Dan Shryock has now lived in Oregon for more than 30 years, but it wasn’t until 2010 at age 56 that he hopped onto a road bike for the first time and began to see the state in ways he’d never imagined.
As a lifelong journalist, Shryock commuted almost daily for over 10 miles down a country road, Highway 221 between his home in West Salem and Hopewell, where the distractions of deadlines and to-dos outcompeted the landscape whizzing by. On a bike at 10 mph, however that same landscape could be observed as something rich and wonderful. The earthy funk of freshly tilled fields filled his nostrils. His gaze lingered on the scratchy woodgrain of a weathered barn he had never noticed. There were buttercups and puffball clouds and silver sunbeams on shimmering hills.
“Everything opened up to me,” he said in a recent phone interview. “There’s so much to see if you just slow down.”
That very first road-bike ride proved to be so pivotal that Shryock, now in his 70s, would eventually embark on a cycling quest that has given him a renewed purpose as an author. Oregon has 18 scenic bikeways. He would ride 17 of them — 16 of them in a single year — and write a book about it. Here’s how he followed his passion across the state.
Oregon’s Scenic Bikeways — a First in the Nation
Scenic bikeways weren’t a thing in the United States at all until 2010. About the same time Shryock started cycling, Oregon became the first state in the nation to designate cycling routes that showcased its unique landscapes and sites.
That year, under the umbrella of Oregon State Parks, the Willamette Valley Scenic Bikeway was born, a 135-mile one-way route that rolled through Salem, Albany and Brownsville, and across the fertile and gorgeous bottomlands of Oregon’s celebrated winegrowing region.
Other routes followed. The family-friendly Covered Bridges Scenic Bikeway, a 35-mile romp near Cottage Grove, takes riders past six covered bridges, each extremely photogenic, with options for shorter rides. Near Prineville, the Crooked River Canyon Scenic Bikeway shoots along the sun-fired rimrock walls that line one of Central Oregon’s most beautiful rivers. The Wild Rivers Coast Scenic Bikeway meanders for 61 miles past colorful cranberry bogs and the ragged basalt sea stacks that help make the Southern Oregon Coast one of the most spectacular stretches of oceanfront in the nation. For each ride, cyclists can find easy-to-follow maps, cue sheets and GPS tracks online that you can download to a smartphone.
It took years for Shryock to get serious about his quest as he slowly transitioned from being a runner to a bike rider. The adventure started in earnest around 2021, when he took a walk with his wife and announced he’d decided to get a group of friends together to join him on the scenic-bikeway adventure.
Some rides, like the challenging McKenzie Pass Scenic Bikeway, could be done in a single challenging day, with 38 miles of riding but more than 2,000 feet of climbing. Others, like the Painted Hills Scenic Bikeway, would require multiple days to cover the 161 miles with a whopping 12,864 feet of climbing. On that route, his group — deemed the Crash Test Dummies — would take turns driving a support vehicle.
“I didn’t know what I’d find or what the core message of the book would be, but I knew if we just did it, all of that would fall into place,” he says. In the end, “Cycling Across Oregon: Stories, Surprises & Revelations Along the State’s Scenic Bikeways,” which Shryock self-published in March 2024, isn’t really about cycling at all, he says. Rather, it’s about “discovering aspects of the state for yourself that people often don’t know are there.”
Adventure Awaits on Two Wheels
The allure of seeing your home state in new, inspiring ways kept Shryock motivated as the miles ticked by, the calories burned off and the list of routes to do dwindled. The green lushness of Elk River Road near Port Orford in spring wowed his senses. He faced 25 mph winds out at Cape Blanco. At each turn, he felt that seemingly ordinary roads that would be ho-hum experiences at best in a car offered extraordinary experiences from the seat of a saddle.
Shryock’s adventures in Oregon’s John Day country, which hosts two scenic bikeways, included a healthy dose of fun and some challenges. One ride, the Old West Scenic Bikeway route, runs for 174 miles past the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness, an expanse of alpine peaks and lakes that form the headwaters of the John Day River, the longest undammed river in the West. It also took him to the Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site, an old trading post run by 19th-century Chinese immigrants who one day boarded up the shop and left it as is, where it sat undisturbed for decades to become a time capsule to the past.
“If you haven’t been there, you have to see it,” Shryock says.
The other route, the Painted Hills Scenic Bikeway, was another story. That route, which state park officials call “extreme,” connects communities like Fossil, Spray and Mitchell on a 161-mile run. Out there, among the high-desert sage, the sun can be relentless.
On the day the Dummies tackled that route, they’d stayed in Mitchell at the Spoke’n Hostel, a bike-friendly hostel on the TransAmerica cycling trail. “Love that place,” Shryock says. They drove to the Clarno Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds, a rugged and dramatic area with an extraordinary number of fossils, and began their ride back toward Mitchell. It was 90 degrees or warmer, so hot that air bubbles trapped in the asphalt began to pop as he rode over them — a good reminder to consider leaving early. “I heard this ‘pop-pop-pop’ and thought I was getting a flat,” he says.
Riding Through Time on the Trails of Ancient People
Along the way, Shryock found all manner of other marvels that made the trip better than the sum of its parts.
Near Baker City on the Grande Tour Scenic Bikeway — a 134-mile figure-eight loop through the soaring matrix of the Elkhorn Range, the Blue Mountains and the Wallowa Mountains — Shryock visited one of his favorite places: Pondosa. It’s a ghost town that once had 500 people, where Shryock visited with a centenarian, Bob Bennett, and his family who maintain the historic timber town site.
At the Historic Union Hotel in Union, they chatted with the owner and ate delicious sandwiches. Near Maupin, after riding the Sherar’s Falls Scenic Bikeway, a 33-mile loop that rolls past the traditional salmon-fishing sites for the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Dummies got a room for the night and kicked back at the Imperial River Company, where they watched the boils and swirls of the Deschutes River out front.
Throughout the adventure, Shryock thought time and time again about how most of the roads he was following were at some point footpaths for people who’d come long before him. That came into stark relief after he rode the Blue Mountain Century Scenic Bikeway, another “extreme” ride that covers 108 miles and 8,000 feet of climbing near Heppner and Ukiah. In Pendleton Shryock met Bobbie Conner, a Confederated Tribes of Umatilla member and the director of Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, a tribally owned museum on the Umatilla Reservation.
From the beginning, Shryock felt it important to remember that “Oregon” is a relatively new place. “Bobbie told me, when I was riding out there, that I was probably experiencing the land as close as possible to how her ancestors experienced it — the same routes, the same winds, the same undulations of the land,” Shryock says. “I get goosebumps just thinking about that.”
