If you were to string every mountain bike trail surrounding Bend into one long lick of singletrack, how far do you think you could ride? To Crater Lake and back? To Portland? All the way to San Francisco?! Good guesses all but try again. With about 600 miles of trails, that one mega-route would run all the way to Seattle—and most of the way back to Bend. Even more mindboggling: The Central Oregon Trail Alliance—a nonprofit funded largely by mountain bikers like you—maintains almost every inch of those trails.

“The story of COTA is a story about volunteers,” says Eric D’Orvilliers, a volunteer crew leader and COTA board member. “The breadth of work they do is astounding.” 

Every year, a whopping 1,600 volunteers tend to the trail network that stretches from Sunriver in the south to Madras in the north. Collectively, they log 20,000+ volunteer hours—a decade’s worth of 9-to-5 work—in a single year. They repair drains that keep the trails dry and tighten berms and fix jumps. When a tree falls in the woods, a sawyer somewhere seems to hear it and will ride out on a bike with a chainsaw to remove it. “They’re amazing,” says Emmy Andrews, COTA’s executive director. “They do it so fast that no one hardly ever encounters a tree.” 

COTA has evolved a lot since its founding in 1992. Today, visitors and locals alike come out to help. The Women of COTA, a group within the group, do their share of shoveling but also work to make mountain biking more inclusive with “no drop” group rides, mentoring, and educational sessions on topics like bike maintenance.

Curious what all that trail work leads to? Bend’s downhill mountain biking scene showcases the high-speed fun made possible by these volunteers’ hard work.

A COTA membership costs $30 a year—about four pints of beer—and helps keep the saws sharp, the work organized, and you riding those fast flowy trails for as long as your legs and lungs can endure. Says Kate Eng, who founded Women of COTA with her friend Rene Warne: “If you’re going to ride the trails, don’t you think you can give back?” Here’s how to do that.

This piece is dedicated to Tom Lomax—a trail builder, COTA volunteer, and former operations lead at Mt. Bachelor whose work is woven into many, many miles of singletrack in Central Oregon. The trails we ride today were built with his passion and tenacity.