainly good for your sex life, you’ll be surprised how much fun nudity (or near-nudity) is without sex.

2) Nobody cares that your body is not perfect. Nobody’s body is perfect, so for one night, everybody’s body gets to be perfect.

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The video created by Stay Wild Magazine and Alin Draguilin for this Saturday’s World Naked Bike Ride is terrific. It’s also slightly (though not extremely) unsafe for the workplace.

As for this year’s ride itself, here’s what you need to know:

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Pre-ride crowd on the Park Blocks in 2013.
(Photo by M.Andersen/BikePortland)

Oregon’s biggest pay-what-you-will bike ride of the year, which also happens to be the largest clothing-optional bike ride in the world, will start rolling June 7 at 8 p.m.

The 2014 edition of Portland’s World Naked Bike Ride will begin in a new location: Normandale Park on NE Halsey between 55th & 57th Avenues. It’s a few blocks northwest of the 60th Avenue Green/Red/Blue MAX stop.

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Photo by Alex Milan Tracy

The official count is in: Portland’s World Naked Bike Ride broke a record this year with an estimated 8,150 participants.

The last two years, ride organizers put the number of riders at 4,500 and 4,200 people respectively — so this is a substantial increase. The count was performed by volunteers who sat down tonight and watched video taken of the ride last Saturday. Ride organizers installed an overhead video camera on SW Jefferson just past the starting point of the route specifically to document the turnout (there has been a bit of controversy in the past about inaccurate counts, especially the inflated numbers that were originally reported for the 2010 edition).
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Something new this year: we’re using Storify, an embeddable social media aggregator, to round up some of our favorite social media chatter about Saturday’s naked ride — including a few from other WNBRS around the world.

Check below the fold for a selection of tweets, videos and photos from the event.

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