Kicking off the PNW road trip the right way! – Tech and flow at Tiger Mountain, WA

As you’re going to see in this video, Tiger Mountain is an absolutely amazing place to ride, sporting that special PNW feel of techy rock and roots, with some fast sections nested deep into the woods with oh so much loam. Its located only about half an hour east of downtown Seattle with easy access and good signange. It is worth noting that if you’re visiting you have to park in the lower lot as the upper parking lot requires a special pass.

If you’re watching this video wondering what route to take, I’ve included links at the bottom of the description with the route I’d recommend based on this experience and what we actually did. The difference is subtle and I’ll point it out later in the video. This route is good for an advanced rider without the need to be an expert. In general, we did two laps, one to hit OTG into NOTG which are single diamonds and a second one to hit Predator which is a double diamond.

We didn’t get to do lower OTG, but upper OTG is an amazing purpose built trail, its routed over every single obstacle they could find, but its still super hard packed as if it saw a lot of good usage. In contrast, NOTG seems completely natural, being a newer trail it feels a lot more like an unsactioned trail, which I personally really enjoyed.

Right after this trail is where I would recommend a route slightly different then what we took. Instead of following Joyride down to Legend, I’d recommend you jump into inside passage and down East Bound and Down, it’ll drop you much closer to the start for your second lap without missing out on much. Don’t get me wrong, Legend and Megafauna are both awesome trails, but they’ll dump you far out and the return is a super boring steep fire road.

These trails taught me quickly that double diamond in the PNW doesn’t mean the same as in other places I’ve ridden, the rocks and roots on these features made them high commitment high consequence, the fear of which was an issue I’d have to deal with for the whole trip.

In general, I’d consider Predator to be mostly a single diamond trail with some very hard commiting double diamond sections, but its completely OK if you can’t ride them as there are options or the ability to walk in all spots.

We all know how that goes, famous last words. The next obstacle was this chute which has very narrow space for the pedals with some roots that stuck out akwardly. While I decided not to do it in the end, I managed to get Phil and Gary, who we met during this ride as he had seen my channel before, killing it down this section. This is one of those spots where the GoPro effect seriously downplays how sketchy it is.

This is probably the fastest I’ve noped out of a feature and then regreted it. In hindsight, its incredibly well built and I should have given myself time to roll up a few times and see if I was up to it for real. Unfortunately, being the start of the trip, my caution meter was a bit higher than it should have been. There’s other stuff I didn’t get that I don’t really care about, but this, I hope to go back and do someday.

And so, we come to the end of this video, I want to thank Gary for guiding us down Predator, it made it really easy to know when to flow and when to slow down and look out for the crazy stuff. If you’re a local and you haven’t been here, do it, if you’re planning a trip to the area and you’re wondering where to ride, this is a must stop. I know this video turned out a bit longer than usual, but there was just so much awesome stuff! I hope you enjoyed the longer format, if you did or didn’t please let me know in the comments. I’ll see you for the next one where we’ll be riding Alpine in Oakridge for some high speed fun.

Tiger Mountain on Trailforks: https://www.trailforks.com/region/tiger-mountain/
Recommended Route: https://www.trailforks.com/ridelog/planner/view/72079/
What we did: https://www.trailforks.com/ridelog/view/7640059/

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