Bike About 2025 – Wyoming
December 14, 2025 § Leave a comment
July 5th Day 19 – I transition from the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route (GDMBR) to Peaks Parks and Prairies (PPP) heading out of West Yellowstone. This begins the next phase of my summer bike about where my goal now is to get to the town of Orange City in Iowa for the start of the 52nd edition of the Registers Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI). I have the entire state of Wyoming to cross as well as most of South Dakota, one of the few states left on my list to visit, and now I am going to do South Dakota some real justice and spend quite a few days riding across it. For now I am still in Montana, having left Denise and Rebecca on the 3rd, they should be finishing up today by riding into Jackson Wyoming while I will set out East bound.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bike About 2025 – GDMBR Week 2
December 12, 2025 § Leave a comment
In my last post I only covered 6 days, so the title is a little misleading, however I will try to be a little more terse and cram in the rest of my time traveling with the lovely ladies Denise and Rebecca who invited me to join them on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route/Ride (GDMBR). I ended the last post where section 1 of the route ended in Helena, and this post will cover section 2 from Helena Montana, to Jackson Wyoming however, I will be departing this route before then and diverting to West Yellowstone where my next phase in this adventure will begin. For now though, it’s the Rocky Mountains of Montana, and miles to go before we rest.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bike About 2025 – GDMBR Week 1
December 7, 2025 § 1 Comment
We are now in phase 2 of my great bike about in the summer of 2025. My last post dealt with my time on my own before riding with Denise and Rebecca (Full disclosure I will refer to them as both “The Ladies” and “The Girls” through my writing. I hope no one is offended by using each reference interchangably). Now we are all together and setting off, a day later than first planned, for a two week adventure south on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route (GDMBR), covering the rest of Section 1, and all of Section 2. We were delayed a day in starting because the girls got in so late Friday night, it was early Saturday morning and a late winter storm hit the area bringing cold rain in the valley and almost 8 inches of snow in the passes.
June 22, Day 6 – We agreed to meet in the morning at 9am at Lulah’s Cafe in downtown Whitefish where we would load up on a big breakfast before departing for Swan Lake, 65 miles into our route. Lulahs was pretty busy that Sunday morning, and it became apparent early on that we should have agreed to meet at 8 instead. By the time we were seated and ordered, it was almost 45 minutes before we were seated. Partially I can accept some fault here because I was there early and I could have gone down and put our name in the queue for a table, but I wasn’t sure what had been done already, and I just awaited their arrival. With our bikes locked up we descended the stairs and 90 minutes later, after a very nice breakfast meal we unlocked the bikes and began the first mile of many. The storm that had blanketed the area for the last 36 hours was still in the area though we were now on the trailing edge of it. There were pockets of moisture, enough to warrant putting on rain jackets, and since I was the only one with rain pants, I opted in for those as well. You know the drill. When you prepare, it doesn’t rain, and when you say “It’s not going to rain” it rains.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bike About 2025 – Glacier National Park
November 30, 2025 § 1 Comment
Back in May I posted that I had a bike packing adventure that I was prepping for in June. Later in May I trialed my equipment in a 500 mile loop leaving from my home in Ocean, NJ and riding a somewhat loop clockwise through Pennsylvania, New York and then a ferry ride back to New Jersey. By the time I started this trip my basic plan was as follows:
- Start with Glacier National Park
- Ride two weeks on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Ride (GDMBR) with Denise and Rebecca
- Ride to Orange City Iowa for Ragbrai LII
- Ride Ragbrai LII to the Eastern border of Iowa
- Ride Home to New Jersey
At this point in the trip, I was definitely planning to ride all the way home, though I wasn’t entirely confident that I would make it, not was I set on a route from the Ragbrai end in Guttenberg where there wasn’t a Mississippi crossing. I felt that to better my chances of completing this feat I should break the adventure up into some logical phases where I think I would call the GDMBR Phase 1. Why not call Glacier Phase 1? I feel like the phases should be devoted to getting home again, and my time in Glacier did nothing to advance my progress home. It was merely a destination bucket list item, where I could hone my condition a wee bit more before the ladies arrived.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bike About Tri State Loop – After MTCCNJ
November 29, 2025 § Leave a comment
While covering 3 days in my last post, this post will look at the next 5 days in which I completed my Bike About, where I left my home in Ocean NJ, where I was intending to return 8 full days later after riding a giant clockwise loop into PA up through and across the Catskills in NY, and then down through Manhattan to the Pier 11 ferry terminal and onto a Seastreak Ferry back to Monmouth County where I would finish up.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bike About Tri State Loop
June 6, 2025 § 1 Comment
In my last post I wrote about the equipment prep as well as the riding prep for some upcoming bikepacking rides. Now I sit here in the comfort of my home after finishing 8 days riding a giant loop around the Tri State NJ/PA/NY/NJ area, having covered a lot of miles and riding every day. I think I will split this into two posts, and so, start this off with the first few days, and then follow it with the last.
I needed to test out my bikepacking equipment, and I needed to develop my legs. I am recently out-of-work and sort of retired, so while I have been able to put some regular road miles into my legs, I felt a need to get some bikepacking miles into them as well before taking on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route later in June, and so when the opportunity was presented to join another group that was doing a 4 day out and back to Jim Thorpe, I jumped onto that and started planning. I had already mapped a route from Hancock NY to Pier 11 in lower Manhattan, so I just needed to add in a route from Jim Thorpe to Hancock, and thus make an 8 day ride out of this.
« Read the rest of this entry »Bikepacking in 2025 – Prep Ride
May 19, 2025 § 2 Comments
I have signed on to a ride starting just prior to the Solstice with a couple of people I have met through a local Hiker/Biker group that operates out of the Morris/Essex counties area of New Jersey. I was introduced to this group via my friend Paul that has joined me on some of my backpacking adventures and now that I am nearing the end of my working career, I am looking for bikepacking adventures as well. This particular adventure will be 2 northern sections of the GDMBR (Greate Divide Mountain Bike Ride) from Kalispel MT, to Jackson Wyoming. My plan is to leave them 1 or 2 days prior to their destination, and jump on the Adventure Cycling’s Parks, Peaks and Prairies ride and try to get to Orange City Iowa in time for this year’s Ragbrai (Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa) which some other friends I have are doing this year. I did the 50th anniversary edition of Ragbrai in 2023 and at the end of that ride we all agreed to try again this year. Once I am done with Ragbrai 2025, then the plan is very fluid. More than likely I will simply keep going and work my way back home to New Jersey, however I will probably try and work my way up to Buffalo to get onto The Empire State Trail, and ride to Manhattan and home. In 1981, with my buddy Frank, we rode fairly straight across the states from Iowa, so I am not too keen to repeat that. Another possibility is to head North, and then West and ride to Bend Oregon. That seems very unlikely, but it is not out of the question.
« Read the rest of this entry »Michaux March 2024
December 8, 2024 § 1 Comment
This will not be the post I thought it would be, because this was not the trip into the woods that I thought it would be. It certainly started out like the trip I thought it would be, and for the most part Friday night was almost a repeat of any Friday night spent in the woods with friends. As it so happened the only friends in the woods with me that night were my Brother-in-law Walt, and my friend Dan, as no one else was able to make it out on this weekend. The reason for this early outing was that Walt was being honored as an Outstanding Alumni by the College of Engineering at Penn State, and he proposed that we do a weekend in Michaux prior to his “Big Day”, and since I was planning on going up early anyway, I was automatically a “Yes”. I have rarely observed any camping request in which Dan was an automatic, however that was where it ended. For awhile that is. It seems Walt chose an old email thread that was devoid of a few key members of our clan, and since, like most people probably, no one actually looked at the list of recipients to see who was there and who wasn’t.
« Read the rest of this entry »Zion 2024 – Segment 3
November 17, 2024 § Leave a comment
Strava
Panoramas
Relive Video
Relive Interactive
This post will over the last 2 days of our Transverse of the Zion Wilderness. If you have been following along, you will know that we are camped on the East side of West Rim mesa/plateau at what is probably one of the best sites in all the National Parks. It is Jed, Paul, Jim and myself, minus Mike who is hanging out in Vegas, we awake early, around 6:30 to get up and see what the sunrise brings us this day. We are in Mountain Time, on the West edge of that timezone, so Sunrise is about 7:21 with first light appearing at least 30 minutes prior. When I emerged from my tent there was the hint of a glow on the Eastern horizon. I grabbed my chair and moved down to the trail junction where we had a clear view. Unfortunately the sky was clear which meant that there would not be any colored clouds, and it would just be a clear sunrise. Anyone who chases Sunrises or Sundowns knows that the best versions involve clouds. We ventured from our viewing site looking for other opportunities I believe Jim got a Raven to pose for him a wee bit down The Grotto trail.
« Read the rest of this entry »Zion 2024 – Segment 2
November 10, 2024 § Leave a comment
Strava
Panoramas
Relive Video
Relive Interactive
The second segment of our Zion traverse includes what I have called Death March 1, and Death March 2 based on how I felt at the end of each of those two days, which was exhausted. Just to be clear, this is not like a Solzhenitsyn march where you know from the start what kind of day it will be, but rather each day began just like any other day when you backpack and have to move camp pretty far along the trail. Don’t sleep in; Pack your sleeping bag, and deflate and stow your air pad before you exit the tent; Breakfast on oatmeal, and coffee drinks, water up, and pack the rest of the things; Groan while raise the potential energy of the pack, and start walking, a smile on your face, and nothing but happy “What will today bring?” expectations ahead.
We compared “steps” at the end of each day, where Jed and Jim were scoring around 3-4 thousand more steps than me, who marks out a fairly decent stride. More, when I go up hill. The two “Death March” days were 24,951 and 28,985 steps, and I still backpack in fairly traditional leather boots made by Zamberland (“Zambies”) that weigh in around 4 pounds so 2 pounds per foot. Jed and Jim wear something more like trail shoes that are a lot lighter. Mike is also more traditional, and I can’t remember what Paul was wearing. I think you see where I am going here. Each step moves that 2lb boot further along the trail, and as they add up, fatigue starts to set in, so that by the end of the day, you just want to get those damned heavy-assed boots off your feet and let those feetsies recover.
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Big Bird's Adventures 