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Banks-Vernonia Linear Park Information
- Easy/Moderate Ride 20+ miles round-trip.
- Good warm-up ride.
- Best suited for Mountain Bikes (wider tires)
 The
Banks-Vernonia Linear Park is becoming a better bike ride. During the past two
years, volunteers and the Oregon State Parks department paved a few sections
and filled in a couple of gaping holes. Heavy rains in the winter of 1995-96
washed out the trail near the 12- and 13-mile marks. The state fixed one washout
in the summer of 1996 and the other in February, again making whole one of the
easiest and safest 20-mile rides in the Portland area. The trail is almost completely
flat and mixes with car traffic only once. The newest paved sections make the
trail even easier.
A 3.3-mile section starts at the Manning trailhead and makes a line to Banks,
ending a half-mile before town. It's a good section for little cyclists. Another
newly paved section runs 1¸ miles from the Pongratz Road detour to an old trestle.
Then the pavement turns to dirt and gravel for seven miles. Park ranger Scott
Green said it would stay that way. He said the pavement has cut park use by
30 percent because many horseback riders don't want to giddyap on asphalt. The
pavement reappears at the seven-mile mark and continues into Vernonia. The unpaved
section is easy going for fat-tired bikes. A thin layer of gravel covers most
of the trail. The going gets rough at only one point: Cyclists make a steep
descent and climb at about the eight-mile mark when the trail bypasses a burnt-up
trestle and crosses Oregon 47. Traffic is sparse but fast.
More improvements to the trail are on the drawing board. The state is negotiating
with Burlington Northern railroad for the railbed that would complete the trail
into Banks. Green said he
hoped the final section could be acquired by next summer. He also is trying
to find the money to add a dramatic touch to the trail. He's looking for $50,000
to fix up an 85-foot-high trestle that riders would cross. He has applied for
grants ÷ so far, unsuccessfully. The funds would buy wood for planks and guard
rails to be installed by volunteers.
Unfortunately, Green can't draw up any plans to fix the trail's most aggravating
feature, the detour on Pongratz Road. After the Manning trailhead, cyclists
must ride the road for a mile to get back to the trail. The road is mostly gravel.
A farmer went to court and successfully kept the state from developing the one-mile
section of railbed on his property. Green doesn't know if that section will
ever become part of the trail. He said the state is reluctant to use condemnation
powers for the trail, partly because it doesn't want to offend property owners
and partly because it has no money to buy the land. But the missing link is
only one mile. The Banks-Vernonia trail offers 19 others to choose from. Stan
Shaw, a page designer at The Oregonian, writes about bike rides once a month.
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