Cycling the Divide, from New York to Montana

This week's Bike Overnight story is titled Blue Hole Loop, New York. It published yesterday, as it's been scheduled to do for weeks. Yet the timing is such we'd like to offer it in respect for those who suffered, and are still suffering, from the force of Superstorm Sandy. The ride takes place relatively close to New York, in that city's watershed, so we don't know what kind of shape the route is in right now. But it might be a good one to put on your "to ride" list for the future.

"This bike overnight ride brings you to picturesque pastoral and forested settings far from the daily existence we might call the 'real world,'" writes author Rich Ehli. "Yet it is surprisingly accessible to most of us who live within that great swath of urban sprawl stretching from Philadelphia to Boston."

Check it out at BikeOvernights.org.

I must admit, though, that for all of October -- and now into November -- most of my own virtual travels have been taking place far from New York City, along the spine of the continent. You see, I've been working on a new edition of Cycling the Great Divide, the guidebook to the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. I think about rides I've taken there, such as the adventure a group of twelve of us made last summer on the Canada section ... and a two-day Bike Overnight I did three or four years ago closer to home.

I wrote about that overnight in a piece titled Relearning the Lesson: Two Day Trip on the Great Divide. The story focuses on a 90-mile stretch of the Great Divide beginning at Big Springs Idaho, and ending in Lima, Montana.

Regarding the second day of the ride, I wrote, "An infinite morning sky hung over the wide open Red Rock River Valley. Prolific, willow-filled wetlands clashed with the surrounding hills, bald, brown, and crinkled. Grasses and cattails bent with the breeze. The only sounds were those of blackbirds and curlews calling, the wind?s soft whistling, and rubber tires snapping across gravel. Abandoned cabins and outbuildings reminded me that somewhere I?d read this valley was once more heavily populated than today, before the wildlife refuge was created in the mid-1930s to provide habitat for the endangered trumpeter swan.

"The 57 miles went by almost too quickly. When I arrived in Lima, my wife Nancy was there with the truck waiting for me. Reflecting on the two-day journey as we drove home, I realized it had taught me something I already knew: Things look, sound, and smell a lot clearer from the saddle of a bicycle than they do from the seat of a car. And it doesn?t matter if you?re riding for two months or two days -- it?s good for the soul just to get out for a refresher course now and then."

You can read the piece in its entirety at BikeOvernights.org.

This week's Photo of the Week, shown below, also comes from the region hit by Sandy. It's from the Bike Overnight tale By the Seat of Our Pants: 3 Nights in Southern New Jersey, by Marty Garnick.

BikeOvernights.org Photo of the Week, 11.02.12.

Top photo by Rich Ehli, middle two photos by Michael McCoy, bottom photo by Marty Garnick. 

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BIKE OVERNIGHTS is posted every Tuesday by Michael McCoy, Adventure Cycling?s media specialist, and highlights content from BikeOvernights.org. Previously, from March 2009 through January 2012, Mac posted weekly at Biking Without Borders. He also compiles the organization's twice-monthly e-newsletter Bike Bits, which goes free-of-charge to nearly 47,000 readers worldwide.

Source: http://blog.adventurecycling.org/2012/11/cycling-divide-from-new-york-to-montana.html

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