The author and legend himself, Mr. Wicknasty.

This whole parched nightmare began nine years after l swore off spandex and abandoned any pretense of 'racing.' So it went as I made the high speed run from Bend toward the Bear Springs Trap this past weekend. What an absurd title for a gathering of pure, demented Oregon bicycle racing degeneracy.

l'd done this race circuit before. I was a trembling seventeen year old idiot then. My mother, God rest her soul, was always my biggest supporter. She spent years driving me to bike races all over the state of Oregon in a battered blue Dodge Caravan. She sacrificed all of her spare time to my strange and selfish endeavors. She inevitably gave up her Mother's Days like this one to sit in the dirt and watch me suffer.

On one such day at Bear Springs, after she had boiled pasta for me on an old Coleman stove while I hovered nearby paralyzed with pre-race anxiety, I suffered a mid race flat tire. The sickening PFFFFT happened right at the start and finish line of lap one. It was followed by the blinding terror of losing second place. I fixed that flat lickety split, grabbed some snacks from mom, and rampaged off for the second lap. The next two hours were pure agony. It was a total chemical breakdown fueled by teenage delusion. The tank was empty and the sun had boiled the last shreds of sanity right out of my helmet. But the delusion held and so did my skinny legs. I took second place to another teenage phenom named Jeremy Vanschonhoven.

Jeremy was very fast. My mother was very patient. I was very, very tired.

This race, this "Trap," is not just "hard." That is the sterilized language of middle management and people who wax their chains in laboratory settings. Bear Springs is a savage 28-mile Monument. It is what happens when you strip the last vestiges of civilization away and demand that a grown man pilot a fragile machine through a screaming vortex of trees and rocks and anguish, haunted by younger versions of himself.

In this hyper-televised era where "mountain biking" means 17 gentle laps around a plastic track engineered for maximum screen-time revenue, the Bear Springs Trap remains a truthful and beautiful anomaly. It is a single monstrous loop of barely there singletrack and perfect dirt. Along for the ride is the constant heads up paranoia that demands every available neuron remain firing. If they don't, you could end up a smear of blood and shattered carbon fiber against an ancient Douglas Fir. Or you might end up off-course climbing an extra 1000' for your inattention.

Finish line fist bumps with half of the course engineering team, Erik “Caveman” Tonkin.

The night before this year's race we camped out at Clear Creek Campground. The place reeked of woodsmoke and Erik Tonkin's dirty chamois and positively vibrated with nervous excited energy. It was a symphony of anticipation and nostalgic shit talking. The whole circus was coiled tight and full of old friends, new frenemies and the inevitable creeping anxiety that only a start line can deliver. Everyone was pretending they weren't about to suffer.

The race itself, the long, cruel, intimate loop binding us together in a mutual pact of suffering, lived up to the hype. Between careening down slopes of jagged shale or clawing for purchase in virgin loam, I felt the truth in the effort of Petr's meticulous chainsaw work as he "prepared" this terrain for us. The fact that our tires were the first to touch that dirt after the snow melted is nothing short of miraculous.

And the battle for the finish? Christ, what a lineup.

Williams, Pennington, Babcock, Means, Fahringer, Meyers, Tonkin. A terrifying assembly of OBRA assassins, aging lions and young wolves alike. My ambition was a simple and desperate prayer. I wanted to cling to the pack and see how long the chemical friction of ATP in my legs could hold up.

After two hours of ferocious velocity and sweat, choking down whatever God-forsaken substance was seeping out of my water bottles, a far cry from the lukewarm Gatorade and hand-cut orange slices my mother used to press into my muddy palms, I looked up and realized the terrible beautiful truth.

I WAS ALONE OFF THE FRONT.

You can't retreat from that.

You can only channel your inner screaming addict and step on the gas and ride the manic wave home. To claim a victory when I am supposed to be through with all this racing business is disorienting. To shove a wrench into the perfectly tuned machinery of my friends and rivals from two decades of this pointless marvelous struggle?

That tastes like pure glory.

Petr puts in a lot of heavy lifting to open these trails for the race every year!

It was a beautiful victory but I have to tell you the real secret. Standing there with my lungs on fire and my brain turned to ash, shivering in the same spandex suit I'd sworn off a decade ago, the podium felt like an afterthought. I wasn't looking for a trophy or glory. I was looking for an old blue Dodge Caravan. I was looking for a woman who sat in the Oregon dust for twenty years just to watch her son fail, succeed, and eventually, find his way home.

That's the real Trap: you go out there to beat the clock, but you end up finding the true spirit of the people who loved you before you even knew how to pedal.

We act like we hate the suffering, but in truth, we are addicted to the purity of it.

This one was for my mom.

So now, our objective is simple. We MUST MAKE THE BEAR SPRINGS TRAP GREAT AGAIN. We need 150 beautiful, wretched souls on course next year. I guarantee you this, you pathetic truth seekers: If you drag your scared carcass out for the full filthy weekend, it will be the most profoundly irresponsible and exhilarating fun you can have in the whole goddamn state of Oregon.

A manic salute to Mr. Tonkin and the lunacy of the Sellwood Cycles Crew. An extra special shout out goes to the chainsaw saint Petr for orchestrating the single best weekend of mountain biking in America, hands down.

See you out there next year.

-Barry Wicks

THE GREAT BEAR HUNT: Notes on Adrenaline, Metabolic Meltdown, and the Soulful Redemption of a Bicycle Race