Trip Summary Trip Dates: Jun 15 - Sep 05 Start - End Locations: Banff, AB Canada - Antelope Well, NM/Shuttle to El Paso, TX Days: 82   Rest Days: 10   Level of Support: Self-contained Miles: 2711 Average Miles Per Day: 38 Surface: Dirt Riders: 14 Type: Self-Contained   Meals: Shared cooking Accommodations: Camping Physical Difficulty: Advanced+  Technical Difficulty: Difficult Elevation: Elevation Alert Airport: Calgary, AB Canada/El Paso, TX Cost: $4249 Booking Status: Closed

Imagine spending eighty-two days pedaling the backroads of the Rocky Mountains, going from Banff, Alberta, all the way to the U.S.-Mexico border. Imagine encountering more moose and elk than people, more pronghorns and prairie dogs than pickup trucks. Imagine spinning along, listening to your tires snap across a road surface of gravel—a sound interrupted only by the occasional call of a curlew or gurgle of a mountain stream. Imagine being so hot and sweaty that you remove your jersey, dip it in a cold lake, and put it back on for the cooling effect, then, the next morning, waking up with frost on your tent.

Do you want to do more than just imagine these things? Then join us for the ultimate expedition: the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route.

This is our most demanding trip, in terms of both logistics and the riding challenges it presents. It’s extremely rugged, very long, often unforgiving, and sometimes maddeningly unpredictable. But it’s also spectacular, amazing, surprising, and infinitely rewarding. Just talk to someone who’s done it, and you’ll see what we mean.

From the bustling national-park community of Banff, we’ll head into the wilds by way of the Spray River Trail. You’ll immediately notice signs warning that you’re in grizzly bear country, an unsettling yet exciting revelation that confirms yes, we’re not in Kansas any more. Soon we’ll make the steep climb over Elk Pass and the Continental Divide, known aptly as the “Great Divide” in Canada. To give you an idea of the ruggedness of this largely roadless region, it’s a six-mile ride from trailhead to trailhead, but to drive from one to the other in a car would require a trip of nearly two hundred miles.

After entering the United States at Port of Roosville, Montana, we’ll follow abandoned logging roads that wind their way through ancient forests of western larch and Douglas fir. You’ll leave Montana at its other end via the Centennial Valley and its unforgettable Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. Soon, we’ll squeeze between Yellowstone National Park and the northern Teton Range on a dusty track known as the Grassy Lake Road, spilling into Jackson Hole beside the upper Snake River. In the high desert at the foot of the even higher Wind River Range, we’ll ride directly atop the Continental Divide for a ways, most likely gazing down on galloping herds of wild horses.

Next up: Colorado, where the “highlights” are many, but none more memorable than the gravity-propelled, 2,200-vertical-foot, ten-mile drop from subalpine chill to the desert-like environs of Radium and the Colorado River.

After the high-elevation mountains of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, we’ll visit places like Abiquiu; from that village made famous by a talented resident named Georgia O’Keeffe, we’ll ascend Polvadera Mesa, a twenty-mile-long ramp leading into the lofty Santa Fe National Forest. From Silver City, with just over a hundred miles to go, we’ll finally poke into true desert—replete with lizards, roadrunners, the works. We’ll gain the international border by way of a lonely paved road cutting through a landscape once frequented by the outlawing likes of Geronimo and Pancho Villa.

Imagine no more. Make this your summer to explore the Great Divide. Put your tires to the test in the real Wild West.

For more detailed information, see Self Contained trip logistics.

READY TO GO?
You can sign up for the Great Divide now. Go to our online sign-up.

EXTRAS
To learn more about the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, visit our Great Divide maps page.