The OC and E Woods Line Trail
Near Klamath Falls, Oregon
On the east side of Klamath Falls begins the longest linear state park in Oregon, the OC and E Woods Line State Trail, a rail trail that runs roughly one hundred miles across the high country. It follows the old railbed of the Oregon, California and Eastern Railway, a line whose construction began in the summer of nineteen seventeen to haul timber out of the pine forests. For decades this railroad carried logs and lumber down to the mills of Klamath Falls.
When the trains stopped running in nineteen ninety, the timber giant Weyerhaeuser turned the corridor over to the state to be preserved as a trail, a process called railbanking. Today it starts here in town and runs east about sixty three miles to the little community of Bly, then a long spur branches north from Beatty toward the Sycan Marsh. The first eight miles out of Klamath Falls are paved and popular with walkers and cyclists, while the rest is dirt and gravel that carries riders and hikers deep into ranch country and forest.
It draws roughly one hundred thirty thousand visitors a year, following the ghost of a logging railroad through the landscape it once helped strip.
