79pmooney

I just thought of a loose parallel to the idea of having planned an entirely different route as well. Germany in WW2. The European and North African fronts are faring not so well. Let's take on Russia.

Cycle Oregon would have to step up its paid staff just to do it. (I believe it has currently 4 paid staff members.) Remember, Cycle Oregon isn't #1 about the bike ride, it is about the welfare of the communities of rural Oregon. The $500 we don't get back will go, as planned, into the funding for those efforts.

I "did" Cycle Oregon in 2011 as a fully paid up rider but without my bike because I had two-week-old broken ribs and collarbone. Traveled with camp volunteers, the bike detail crew and others instead. Showered most nights late (so as not to deprive riders of that oh-so-wonderful post ride shower, often at the same time as the lead shower truck drive. He had been doing it for 20 years and loved it. I got to hear a lot of stories of the challenges of the big-rig drivers doing their "dances" with all the other trucks in very tight, previously unseen places. (This despite a map of the grounds and layout being given to all the various crews that work CO.)

That experience also brought me closer to the CO organizers than most riders ever get. Not because I was now "on the inside" but because they know me as someone who loves CO for what it is; who has seen more than the riding, the towns and the music and beers after. I've seen the incredible transformation that happens in two hours between 10am and noon when the first riders show up. At 10am, CO is bare fields, three huge tents set up but empty underneath, a bare, spare plywood stage for the music and a packed "parking lot" of semi-trailers. Two hours later it is a working small city. The "dance" in between is incredible to watch. It is like watching ants. People everywhere. Things happening everywhere. And it works because thay all know (well not everybody, but most of each crew) what they have to do AND all the other things that have to happen and what order they need to happen in for it all to work. "This truck needs to be here now to unload this, but in 15 minutes, we need to set this up where the truck is now. That truck has to stand off or this truck will not be able to get out." And so on and so on.

To ask the four paid folk and the countless volunteers to plan all this out and do all the ground work twice, knowing only one was going to get used? Likewise asking twice the favors of bureaucracies to get access to off-limits trails, use of school grounds for campsites, permits, work with locals to plan around home and away football games (both matter, we sleep on their field and the HS football teams are the primary source of labor to load and unload the baggage trucks. Their "perk" is tips from us riders for helping us move our 60+ pound bags to and from out tent sites. Those tips go to the cause of that team/school's choice. Better equipment. Improvements to facilities, etc.)

I wonder if part of Cycle Oregon's future mission should be touring some of the burned areas to keep in focus the consequences of our actions as human beings to our environment. That is after all a real part of the reason for Cycle Oregon's existence. Maybe talking about how fire, that natural part of the cycle of life for forests and grasslands (lighting and in the past 10,000 years perhaps, set intentionally by the native Americans) has become so destructive in the past half century when it has been happening for millions of years.

Ben