Pacific Crest Bicycle Trail

The Pacific Crest Bicycle Trail (PCBT) is a 2,500-mile-long, road-based bicycle touring route from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada to Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. It was designed to closely parallel the Pacific Crest Trail and the two trails cross 27 times as they pass through the states of Washington, Oregon, and California.

The PCBT passes through the North Cascades National Park, Crater Lake National Park, Lassen Volcanic National Park, Yosemite National Park, Kings Canyon National Park, and Sequoia National Park and is generally routed through the Cascades and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. The route attains its highest elevation at Tioga Pass in California at approximately 10,000 feet.

Both paved and unpaved roads are used, although most are paved. In several sections where an unpaved road is used, a paved road alternative is offered.

The route passes through terrain as varied as thick evergreen forests, apple orchards, wide river canyons, grasslands, glaciated high Sierra canyons, and high desert.

The PCBT was first publicized by Bil Paul in his 1990 guidebook Pacific Crest Bicycle Trail, which is now out of print.^[1]

Route

According to a trip report by Caryl L. Bergeron,^[2] the route through most of Washington to Central Oregon included:

from Sedro-Woolley, Washington to Twisp on SR 20
to Pateros on SR 153
to Wenatchee on US 97
to Ellensburg on US 2 and SR 821 (Canyon Road)
to Selah on Old Naches Heights Road
to Naches on US 12
to Randle on US 12
to Trout Lake on SR 131 and Forest Service Road 23
to Hood River, Oregon on SR 141
through Hood River on 2nd Street, Oak Avenue, 13th Street
to Parkdale on Route 281
to Detroit on Route 35, U.S. Route 26, and Forest Service Road 42
to Sisters on Oregon Route 22

The route was changed and field re-researched by Bil Paul in 2008 to use all paved roads (with one non-paved alternative in Oregon). However, more side roads are used. The Adventure Cycling Assn. of Missoula, Montana, published in April 2010 a series of five maps covering the revised route which they call the Sierra Cascades Bicycle Route. A side route to Mount Rainier National Park has been added. The southern terminus of the route has been changed to Tecate, Mexico. At the northern terminus at Sumas, Washington, a connector route allows riding between Sumas and Bellingham, Washington, for an airport route to the Pacific Coast Bicycle Route.

References

↑ Bil Paul (October 1990). Pacific Crest Bicycle Trail. Bittersweet Publishing Company. ISBN 0-931255-06-6.
↑ "Caryl and Brian's World Bike Tour". 1998. Retrieved 2008-02-12.

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