This Saturday, spectators are gathering at a muddy venue on the outskirts of Bellingham to watch bikers climb, run and cycle their way to victory in Cascade Cross’s 19th cyclocross series.
The next races are at Hannegan Speedway on Nov. 22 from 10 a.m. to 2:45 p.m.
Cyclocross is a seasonal sport in which racers bike and navigate obstacles on a closed-circuit track. Casey Griesemer, a member of the Cascade Cross board, describes the sport as akin to cross-country.
Cyclocross season typically stretches from late August to February, according to Griesemer. The 2025-2026 season for Cascade Cross is from September to January.
Cascade Cross races are free to spectate, $35 to pre-register in an individual race and $130 to participate in the full series. Racing is free for volunteers who help set up the Hannegan Speedway race. Races are separated into gender, age and experience-based categories so people of all ages and abilities can participate.
Griesemer said that Cascade Cross does everything it can to keep races tight-knit and welcoming.
“We try to keep our event fees as low as possible,” Griesemer said. “Cycling can be a pretty expensive sport, but cyclocross in general is the most approachable one that exists as far as a competitive cycling sport.”
Cascade Cross began when Ryan Rickerts, founder and former director of the series, received a fateful phone call in 2005.
“Someone called me and said, ‘Hey, I know you raced cyclocross,’ because I raced a little bit in Seattle, ‘have you ever thought about promoting a cyclocross race?’” Rickerts said.
Rickerts was the co-founder of a collegiate racing team hosting and promoting weekend bicycle races. He describes Bellingham’s cyclocross scene at the time as nonexistent.
“That was why I was motivated to do it, because I wanted people to experience cyclocross as a discipline of cycling without having to drive to SeaTac,” he said.
Rickerts contacted Mark Peterson, who had recently hosted the Belly Cross cyclocross race in Cornwall Park.
“I asked him, ‘How do you put on a cyclocross race?’ And he said, ‘Well, first thing to get good turnout is you should make it a series,’” he said. According to Peterson, a cyclocross series needed at least three races, Rickerts said.
Rickerts called his first three-race cyclocross series Cyclocrazed. He created his own logo and website, gathered his equipment and learned from scratch how to time and score by hand. Cyclocrazed was rebranded to Cascade Cross in 2008.
Rickerts said that when he started Cascade Cross, races would only attract around 40 people when the weather would get bad. According to Brian Bressler, a former Bellingham resident and cyclocrosser for 17 years, recent Cascade Cross races can attract up to 150 riders.
But even as Bellingham’s first local series, Cascade Cross is far from the only contributor to the modern Bellingham cyclocross scene, Rickerts said.
Lemon Peel Productions expanded its Northwest Grand Prix series to the Bellingham area in 2024. Both Bressler and Fishy Finch, a seven-year Bellingham cyclocross racer, describe Lemon Peel Productions’ approach to Bellingham cyclocross as being more professional, contrasting the fun atmosphere of local races.
“They’re always wearing costumes and they’ll bring food, they’ll do hand-ups,” Finch said. “When you’re going around the course and there's a lot of spectators that stand along the course and cheer people on, and sometimes they hand you up something like a piece of a doughnut or a Dixie cup of beer or a piece of bacon, all kinds of crazy things.”
Griesemer and Bressler both believe in Bellingham’s modern cyclocross scene as a very tight-knit community.
“In Bellingham cross, everybody knows everybody,” Bressler said. “So it’s easy to watch a race and cheer people on, because you know almost all the riders.”
There’s no prize money in Cascade Cross races, and Rickerts didn’t do podiums during his time as a director. To Rickerts, Cascade Cross isn’t about being the best or the fastest, but ensuring all participants have fun and feel welcome.
Finch expresses that, at the age of 72, they often end Cascade Cross races in “dead friggin’ last”.
“I've said, ‘Are you sick of having to go around me?’” Finch said. “They said, ‘No, we love having you here, you give us hope that we can ride when we're older.’”
Cascade Cross’s 2025-2026 season ends on Jan. 10, with a race at Cornwall Park and an afterparty and season awards directly after.
Carden Mercier (he/she) is a City Life reporter for The Front. This quarter is his first publishing for The Front; he is currently a sophomore at Western Washington University seeking a degree for news/editorial journalism. Outside of writing for The Front, he is a hobbyist digital artist and writer and can often be found exploring Bellingham for new spots to eat. He can be contacted at cardenmercier.thefront@gmail.com.
