Mt. Bachelor's Bike Park Is Open Despite Walls of Snow—Conditions Report

Originally posted on Powder | By Izzy Lidsky | Last updated Jun 27, 2025 5:32 PM ET

Mt. Bachelor's downhill bike park opened for the season on Thursday, June 26, 2025, and if you're familiar with how big of a bike town Bend, Oregon is, you know this is huge for the program.

A couple buds and I headed up to ride opening day on Thursday afternoon. From Century Drive, the mountain still looks vaguely skiable, and we joked how wild it was that we were going to ride bikes. The Mountain Ops teams at Bachelor has been hard at work digging the bike trails out from the more than 400" of snow that the mountain got this past winter.

Riding up Pine Marten, you could see faint traces of ski tracks in snow from where folks had been touring after the resort closed in April. While volcano corn skiing seemed mildly enticing, seeing how patchy and rocky the snow had become quickly ended that train of thought.

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Bend is known in part for having some of the sandiest PNW riding around. Unlike the tacky dirt and loam in places like Seattle and Bellingham, it takes a lot of moisture to wet our dirt down. Given how much snow had just been removed, we were hopeful that we'd get some tacky dirt.

Just like early season skiing, early season biking can be a bit...variable. We found excellent dirt and features on Lava Flow, Cone Run, Lower Rattlesnake, and Blade Runner. It was indescribably good to be back riding lifts to mountain bike.

We also found some of Bachelor's classic sandy corners, lava rock baby heads, and a few snow-melt puddles, but considering how much snow is still up there, it was awesome that mountain ops even got the bike park open this early. We all know trails can take a little time to smooth out each year.

A good portion of the more than 500 miles of singletrack around the Bend area are a bit more cross-country focused, so Mt. Bachelor's bike park is a welcome change with lift-accessed, gravity fueled volcano riding.

Additionally, Mt. Bachelor changed their policy this year to allow Class-1 pedal-assist e-bikes on the mountain's downhill trails. The mountain's policy change comes in an effort to make the bike park more accessible to a broader range of riders.

The mountain also welcomes the use of adaptive e-bikes on its downhill trails. E-bikes have been a controversial topic on Bend trails, but Mt. Bachelor allowing them is a fantastic step in the right direction for making mountain biking more accessible.

This article first appeared on Powder and was syndicated with permission.

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