Tour Update: Oregon Trail

A group of long time cycling friends have come together to form its own self supported bicycle tour from the Oregon Coast to Missoula Montana this summer. We are calling the tour "The Oregon Trail Tour".

Those riding will be: BJ Davis, Mike Kimbell, Bill Oswald, Joe Shoumacher and Tom Standley. Supporting us along the way will be Gay Riegel, Gail Shoumacher and Val Oswald. Peddles will begin turning on Friday August 25th in Florence Oregon heading due east.

The map below is from Adventure Cycling's map network, our source for every self supported cycling trip we have taken in the past. Two Trans-America routes are shown.

The orange or lower route is called the Trans America route. This route was created back in 1976 and is the route we will be riding this year from Oregon to Missoula Montana, 850 miles.

The pink route is called the Northern Tier route is shown only for reference. Our plans will be to return next year to connect to that route and complete the tour all the way across the US.

The first part of our tour follows or crosses many of the routes used by settlers in the mid 1800's that migrated from the east to promised lands of milk and honey in the West. It was a time of gold rushes, pursuit of religious freedom and the promise of land. It was a time of expansion. The building of America's first trans America railroad.

It was also a time when America pushed aside the peoples who had lived these lands for thousands of years. The Cherokee, Apache, Comanche and many many others who were eventually either killed outright or placed on reservations to adopt the white mans ways. A fact that many of us today are not proud of. Yet a fact non the less.

Frontier Trails of the Old West states that:  "From 1843 until 1869 when the first transcontinental railroad was completed, there were over 500,000 people who made the trip in covered wagons pulled by mule and oxen. Some went all the way to Oregon to farm and others went to California to search for gold."

One can only imagine what it must have been like to travel over those lands in those days. Imagine pulling a wagon with a team of mules over barren prairies and across raging rivers and over mountain passes, ever vigilant for hostile peoples and animals.

The Oregon Trail a modern nonfiction novel written by Rinker Buck states that: "I often come across the phrase "seeing the elephant", a term that pioneers used to describe their anticipation about striking out across the unknowable wilderness of the plains."

Other comments about those who traveled the trail were: "The cowards never started. Only mad men started." He went on to say: "I believe in crazyass passion. It was crazyass passion that dug America's canals, flung the wagons west, built the railroads, and propelled the God fearing to their deaths at Cold Harbor and Shiloh....it was crazyass passion that would deliver me to the trail."

OMG how that perfectly explains what we are about to embark upon. We have set this goal this BHAG (Big Hairy Assed Goal) of riding across the US on a bicycle. That goal is about to begin. We don't know how it's going to end, but we do know that on August 25th we will depart Florence Oregon on our way to "see the elephant."

More soon....