Photo: Ale Di Lullo

For regular Singletracks readers, Travis Reill needs no introduction. Travis has been contributing to Singletracks as a freelance writer since early 2023, and this month, he joins Singletracks full-time as a staff writer.

Travis lives in Bend, Oregon, home to hundreds of miles of incredible trails stretching into the foothills of Deschutes National Forest and beyond.

At Singletracks, Travis has already written about a wide variety of topics, from trail news coverage to bike and component reviews and tech explainers. And yet, he doesn’t personally own a mountain bike at the moment.

“So I had a Canyon Spectral,” he told me. It was a demo bike, on loan to another publication, and after publishing his review, a representative for the publication told him he could keep the bike. So, he got rid of his personal bike, a Stumpjumper, and rode the Spectral for the next three years. Then, Canyon called: the demo bike was overdue and needed to be returned right away.

Fortunately, Travis always has a demo bike or two that are in for testing, though he’s in the market for a bike he can officially call his own. Preferably, a trail bike.

“As much as I want to be like, ‘Let’s go to the bike park,’ you know, go ride the like gnarly, crazy stuff — and I do that, and that’s fun,” he told me. “But there’s just nothing better than a solid backcountry trail ride.”

“I am more of an everyday trail rider. I kind of want to go and get lost somewhere and climb a thousand or two thousand feet, and then descend a thousand or two thousand feet.”

Around Bend, Travis’s favorite ride is a route known as North Fork Farewell. Riders pedal up the North Fork trail, passing scenic waterfalls along the way, before topping out at Tumalo Falls, then descending the Farewell trail.

“You climb right up past Tumalo Falls, and then it just kind of — everybody just disappears. And you get up to where you feel kind of remote, kind of backcountry, for Bend at least. That’s definitely my favorite.”

Beyond Oregon, one of Travis’s all-time favorite rides is a relatively new trail called Spinal Tap in Richfield, Utah. The epic descent drops nearly 5,000 feet over about 20 miles.

Spinal Tap features “a lot of berms and stuff to just like really help you carry your speed. So, it’s just a phenomenal, fast trail. I did it on one of the worst bikes that was a rental. It was just like a really clapped-out, terrible, terrible bike. But we did the whole trail in under two hours.”

Prior to joining Singletracks full-time, Travis was a freelance contributor to multiple outdoor publications. And before that, he was an elementary school teacher. He worked in a fourth-grade classroom for a while, which he tells me was his favorite grade to teach.

Travis has written some of your favorite articles, with many more to come

Travis wrote some of readers’ favorite articles over the past few years, including this opinion piece arguing that a 150mm trail bike is pretty much all any mountain biker needs. (Personally, I think 140mm is the goldilocks zone, but I hate to quibble.) And he was one of the first to write about the growing confusion among the public over the difference between e-bikes and e-motos. Travis is currently researching a follow-up to that piece, and we can’t wait to see what he learns.

We’re stoked to have Travis on board full-time, and look forward to much more regular contributions to the Singletracks community!