Border to Border on Orogenesis: Part I, Washington
Who was that chasing Kurt Last year? Meet Jacob Ashton. Jacob has been touring by bicycle nearly nonstop for many years now. In the summer of 2025 he rode Orogenesis trailing Kurt Refsnider by a few weeks. Here are his stories from Washington.
I don't remember when I first heard of Orogenesis but the allure of a long distance singletrack route was undeniable. Having ridden the Tour Divide in 2022, it would also offer far more new-to-me terrain than the Continental Divide Trail and that was one of my primary motivations to do it. 2025 was the year of singletrack touring for me, I hadn't done any long singletrack tours before that. After racing Doom in April, I started the Arizona Trail two weeks later. It was brutal, to say the least, and I immediately fell in love with backcountry singletrack touring. Endless vistas of mountains and deserts, few worries about traffic or finding a spot to wild camp for the night, it was special in a way that's becoming increasingly difficult to find in a developed world. For all the shortcomings of being from the US, there is something to be said for the amount of outdoor access. I've had the opportunity to travel the world on a bicycle over much of the last 10 years and I’ve found very few trails like that in other countries, few places can even come close.
My ride on Orogenesis started in the worst way possible, flying with my bike. Luckily for me, that was one of the worst incidents of my entire ride and it wasn't even that bad, my bike arrived when I did without any damage. I rebuilt my bike at the baggage claim and rode from the airport in Spokane, Washington to the start of the trail over the course of a few days. My southbound ride on Orogenesis from the Canadian border began on the sunny afternoon of August 20, 2025. A new way on old ground was correct, almost nobody I talked to had heard of the route so I started calling it the mountain bike version of the Pacific Crest Trail which felt pretty accurate. My first half day on the route took me into Cascade Mountains, mostly on dirt roads, since I wasn't pushing the pace enough to get to the singletrack right away.
My first full day on Orogenesis felt like a kick in the teeth, every hill was steep, the hike a bikes seemed endless at times as I pushed up over the top of mountains to descend on rowdy moto trails, reclaimed goat paths, and the occasional hiking trail into the next valley before doing it again and again. I accumulated over 8,000 feet of climbing in the 28 miles that made up that first day and at least half that much in descending. The best part of it was that there was no one else around. It felt like I had the entire trail to myself; which wasn't far from the truth. Kurt Refsnider, the first person to finish Orogenesis in one go, was a few weeks ahead of me at that point.
Almost every day on the trail was challenging in a way that I hadn't experienced before while touring internationally. It didn't take long before days without much hike-a-bike almost felt like rest days. Not seeing another human for 2 or 3 days at a time became my new normal and laying in my tent to rest for at least 12 hours a day was the only way I could find the energy to get up and do it again the next day. Stopping for lunch at a remote alpine lake and being the only person around began to be an expectation rather than a hope. Cycling in some countries, it felt like it was impossible to stop for a snack without people appearing out of seemingly nowhere to see what the crazy foreigner with the bike was doing. With how remote the route was, wild camping was almost as easy as it's possible for it to be, all I had to do was find a flat spot off the trail to set up my tent and I didn't have to worry about being discovered and told to move on.
At some point, the days began to blur together. I couldn't afford the luxury of thinking about how many more thousands of miles it would take to get to the border of Mexico when I could barely make it through one day at a time. Incidents stand out: I smashed my derailleur into a rogue stick on the first day and I had to replace it by riding off route into Wenatchee. Luckily, it was still rideable because it took me a week to get there. They also had pizza and cheap groceries in Wenatchee so it was almost a win-win. The mangled cage meant I had to buy a new chain at the same time as the extra twisting had worn it out prematurely. An unfortunate, low-speed crash farther down the trail broke one of my brake levers but I was able to replace it on the same day riding through Roslyn with the help of the folks at bike shop, Ride Roslyn.
It was easiest to not look too closely at where the route went, it got pretty silly at times. Several hours were spent pushing my bike to the top of Bald Mountain where I finally had a good view of Mount Rainier after it'd been obscured by smoke from wildfires every day before that. The descent back to the valley left me only 7 miles away from the turnoff to go up and it would have been a relatively flat paved road instead. Another day, I rode onto the slopes of Mount St Helens and got to witness the still very visible scars from the eruption over 40 years ago as I rode along the moonscape that makes up its slopes.
After most of three weeks on Orogenesis, I set up camp again at the end of another long day on and off the bike and realized that I'd cross into Oregon in the morning. The days might be long, but the weeks and months were shorter than ever.
Follow Jacob’s continuing adventures on Instagram @occasional_bikepacker and on Substack @JacobAshton1
