The final Cycle Oregon Classic rolls through Oregon this week

A chorus of phone alarms sounded at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday morning in a temporary village at Timber Linn Park in Albany. Cyclists began to stir inside their tents, reaching for headlamps and hats, some already pulling on Lycra tights and jerseys, most stopping by the port-a-potties on the way to a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and potatoes.

It’s the first morning of the final Cycle Oregon Classic ride, a seven-day bike tour that has happened somewhere in Oregon almost every year since 1988. The ride this year is taking cyclists between 350 and 452 miles, in a loop that began in Albany on Sunday, going through wine country, to the coast, and back to Albany next Saturday.

Cycle Oregon began as a germ of an idea in a letter to The Oregonian from Ashland innkeeper Jim Beaver. Beaver thought a weeklong ride could infuse rural towns with money, and columnist Jonathan Nicholas, who received the letter, turned the idea into reality.

(The Oregonian is a sponsor of Cycle Oregon and they let us ride along for free this year.)

“They figured a couple hundred people would show up,” Cycle Oregon director Steve Schulz told the crowd assembled in Albany Saturday night from a stage set up in the park, when he recounted the tale of the first ride, “and a thousand people showed up.”

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That ride, he said, from the steps of the capitol in Salem to Brookings, didn’t go very smoothly. For one thing, there were no bathrooms or organized food.

“We’ve seen a lot of things change,” Schulz said.

Nicholas stopped running the Cycle Oregon stage show in 2013, and other changes were apparent in Albany on Saturday night, too, as riders gathered for a meal the night before the race began. The ubiquitous and well-maintained port-a-potties. The catered meals. The beer garden.

But what hasn’t changed, Schulz said, is the sense of community, among the cyclists and also within the towns the ride visits.

Every year, each town the ride camps in is a big part of the event, offering space and volunteers and, in turn, getting grants from Cycle Oregon.

Reached by email while he was hiking in the Wallowas, Nicholas, now vice president of strategic communications for Moda Health said, “We had a remarkable 30-year run. People came from every state of the union, from Canada and France and England; from Germany, Australia and Japan. More than 50,000 riders in all.”

“And all of that success depended on the people of rural Oregon, on the warmth of their welcome and the generosity of their spirit,” he added. “At a time when so many in our state were committed to efforts to tear us asunder, Cycle Oregon created a space in which people could come together, share stories, sleep under the stars, marvel at the majesty of this remarkable place we all are so privileged to share and call home.”

Over the past 33 years, Schulz said, the organization has given away $2.7 million to Oregon communities.

According to event organizers, however, the 2023 ride will be the last “Classic,” the seven-day, some might say grueling, ride. Cycle Oregon will focus on gravel rides and smaller weekend and day-long events.

Many cyclists at the 2023 ride lamented the end of the Classic.

“I am hoping that they regroup after a few years and start doing the Classic ride again,” said Mike Broderick, 57, on the bus from the Portland Airport to Albany. Broderick, from Baltimore, has come to Oregon for six Cycle Oregons, beginning in 1999.

“The enjoyment of a week tour is that it is a week; it is a true vacation,” he said.

Flying to Portland for a weekend from the East Coast, Broderick said, just doesn’t make sense.

Broderick is one of many riders who spend multiple weeks in the summer on these week-long bike tours. Events like Ragbrai in Iowa and Ride the Rockies in Colorado take thousands of riders annually on tours of different states. And many people we spoke to thought Cycle Oregon was among the most well-organized of those rides.

But, organizers say, the model of a 1,000-plus-person, 7-day, highly organized and supported event no longer pencils out.

The number one factor, according to Cycle Oregon spokesperson Ryan Barrett, is production costs.

The now dependable wildfire season means that many mobile vendors that have supported Cycle Oregon in the past are going into rural communities to support firefighters in early September.

“We’re competing for that small pool of vendors,” Barrett said, “that’s really one of the biggest logistical challenges that we’ve had.”

This challenge was evidenced by the fact that the ride’s mobile showers this year are being provided by a company out of Minnesota. At dinner the night before the ride, the owners of the company that brings those showers in big trucks said all the more local companies were busy with fire season.

And, ridership is down. What used to be a guaranteed 2,000-person sell-out event, this year, a week before the event, had 1,000 riders signed up.

Why that ridership is down was a question I mulled over as I joined the ride Sunday morning.

Sunday was a perfect Willamette Valley day. As the sun rose, a rainbow hot air balloon lifted off in Albany, greeting riders as they rolled out on the well-marked route, through little towns, past fields with cows and horses and corn, the smells of mint and manure mingling.

The cyclists who make up the majority of the riders this year are older, white men. There are younger people, even a 10-year-old rode, and plenty of women, but you can’t miss the glaring demographics. I certainly couldn’t, as a string of men my dad’s age zoomed past me, saying, “On your left,” as they left me in the dust.

The fact that so many Boomers were putting me, a 40-year-old, to shame might be one indication of why Cycle Oregon has struggled to “build a bridge,” as Barrett put it, to the younger generations.

Training for a seven-day ride is a huge time commitment, demanding many hours a week on a bike. That’s the kind of time retirees have, not me, a working mom with a three-year-old. And that’s even before thinking about taking eight or nine days off to do the ride.

One set of demographic-defying riders who were also interested in this question was Seattle couple Susan Heller Evenson, 41, and Erik Evenson, 42.

“It’s hard to get the time off of work,” Heller Evenson suggested at a rest stop on Sunday, as a reason people between the ages of 20 and 50 seemed few and far between at Cycle Oregon.

“Childcare,” Evenson chimed in.

“Mountain biking, cyclocross, gravel cycling,” Heller Evenson added.

Even though they were in the minority, the couple was enjoying their time on the road.

“This is just the right amount of cush,” Heller Evenson said. “You don’t have to carry all your food, which is so nice.”

The couple did a lot of bike touring before their two kids were born, Heller Evenson said, and they wanted to have an active vacation. Now that their kids are 6 and 10, they felt a little more comfortable leaving them with grandparents for the week.

Heller Evenson and Evenson considered doing the Cycle Oregon route by themselves at a different time, but when they heard the 2023 ride would be the last one, they went for it.

Still, they were only able to go on the ride with the help of Heller Evenson’s parents who urged them to go and even helped them pay for it, as well as watching their kids for the week.

Parental support was a big factor also for this year’s youngest rider, 10-year-old Rohan Sastry, a fifth grader at Caitlin Gable, who is riding his second Cycle Oregon with his parents. His first was in 2022, when he was only 9.

“It was hard but fun,” he said, of his first ride, noting the hardest part was one big hill and the bugs.

And while it makes sense that a 10-year-old would be riding with his parents, all of the Millennials and Gen Z riders I spoke with either had the support or suggestion of or were riding with someone’s parent.

My interest in Cycle Oregon also comes from my parents, who did Cycle Oregon in 1993 (My dad also did another one a couple years later). I’ve always wanted to do it myself.

My mom describes the crowd that rode in 1993 as mainly young men in their 20s, 30s and 40s. Some of the same men, likely, who are riding now or encouraging their kids to ride.

But that trickle-down effect hasn’t been enough to sustain and grow the Classic ridership.

Most people I spoke with agree that younger people are being drawn more to gravel events, which take riders to gravel roads with fewer cars. The rides are also shorter, a few days instead of a whole week, making them more accessible to people with families and jobs. Cycle Oregon now hosts gravel rides and weekend rides and women-only road rides.

Those events should continue as the Classic ends.

As I rode through the rolling hills of the valley Sunday, I considered the fact that Millennials have often been blamed for ruining things that we’ve been unable to or delayed in doing because of economic pressure our parents didn’t feel. Dealing with college debt, coming of financial age during the Great Recession and the increased cost of everything has left us struggling to buy a house or start a family, much less find expendable income to focus on hobbies.

At the same time, the culture has shifted in ways that make it harder for people with kids to take a week away from them. Many men are much more actively involved with their children than their fathers were, attempting to take on a more equal share of parenthood, which means they have less time to train for or go on long bike tours all summer.

Millennials are also having kids later, which means when they might be financially capable of spending $1,500 to $2,000 for a week-long ride, and when their kids are old enough to be left for a week, Boomer grandparents might be too old to watch kids for that long. Paying for childcare for a week would be thousands more, if it was even available.

All of that is too bad really, because a fully supported ride like Cycle Oregon, along roads you might never travel otherwise, is an incredible way to see the state and connect with other people.

Instead of worrying about where to go, what I was going to eat or where the next water would be available, on Cycle Oregon on Sunday, all I had to do was ride and make friends.

And when, about six miles outside of Dayton, my tire started going flat and I stood in the gravel on the side of a road, tears welling up in my eyes, kicking myself for not bringing a handpump to get me to the next stop, a man named John Brooks rolled up on a motorcycle support vehicle and changed my tube for me while telling me about how he’s been designing the Cycle Oregon routes for years.

There is also a benefit, as director Schulz said on the night before the ride, in “bridging the divide” between “Lycra-clad city slickers” and local Oregon communities.

As we pulled into Lafayette, a few miles outside of Sunday’s final destination of Carlton, where wine tasting and showers awaited us, a few gathered locals rang bells and cheered us on.

How would people from Baltimore, Seattle, Boulder and Salt Lake City even know about Lafayette, a Yamhill County town of roughly 4,500? I was born in the Willamette Valley and I am not sure I knew about it before Sunday. But now I know it’s home to some friendly, enthusiastic people.

“I just love going through the small towns,” Kendall KIC said Saturday night, as a cover band played on the stage in the distance.

KIC, who legally changed her name so it is all capital letters, is 62 and currently riding her 19th Cycle Oregon.

“I’m disappointed that people don’t see the value in it,” KIC added, “because I just feel like it’s a wall of money that hits these communities that are desperate for it.”

Hopefully, the Cycle Oregon organization will figure out a way to keep bringing money and riders to rural places in the state and encourage younger adults to join in, too.

What exactly they will do, we’ll have to wait to find out. Cycle Oregon will announce next year’s plans in the coming months.

Shulz certainly sounded like this year’s Classic was more of a beginning than an ending on Saturday night when he told the crowd, before handing off the mic, “There’s some exciting things we’re going to do in the next decade.”

For now, the riders out there are less focused on 10 years in the future than on what is ahead of them this week: A couple hundred more beautiful miles along the roads of Oregon.

— Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052; lacker@oregonian.com; @lizzzyacker

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