Special Episode: Riding Orogenesis, the longest mountain bike trail in the Americas
Spin Cycle
Escape Collective
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“Orogenesis” is the geologic process of mountain building — a gradual evolution powered by unfathomable forces that expand across and transform broad swaths of the landscape.
Orogenesis is also set to be the longest mountain biking trail in the United Sates. At 3,500 miles, this new route stretches through Washington, Oregon, California, and then it connects to the existing Baja Divide bikepacking route to add another 1,600 miles to San Jose del Cabo at the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula. The creation of such a trail is an absolutely monumental vision, and endurance cyclist Kurt Refsnider will be guinea pigging his way down the full length of it for the remainder of this year as the first person to attempt the ride in its entirety.
In this episode, we talk to Kurt Refsnider about the history of the trail, what drew him to it, and what to expect along the way. We'll then be checking in with him over the next few months as he makes his way from the US/Canadian border to Mexico.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back, everybody, to a special episode of the Spin Cycle Podcast. |
| 0:11.3 | I'm Kaylee Fretz. |
| 0:11.9 | I'm joined by Josh Weinberg. |
| 0:14.8 | Josh, this is going to be a little bit different, I think, from what folks would normally get out of a spin cycle episode. |
| 0:22.4 | Actually, I'm struggling to think of anything that would be more different, but I think they will |
| 0:26.0 | enjoy it. So what are we here to do today? Who are we talking to? What are we doing? |
| 0:31.4 | Yeah, so I recently had a conversation with Kurt Ref Snyder, who is a endurance cyclist, mostly a mountain biker, |
| 0:42.5 | and he's explored trails all over the world, connecting dots from random place to random place. |
| 0:50.0 | And he's got a new project right now that he just took off for the other day called the Orogenesis Trail, which is a new trail that reaches from the northern part of the United States to the southern along the west coast. |
| 1:07.2 | So from Washington to the bottom of California. |
| 1:10.7 | And he's going to try to be the first one to ride this trail. Okay. So from Washington to the bottom of California. |
| 1:23.1 | And he's going to try to be the first one to ride this trail that's basically just a bunch of kind of, yeah, single track and double track and random roads that have never really been linked up before. |
| 1:24.8 | It's going to take him about four months. |
| 1:26.0 | And we're going to talk to him, right? |
| 1:26.9 | That's the idea here? |
| 1:28.6 | We're going to talk to him along the way. |
| 1:31.2 | I spoke with him recently before he set out. |
| 1:36.7 | And yeah, we're going to have a series of periodic check-ins as he makes his way south. |
| 1:39.1 | So should we just throw straight to your conversation? |
| 1:39.9 | Let's do it. Let's do it. Kurt would love it if you could introduce yourself to our listeners and tell them about a bit about your background and this project called Orogenesis. |
| 2:10.6 | Yeah, thanks so much, Josh. Thanks for having me and for making this project come to life. I'm really excited to share it with the world. |
| 2:17.7 | So my name is Kurt Ref Snyder. I'm a professional mountain biker and more of a kind of backcountry |
... |
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