Mountain bike riding gets urban twist in Springfield.

Byline: THE OUTSIDER By John Rezell The Register-Guard

With his fenderless rear tire fishtailing through the mud, spraying a perfectly straight line of water, dirt and various debris onto his now crusty jacket back, Ken Wilson displayed the soul that made us immediate kindred spirits.

"How often do grown-ups get a chance to go out and play in the mud?" he shouted back to me.

Our answer is simple: Not often enough.

Wilson offered me the chance to join him in a local adventure on some of the most interesting, technical mountain bike riding in the immediate area. He tempted me with gnarly, rutted, muddy terrain - just what every mountain bike rider searches for endlessly. And he delivered.

"Backyards are much more interesting than front yards," Wilson said as we explored the alleys of Springfield. "People fix up their front yards. Their backyards show character. It's who they really are."

Indeed, alleys are not for the pretentious. They are for the creative. The adventurous. The Ken Wilsons of the world.

"I was just running errands one day when I rode down one alley," he said. "It was muddy and rutted, and I thought, this is cool."

And so Wilson charted a course that snakes back and forth, up and down, through the alleys of Springfield, between A and D streets, from Pioneer Parkway to 14th.

Wilson earned my first accepted invitation to explore the area on simple merits. His was the only one that didn't offer any qualifiers like, "As soon as the rain stops," or "When we get a clear day," or "Once the trails dry out a little."

With visions of buckets of rain turning swampy alleys into roaring rapids, I couldn't hit the road soon enough. Wouldn't you know? When our appointed day arrived, so did the second straight day of rainless weather.

Still, what's not to like about being able to roll right out of your meticulously groomed front yard, or beautifully raw backyard, into a mud-slopping technical cruise?

Wilson's eyes sparkle behind his amber lenses and his salt-and-pepper beard curls up when a particularly challenging alley presents itself - single-track with overgrown blackberry bushes waiting to swallow us whole.

He admits to being an adrenalin junkie. When he isn't working as a respiratory therapist in Salem, he's roaming the slopes of Willamette Pass as a ski patrol volunteer.

"I started cycling about 10 years ago," he said. "When I was way overweight and a way bigger smoker."

Wilson had opened his house to a foster child a few years earlier. "He needed a place to stay for his senior year of high school to stay out of trouble," Wilson said.

His foster son got into competitive mountain biking. One thing led to another, and Wilson got hooked on cycling. He eventually gave up smoking, too, and believes he's in the greatest shape of his life.

That foster kid is now a sheriff in California, raising a house full of foster kids. He called Wilson a year ago and offered him one of his old road bikes that was just sitting around. Wilson snatched it up, and last summer completed his first Tour of Oregon, shocking even himself.

"I always used to see cyclists climbing up Fox Hollow thinking to myself, `I'd sure love to do that someday,' ' Wilson said. "And now, I can do that."

John Rezell, aka, Raz, is a former editor of VeloNews magazine and bike.com. He's experienced 43 of our 50 states and wants to explore the great Oregon outdoors with you. Drop him an e-mail invitation at [e-mail].