50 years of the TransAmerica Bike Trail—the ‘Appalachian Trail’ of biking

The origin story of the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail began on different bike trip: The Hemistour, from Alaska to Argentina. Outdoor adventure friends from Ohio, Dan and Lys Burden and Greg and June Siple, were biking the west coast of the Americas for three months on a shoestring budget when they were struck by how traveling on bikes connected them to things happening around them in an intimate way.

The connection to the local environment was so powerful that they wanted to share the experience of slow bike travel and collectively conceived of an organized mass ride across America to mark the Bicentennial. This was before bikepacking was popular but driven by a deep curiosity and pre-political patriotism, Dan suggested this ride “would…teach [riders] what our country is all about, what it is and who it is.”  

In Mexico in 1973, they found a typewriter to make a flyer and mailed it to all the adult bike riders they knew to announce the “Bike”centennial ride. Part of the group flew to Washington, D.C. to begin organizing and to also receive their funding from Carolyn Patterson, National Geographic’s first female senior editor. 

The idea took fire. As a trained geologist, Lys Burden drove across the country to map out the route by handpicking small towns, backroads, and diverse geological regions. International riders signed up from countries as far as the Netherlands and Japan. And by 1976, there were small groups and solo amateur riders totaling 4,000 in short-shorts on Schwinn bikes cycling and camping in both directions on this trail across America. They relayed their whereabouts to family and friends from phonebooths scattered across the landscape.

(Ride the rails, then the trails—these 8 stunning bike routes are reachable by train.)

What's distinctive about this ride?

This trail is more than biking across a country. It is a curated route that showcases the best historic and scenic landscapes on the safest backroads. “There’s a comfort level in knowing it [is] already there. Plug and play,” says Mike Bowen, who biked the trail in 2024. There is a legacy of 50 summers of riders retracing this route. It’s the Appalachian Trail for biking. For generations, towns have embraced riders from all over the world. They invite them to sleep in their backyards and town parks. Many end long-mileage days by swimming in town pools, which feels like winning the jackpot.

The route includes specific directions, such as where bikers can call the police to get permission to camp in the town park. “I was surprised by how well-oiled the machine was,” my summer cycling partner, now Dr. Kyle Cedermark, reflected. It was all part of an “invisible network of hospitality” that suddenly appears and can charm the cynic out of anyone, even a boy from New Jersey.

We met old ladies tending their dahlias who invited us to church picnics and fed us barbecue and Jello. In Afton, Virginia, June Curry started handing out cookies to cyclists in 1976 and continued every summer. 

Exploring America's small towns from a bike seat

It's the guts of America: the country roads, monuments, and family businesses that collectively tell our cobbled-together national story. The climb through the Colorado Rockies and the national parks might be the gems, but the soul of this trail is the small-town gas stations in Kentucky, where the local cashier sells chilled drinks and refills water bottles from the tap before recommending the best biscuits and gravy in the state, just down the road. (His cousin makes them and has for 30 years.) 

(This network of trails is the best way to explore Atlanta.)

Biking across the U.S. on the TransAmerica Trail 

In May of 2004, I graduated from college and began biking across America with my college ex-boyfriend. Our sleeping bags and a Eureka tent were bungee-strapped to the rack. In the same direction as explorers Lewis and Clark, we biked west from Virginia, against prevailing winds and across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. My mother insisted I take a Nokia phone for emergencies, but we relied on 12 folded paper maps and a book listing all the trail turns, free places to camp, and town pools. 

To save weight, we ripped pages out along the way. School friends had biked the previous summer and told us about this trail, mapped out in the 1970s and retraced by bikers every summer.  We were East Coast kids who had never been to the Pacific. Although our relationship as a couple ended before graduation, we would share a tent for the summer; we still wanted to see the real America from the seat of our bikes, at any cost. 

How I traveled on the cross-country trail

From the East Coast, the route starts in Yorktown, Virginia, and takes approximately three months to bike 4,250 miles. We graduated from the University of Virginia the week before leaving, so we joined the trail in Charlottesville, and biked every day like it was our job, after a morning cup of camping-stove coffee. 

From the familiar Blue Ridge Mountains, we biked up and down the steep Appalachians, sampling the best biscuits and gravy we could find. We joined forces with two young men (really just boys) on the route in Kentucky, and continued biking together to the Pacific Coast. Together, we crossed Huckleberry Finn’s Mississippi and rolled across the Ozarks in Missouri, perfecting our cheap-calorie tuna-and-ramen camping dinners.  We hit our highest mileage days in the flat farmland of Kansas, with water towers pinpointing the towns along the way.

The trail turns north at Pueblo, Colorado, where we had to stop to acclimate before climbing the Rockies over Hoosier Pass. We celebrated the Fourth of July in Yellowstone National Park, watching the Old Faithful geyser explode while bear-bagging our food at night. We were mesmerized by the peaks of the Grand Tetons mirrored in the lakes below. We stopped in Missoula, Montana, to pay our respects to Adventure Cycling, the founding organization of the TransAmerica Trail, where you can join an afternoon tubing down the Clark Fork River. In the golden evening sun, we twisted through the curves of the Salmon River Canyon, watching shadows crisscross our path. We crossed otherworldly lava fields at McKenzie Pass. In Oregon, we rode the well-planned bike network in Eugene with a friend before finally reaching our goal—the Pacific Ocean. 

Every day, we were biking farther west than we had ever been west of Chicago. The TransAmerica Trail is more than the sum of its parts.

(Want to try bike-camping? Here’s the easy way to do it.)