An Ode to the Oregon Cascades Volcanic Arc (Video)

With additional photos by Abe Alkhamees, Tom Jeane, and Josh Liberles

Editor’s Note: The Oregon Cascades Volcanic Arc (OCVA) is a route, ride, statement, and musical score edited and brought together by Ryan Francesconi. Ridden and filmed by Ryan and friend David Wilcox in the late autumn of 2022, the journey was confronted by active wildfires and seasonal change as they rode up the spine of the Central Cascades. Their goal was to capture the fragility and transience of the Oregon landscape as it has been forced to adapt to changes in climate, fire, and ongoing resource extraction. Ryan wanted to see what was left and remember what was. Watch the beautiful film that blends all of this below, followed by a written version with a photoset from the ride. Be sure to check back tomorrow for a complete route guide for the OCVA.

“In a world that’s addicted to speed, deliberately slowing down is often misunderstood.”

How fast can you move until discovery is lost? How much slower do we need to travel to really see? How do we slow down but still arrive? And if not rediscover what is missing, at least be aware of what was lost?

Traveling by train changes your relationship to time by requiring you to let go of control. This is at odds with the abrasive ego of transportation entitlement in the US. Consequently, train travel is deprioritized by freight, very slow, and largely unavailable. Our ride was designed with the train in mind, bringing us to the start from opposite directions. In a world that’s addicted to speed, deliberately slowing down is often misunderstood. Our transportation network has largely eliminated both ebb and flow and personal responsibility from travel. Convenience became commodified over experience. So much has been sacrificed for it. People’s eyes face forward, exhaust retreating behind them into the distance.

Leave no trace principles are only mentioned in the context of recreation. And at best, it means leaving them somewhere else than you are making them. We live in a nest of contradictions. To navigate this with integrity, which should we accept and which should we resist? How do we travel as a part of the earth? In a lighter way. Not trampling, destroying or polluting?

• 
• 
• 

• 
• 

Oregon is a beautiful place—but with many wounds.

As a route, the OCVA follows the volcanic peaks as signposts and flows through the Oregon Cascades. The line is diverse and compelling but also practical and bike-able. When I first created this route in 2019, we rode the 400 miles quickly, over two days. This time, I wanted to slow down and see what I had overlooked and allow for space to pause. Filming the ride was more of an excuse to look deeper at where we were and what we were seeing. I didn’t have a strong sense of if I would ever look at the footage again or if that even mattered. The ride turned out to be harder than anticipated – for a number of reasons.

Long-distance cycling can teach you many things. You exist in peaks and valleys, not in a flatline. Your speed is proportional to the slope, and you develop an awareness of how topography changes over time. You learn to respect the mountains and how the clouds gather against them. Watersheds flowing to the sea, then return again as rain and snow.

Your relationship with time changes. Day becomes night and day again. You’re a participant in that cycle. You accept the darkness and are reborn in the morning. Boundaries loosen, become pliable. You push against them, eventually realizing that they aren’t really there. You develop resilience or you fail. We tend not to fully appreciate the things that come easily.

• 
• 

The Windigo

The fire season was persistent this year, and the original route went straight into it. Winter was closing in but still obscured by the smoke. The rain was coming but hadn’t arrived. We needed a new variation, and headed east to avoid the fire. We crossed the Cascade passes three times over five days, and each was an ascent into winter and a descent into autumn. On each crossing, the door closed behind us. It was difficult.

When you are pushing yourself with challenging ideas, it’s wise to surround yourself with those you trust. There are a few aspects to this. To be prepared and physically capable is necessary, but more important is a mental stability to support the body during the questions. Friends can help support you during self-doubt, when you’re at the bottom, wondering how you’re going to continue. Being alone is much harder. And more dangerous. For safety, if you can take only one thing with you into the wilderness, I recommend that be a friend.

• 
• 

I create routes as a means to quietly guide myself and others through landscapes. The suspense of the reveal, the struggle, the release, the reward. The composition is the process of limitation. The route, the score. On bikes, we’re both the performers and the audience. When successful, the experience conveys meaning. It’s intuitive and quantifiable but not easily defined. But in order for this to have power, the land must still be strong. The raw materials are still raw. For myself, creating overlapping routes has made cumulative connections and flows. It is a map that is personal to me but also one that I can easily share. I create music for similar reasons. To share the resonance. To allow the space between thoughts to breathe, and if nothing more, have that be enough. The Northwest is an incredibly rich palette to draw from.

There’s a misconception that nature is something different from us. That allows us to continually damage it. Damage is accepted as an inevitable sign of civilization, but if you look deeper, there’s something wrong. The rate of degradation has long outpaced the repair. Nature is strong. But everything has a breaking point. Should any amount of damage be acceptable?

The trail lets the land dictate the line rather than roads which dictate the obstructions. We respect what was here before us, not force it into what we think it should be. The faster the travel, the straighter the line. These lines aren’t straight; the ground isn’t flat. We travel slow. But there is a flow to the movement that is lacking in our gridlocked, parceled world.

The unpaved world is closer to a sense of truth about where we are and where we came from. The structures we build on top are fragile and temporary. Some of those are metaphors, but they’re seen as facts. The truth is still underneath what has been paved, not very far down. We’ve been led down a road that is narrowing. I don’t know that we can turn back, but we can choose to pause or leave the road entirely. In some cases, the trails are still there.

I think much of our underlying anxiety is from our disconnection to the ground. Blocked by layers in between. How can we ground ourselves, move in alignment with the land, not force the land to align to us?

• 
• 

• 
• 

We could live a life of silence, punctuated by sound rather than the constant drone of noise. States of mind reflect the state of the world, the noise of society has been long normalized.

It wasn’t always this way.

“For safety, if you can only take one thing with you into the wilderness, I recommend it be a friend.”

Machines and engines of industry disrupt ecosystems and deafen us to their pollution. Contaminants are added faster than they can be dispersed. It’s the same with us. Our bodies can process the toxins from it until the system is overrun. Then disease sets in. We can become used to anything, even self-destruction. Rather than try to be quieter, we’re becoming louder. Talking over each other as populations expand, removing mufflers to compensate for not being heard. We aren’t listening. Complete silence is as rare as complete darkness.

We pollute with light and sound to shield ourselves from difficult truths. If the byproduct of a society is pollution, how can that society be correct in its assumptions? The rivers are dammed. There is stagnancy in the flow. We can bathe in the Silent Pool, remind ourselves of what was, and perhaps could be again. We can look up at the night while resting in the water, stars reflecting on the pool.

But even then, it wants to remind us.

Planes cross the sky. Satellites above the planes. But we can think of the Space above the satellites. We need the flow to be freed. Washed with white noise, louder than the engines. The Spring is becoming silent, but we can’t hear the change. Why, when there is silence, do we only allot a moment for it?

• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Santiam

Westward, the course of empire takes its way.

We’re on the old road, which led to the east, but we ride to the west. This was originally a native trail, then a military road, then wagons paid a toll to cross it. The alignment was normalized and became Route 20 in 1939. It’s still the longest road in the United States, stretching from Boston to Newport, Oregon. Scraps of the original are still here. And it’s still one of the only crossings.

We’re riding against history, wading against the tide. Against the myths and allegories that led to the deforestation and compromised lands we’re traversing. Stolen from the Santiam, all that’s left is the name. It’s a haunted place, as is most of Oregon.

This land is green, not red, white, and blue.

Commencement, Arcadian, Consummation, Destruction, Desolation.

How can we right the wrongs when there is no accountability? Crimes against the wild continue to persist. We can consider what it means to return what we have taken. To rewild. To let go of attempting to control the uncontrollable. Attempt to participate in the cycles of nature rather than wage war against them.

Landscape connectivity. Topology. Continuous Deformation. Stretching. Twisting. Bending. Arcs. Lines. Links. Directed tree. Oriented tree. Polytree. Acyclic graphs. Forest complexity. Habitat quality. Light and water. Nutrient cycling. Carbon cycle. Hydrologic cycle. Recycle. Lifecycle.

Crossing the Cascades remains a challenge, even today.

We’re back on course, on the western slope. The trees have changed. The ground is soft, the air – damp. The fires are behind us. The snow is above us. We’re winding the seasons backward now. Autumn comes after winter when you descend from the mountains. After days of sand, gray and white, a return to the earth, green and gold, gives weight that resilience isn’t just a synonym for hope. Nature is strong, and not all of it is broken.

We ride the peaks and valleys. Our speed reflects the slope. We understand how topography changes over time. We respect the mountains and how the clouds gather against them. Watersheds flow to the sea, then return again as rain and snow. Grounded in groundwater. The springs flow from cracks in the bedrock. Preserved beneath us. Preserved above us. These springs fell as rain years ago. It’s taken for granted that out of sight, they will be continually replenished. We tend not to fully appreciate things that come easily.

• 
• 
• 

The central Cascade volcanic arc. Covariation of topography and hydrology. Water circulates deep in the basalt. A rich well to draw from. At the top of the range, sourcing all the rivers. The springs flow outward. The watershed flows to the sea.

How fast can you move until the discovery is lost? How much slower do we need to travel to really see? How do we slow down but still arrive? And if not rediscover what is missing, at least be aware of what was lost?

“We’re riding against history, wading against the tide. Against the myths and allegories which led to the deforestation and compromised lands we’re traversing.”

Slowness is a signpost. It’s a reminder for cultivating patience. It leaves you space to observe rather than just react. It’s not a given that these rides, this music, can be recreated again. When you’re out there, it’s for then, for now.

The purpose of this portrait is to document some of the fragility in this particular landscape. We surround ourselves with walls that we’ve created, and when they burn, we’re left exposed. When I realized there are places that I loved that are now gone, I wanted to look closer at the ones that remain. And add a marker and reminder for the ones we have lost.

Dedicated to the fallen trees and the wild spaces between.

Further Reading

Make sure to dig into these related articles for more info...