At The Crow’s Nest in the southern Oregon coastal town of Gold Beach, over a plate of fish tacos and under the gaze of mounted boars and framed Budweiser posters, Dave Lacey excitedly scrolls through digitized, historical topographical maps, buzzing at the backcountry mountain biking possibilities on nearby national forest land.

A man approaches Dave from a nearby table with a mischievous glint in his eye. He knows Dave. Here, in this community of 2,000 people, everyone knows each other.

“You know what the problem is with you, Dave Lacey?” the man says, his big beard bobbing over his hickory-and-high-viz shirt as he affably claps Dave on the shoulder. “You’re trying to make money off people coming here and having fun!”

Halfway down its 360-mile length, the orderly Oregon coastline begins to ripple and bend as several rivers pour into the Pacific Ocean. Locals call it the “Wild Rivers Coast,” with wild applying to more than just the terrain. This is still the Oregon of sasquatch sightings and secluded beaches, where forested summits crowd a little bit closer, and seaside cliffs tower a little bit higher than areas farther north.

Along the historic, coast-hugging Highway 101, a string of small towns—Coos Bay, Bandon, Port Orford, Gold Beach, Brookings—rely on fishing and logging as their lifeblood. A five-hour drive from Portland and with few direct connections to the Interstate 5 corridor, the region has more in common with northern California than more populated parts of Oregon; for decades, residents have joked—well, most of them are joking—about seceding from the Beaver State and establishing “Jefferson,” an independent state comprising southern Oregon and the northernmost counties of California. Among these blue-collar communities, where Humboldt County hippies coexist with those slinging crab pots and chainsaws, a group of forward-thinking mountain bikers has begun reopening old backcountry trails in the Rogue River wildlands and building new trail systems on cut-over coastal timberlands.