Cycling over Bear Camp Road

So, last Thursday I rode my bike from Gold Beach to Indian Mary Park, near Merlin, near Grants Pass Oregon.

This was not easy.

(You can see photos on my Photos page)

Edit to add – if you’re arriving at this article from an online search: Bear Camp Road is a one and a half lane wide paved forest service road between Agness, OR and Galice, OR. It follows a large ridge between these two towns. It reaches an elevation of nearly 4,800 feet and should not be traversed in the winter (though local people frequently travel part of the distance to get to snow or for work-related reasons). During the summer it recieves quite a bit of use from rafters and other people traveling between Gold Beach and Grants Pass.

I started at Gold Beach High School around 8:00 a.m. It was a beautiful morning, but quite windy. I looped around the Gold Beach airstrip, up to the highway, and out Jerry’s Flat Road toward Agness. This is the route used by the Ride the Rogue event in September, which I can HIGHLY recommend after doing this ride. This was my favorite part of the ride, beautiful and a very rideable road. It’s capped off near Agness with a long (and fun) descent to a great bridge. The pavement is great for riding, lots of patches but pretty smooth overall.

A couple miles after the bridge, I took a right turn on Bear Camp Road. Here the fun begins. It’s a 16-mile uphill from the river to the Bear Camp overlook at around 4,800 feet up in the Klamath Mountains. There are a lot of beautiful views but the miles tick by slowly. There are two overlooks: the Siskiyou overlook about 10 miles up the hill (near milepost 26; the mileposts are painted on the road and start at the eastern end) and the Bear Camp overlook 16 miles up the hill (at milepost 21). The road is windy and steep in places, with only a little relief from time to time. Pavement is good, with some cracks & patches but overall great for riding. There are a few very short gravel stretches, maybe a total of 1/4 mile on gravel over the entire road.

After a nice stop at the Bear Camp Overlook (where I ate some food in the car due to being bombed by gigantic flies) I took off for a 21-mile mostly-downhill ride to the Galice area. There’s a little uphill on this stretch but nothing too bad. After a while I passed out of the Siskiyou National Forest and the road goes to county maintenance, and the nice smooth pavement changes over to a kind of rough chip seal.

Most of the downhill was great, but the worst part was from milepost 8 to milepost 4 where the road basically drops straight down the side of a cliff (actually “straight” is a bad word, it’s really curvy). I’m not one to just coast down this kind of stuff at 50 mph, especially with the chip seal, so I was leaning on the brakes for a while. After milepost 4 things get much better.

I hear talk of a “shoe tree” but didn’t see it.

I was pretty spent at the bottom of the hill but wanted to ride along the Rogue River for a while again. It was hot enough, and I was sore enough, that we decided to call it good at Indian Mary Park.

Total mileage: 72

One more time: See some pics! Click the “Photo Gallery” link at left.