The Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, or GDMBR, is a patchwork of paved roads, gravel roads, dirt trails, single track and rugged hiking trails that extends from Jasper, Alberta, Canada to Antelope Wells, New Mexico, USA. The total route is 2700+ miles and our first exposure to it was as part of dotwatching the 2023 edition of the Tour Divide, a “grand depart” race on the southbound route that takes place every June. Incidentally, the winner of this year’s edition, Robin Gemperle, finished the entire course in 11d 19h, an astonishing accomplishment!

Over the past year or so we’ve been hatching a plan to ride a segment of this route and today our journey finally begins, not with a bike ride but with a three hour drive followed by a sixteen hour train ride. First we’ll head to Galesburg, IL to pick up the California Zephyr Amtrak route to Denver. Once in Denver, we’ll spend the day there reconnecting with our good friend Jeff, who was our most gracious host on our 2020 trip to East Africa. On Tuesday morning, we’ll bike back to Union Station and catch a bus up to Frisco, CO where we’ll begin our journey southwards towards Santa Fe and then eventually Albuquerque. In ABQ, we’ll hop on the Southwest Chief Amtrak route which will bring us back to Galesburg, IL. A lot of this is quite theoretical and subject to change!

I’ve put together a collection of route segments that we’ll use to help guide us, along with some nice annotated paper maps from the Adventure Cycling Association. Incidentally, just as I’m writing this I realized I need to throw in a compass. It’s important to have backups to our technology even if it does mean an extra 40g to carry!

You can see that down towards the finish, we’ve got a bunch of branching options. We haven’t yet figured out exactly how we’ll get off the GDMBR and to ABQ, which is where we have to pick up the train. There is a nice commuter train from Santa Fe to ABQ that we will try to take advantage of instead of riding that stretch. It all depends on a lot of factors, as you can imagine. I expect we will be out there for longer, on our 450-500 mile stretch, than Robin was for his entire 2700 mile route. But that’s completely fine — it’s not a race for us!

We’ve spent the better part of the year slowly building up our bikes and equipment for this trip. You can see the results of our efforts:

Our plan is to camp when possible and enjoy a motel when necessary, or just when feel like it! We’ve got a very small stove setup that’s limited to boiling water, so no fancy meals for us. But we’ll be passing by a lot of small towns and many of them have diners, restaurants and convenience stores. We’re starting out with several backpacking meals that we’ll drag along for situations when we don’t have any other options. But the rear packs you see on the bikes are mostly empty and we’ll be using them to hold extra food and water along the way. We’ve intentionally chosen this segment to avoid grizzly bear country, but we certainly will have to be wary of black bear, snakes, scorpions, tarantulas along with all sorts of other small critters that might want to get into our food.

Our bikes have the ability to charge our phones and gadgets as we ride, thanks to our front wheel dynamo hubs, but even with that we’ll have to be smart about battery usage. As such, there may be many days where we don’t update here because we either have no cellphone coverage or battery to spare. Totally normal and expected!

As with the last few trips, we’ll have a Garmin inReach emergency satellite beacon/messenger. You can easily find the link to our current location at the top of the site. For this route we’ll be in some very remote terrain so it’s a big comfort for us to have this as backup to our cellphones. Even so, we hope that the only reason we end up using it is to broadcast our position as we ride.

It’s been a year of ups and downs (pun 1000% intended) and we feel very fortunate to be heading out on this adventure, even if we do feel a bit underprepared and overwhelmed as the reality of our plans set in. Thanks to everyone who’s supported us and is helping us carve these 2-3 weeks of time out. We love you all!

Oh, and you might also wonder about the dogs — they’re on an extended vacation out with George at the Knapp Creek homestead. We’re so thankful to him for taking such good care of Jules and Maya while we do this dumb thing together.

Off we go!

P.S. this is the (quite bad) movie we watched last night to prepare for our days upon days at altitude.