Colorado! Colorado was definitely a highlight of the trip. At the end of the last post I was just about to get off the train in Glenwood Springs and start biking.

My plan was to get off the train at Glenwood Springs (on the left side of the map), and bike up the Colorado river to meet my friends Abby and Alec who were driving down from Leadville (circled in red) to come pick me up.

East of Glenwood Springs there is an awesome bike/ped trail that snakes up along the Colorado river through the Glenwood canyon. I had wanted to ride this trail while on a similar trip in 2023, but the river was too high and sections of the trail were closed.

Glenwood canyon has steep dramatic sides and the only things that go through it are interstate 70, the railroad, and this separated path.

Despite being so close to the highway the bike path was pretty peaceful, I think mostly because it’s below the highway.

There were also a few sections where i70 would go through a tunnel and it would just be the bike path and the river.

I saw a bobcat! I’ve never seen one of these in real life before and it looked just as surprised to see me as I was to see it.

The trail exits Glenwood canyon and after a short road section it continues along the Eagle river. A strong west to east wind was at my back almost the whole way during this ride, which made it so much more pleasant and a lot quicker. 

That wind was especially necessary because it was HOT. The air temp was in the high 90s and my GPS was reading >100 for most of the ride. 

I also kept alternating between thinking I was running pretty early, and running a bit late, and it was only after riding all day that I realized my GPS never changed time zones and was an hour behind my phone.

After about 4 hours I was starting to get close to where I’d be meeting Abby & Alec, but I was also starting to feel the effects of the heat, dry air, and elevation. Glenwood springs sits around 5700′ above sea level and my meet up spot with Abby & Alec was around 7500′.

I had resolved to push through the last hour or so of riding (because at this point I thought I was running a bit late), but then I passed this sign and decided to sit in the shade for a bit and cool off by some sprinklers, which in retrospect was absolutely the right decision.

I met Abby & Alec and loaded my bike in Abby’s minivan and we headed up to Leadville!

 

Someday I’d love to ride all the way to Leadville, but the elevation and road access makes it hard to do with limited time. The sights on the drive in are gorgeous though.

Abby & Alec live in Leadville with Jesse the dog. Leadville (aka the two mile high city), sits at over 10,000 feet above sea level and claims the title of highest incorporated city in the US. Despite getting to that elevation over the course of two days, I was really feeling it on my first day in town. I had to consciously focus on breathing whenever I stood up to walk around and would start to feel lightheaded if I didn’t. Sleeping was also difficult for the first couple nights, but after that my body started to adjust.

The first full day also had the added bonus of wildfire smoke hanging over the city. 

Despite all that, we went on some really sweet hikes & bike rides.

There are some awesome biking/hiking/running trails that leave right from town. Abby has a sweet fat tire e-bike (not pictured) and we swapped bikes when he hills were too much for my lungs.

Leadville has had a fair number of mining boom/bust cycles which have left the landscape around the city dotted with derelict mining infrastructure. They are a ton of fun to walk around and check out, like this old ore sorter.

Leadville also has a rich history of mining related labor disputes which you can read more about here. If you poke through that article you might notice that the assholes that helped the mine owners dismantle the miner’s union 130 years ago are the very same assholes that are helping Amazon do the same thing for their warehouse workers today. Neat!

While I was there it rained for the first time in 3 weeks and the clouds and sunset were incredible to watch.

Abby works at Melenzana, an outdoor clothing brand headquartered in downtown Leadville! Abby gave me a tour of their production process from giant rolls of fleece to finished products.

She also has this awesome embroidery machine that I took full advantage of.

The day after I left Leadville Abby sent me this surreal photo of a wildfire that broke out right where we had been hiking a few days earlier. As of writing (7 days later) the fire has burned over 3000 acres. Fortunately there haven’t been any injuries or fatalities, and property damage also seems minimal.

By this time in the trip my 30 day rail pass had expired, so I decided to treat myself to a sleeper room for the ride from Colorado to Chicago. Did it cost as much as all the rest of my train travel combined? Yes. Was it worth it? Also yes.

The “cheapest” standard sleeper option gets you a roomette, which is a small private room with a door and two wide comfy chairs. The chairs fold out into a bed and another bunk comes down from the ceiling.

 

This was my first time ever getting a sleeper room, and it was so much fun. Having a private space to be on the train that I could get comfy in was revolutionary as someone who’s only ever traveled in coach.

There’s even showers! It felt very silly trying to take a shower as the train is swaying back and forth and the water is sloshing around. The sleeper attendants do an amazing job of keeping everything really clean though which is nice.

There are also larger “Bedrooms” that can be booked for up to 3 people and come with a bathroom & shower in the room.

One of the biggest draws to the sleeper room is that you also get 3 meals a day in the dining car, which is separate from the observation/cafe car. You almost always get seated with strangers, which is fun.

The food was pretty decent too all things considered.

Here’s what the bed looked like all folded out. It’s a bit narrower than a twin, but plenty of room for me. I spoke to someone who was a bit over 6′ and he said it was a bit cramped but not too bad.

The views from this section of the California Zephyr are just incredible. The route snakes through canyons following the Colorado river.

There is apparently a tradition among rafters to moon the train as it passes. The conductor actually warned everyone about this just as we were getting into Colorado, and he was right. We spent around an hour and a half rolling through these gorgeous canyons and getting mooned almost the whole way.

 

It’s a bit hard to see, but those upside down L shaped posts hanging over the tracks are there to detect rock/ice fall. If something hits the wires the nearby signals automatically turn red and the train has to proceed extremely slowly so the engineers can see if anything has fallen on the tracks.

I’m pretty proud of this shot of the train with Denver in the background.

On the inside of the next bend Union Pacific created a wind break using old hopper cars. Apparently the winds here would get so strong that they could blow a train off the tracks. Union Pacific decided to build a new track on the inside, line up all these hopper cars filled with rocks, and weld them to the rails to create a wind break. Neat!

 

That’s where I’ll leave off for now! Colorado was incredibly beautiful, and there’s only a few days left of this trip to cover. 

In the last post I finished up in Oregon taking the train south towards California. Here’s the big picture view on where I am (at the start of this post) & where I’ve taken the train/biked so far. Next I’m heading to Berkeley then starting my journey back east.

The views coming through the Willamette pass were awesome, lots of pretty high mountain lakes. I was in the coach car at the end of the train so it was easy to walk back and sit at the rear of the train.

Being at the back of the train also means I got to see the front of the train coming around bends which was fun.

Freight trains are a pretty constant sight when taking long distance Amtrak trains.  Practically all of the track that Amtrak passes over is owned by one of five giant freight rail companies. Despite federal law saying otherwise, passenger trains are at the mercy of freight dispatchers and are often shunted to sidings to make room for 1+ mile long freight trains to pass by. These freight/passenger train conflicts are to blame for the majority of delays on Amtrak trains.

If you’re interested in the nerdy details Amtrak posts an annual host railroad report where they spend 13 pages roasting the worst offenders.

Snowsheds like this one protect the rails & trains from avalanches & rockfall in the mountains

The high desert sunset in eastern Oregon just north of Klamath falls.

I woke up a bit late the next morning to the sight of the Golden Gate bridge as we pulled into Oakland.

While in Oakland I stayed with my college friend Rhiannon & her girlfriend Emily. My  friends Adam & Candy were also coincidentally in town that weekend for a wedding with Candy’s dog Koda. We did a sweet hike that looked out over SF & the bay.

Koda & Tony became quick friends.

Rihannon is a part of this awesome community garage space in Oakland where she’s able to work on her bike.

While we were there I helped someone pull the engine out of their WRX which was a lot of fun.

We went to the West coast pinball museum where they have this super cool playable transparent pinball machine. 

I also got to see my cousin Isabel who’s working on her PhD at Berkely and working for NASA in the bay area.

Pretty flowers have become a theme for this trip and Berkely was no different.

While tooling around with Adam & Candy we got to see hang gliders flying around on the coast. They were suiting up, running off a nearby cliff, and gliding up on the strong wind that was coming off the ocean. It was wild to watch.

Candy grew up in the bay area and her mom graciously hosted us for dinner. After dinner we went for a roller-blade/ripstik adventure and Koda happily pulled me the whole way

The next day I got an early start heading out on the train heading east! This train is the California Zephyr, which goes from SF to Chicago. On this first leg i’m taking it to Colorado and getting off there for the week.

Right after leaving Oakland we went across this huge bridge which was especially fun in the observation car.

Out of SF the train heads east through Donner pass towards Reno.

 

 After Reno we rolled along through hundreds of miles of desert. This train does go though Salt Lake City, but it’s in the middle of the night.

There are a number of “fresh air breaks” along the way in small towns where the train holds for 10-20 minutes and everyone can get off and walk around outside a bit.

The next morning we were still in the desert, now in Utah and getting close to the border with Colorado.

One of the stations we stopped at for a fresh air break had this awesome old “Ski Amtrak” poster. As cool as this is, I think Winer Park is the only mountain mentioned on this poster that you could reasonably get to via Amtrak. Most of the rest are not that close to train stations, and some of them are really extremely far.

Usually the conductors are pretty quiet unless they are sharing logistical info, but this conductor actually slowed down the train and told everyone to look out on the left for this herd of elk!

After the desert we dipped down and started snaking along side the Colorado river.

This is where I’ll leave it for now, the Colorado river was gorgeous and there’s a lot more Colorado content to come!

When I left off we were in Oregon sleeping through a quite rainy night and hoping that the next day would be a bit drier.

Jan’s phone had fallen victim to yesterday’s rain and wasn’t turning on anymore, so with surgical precision he put it in a bag of rice for the day.

 

 

It rained on and off throughout the day but fortunately let up by the evening when we made camp.

I realized I haven’t shown much what camp has looked like. Most of the nights we were able to find some sort of established site, but this night we just camped in a pull-off on the side of a forestry road.

This pull-off was also inhabited by a nighthawk which spent most of the evening and morning putting on a show for us as it hunted insects, flying high overhead then dramatically swooping down and making a wild woosh/vroom sound.

Tony’s many legs make it easy for him to hold onto things we found along the way.

 

The next morning we resupplied in Detroit Oregon and started a long long climb, mostly up quiet forestry roads (that don’t look like this picture haha). 

This was far and away our most beautiful camp spot (#5 from the map in the last post). We were able to bike most of the way to this summit but had to hike the last half mile due to the number of trees that had blown down across the trail.

 

This is the opposite view from above, I believe Mt. Hood is in the foreground and either Mt. St. Helens or Rainier is in the background.

The main attraction was staring at Mt. Jefferson.

The fire watch cabin at the summit was very pretty, although it was a bit moldy and some mice had already taken up residence.

We decided instead to cowgirl camp under the stars.

The view from our sleeping bags.

 

When we woke up the dew from the previous night had frozen into a surprisingly thick later of ice on our sleeping bags. Fortunately the sun quickly warmed and dried everything out.

Jan staging an emergency picnic

The first few miles of the day were gorgeous single track through a burn zone

…and the rest of the day was a long gravely decent.

Three more friends, Emmet, John and Tom, drove up from Portland (Oregon) to meet up with us for the last 3 days of the trip.

The forecast for the final few days was dry and progressively getting hotter and hotter, up to the 90s for our final day.

 

Emmet, Jan, Landis and I took a fun trail detour on the second to last day, which involved some very narrow singletrack trails with a steep drop off on one side, which was quite hard to capture on camera.

We did a fair bit of walking our bikes through the spookiest sections

The day ended with an incredible long paved decent down some paved switchbacks.

 

On the final morning we had a short, uphill road section and then a short trail section, and then that was it! We relaxed by the Clackamas river and then drove to Portland (Oregon).

Back in Portland (Oregon) I spent most of the week recovering from the big big bike trip and hanging out with friends.

We took a swim in the Willamette river and watched a guy reel in a 50lb sturgeon!

During this week in Portland I stayed with my good college buddy Emmett (two t’s, not pictured). He took a day off of work and we biked on a beautiful rail trail that went over this huge wooden trestle.

After an awesome nearly 3 weeks in Oregon I got back on train and headed down towards SF! Lots more pictures to come but that’s where I’ll leave it for now.

Except for this one extra pictures of another group of cyclists gearing up for their own adventure biking across Oregon.

….and a final shot out the back of the train.

It’s been a bit since my last post! I’ve spent the past two weeks in Oregon soaking up everything this state has to offer. I was in Portland (Oregon) for a few days hanging with friends, relaxing, and prepping my bike and gear for a big ride in the woods that I just got back from. I’m going to break the Oregon content up into two (or more?) posts because there’s so much to see and talk about.

Portland (Oregon)

For the first half of my time in Portland I stayed with my friend Matt, his fiancé Erin, Basil their dog and Ash the cat. All Basil wants to do is heard other dogs, and defend their house from intruders (me).

Matt’s neighborhood is full of gorgeous flowers, it seems like practically everyone had something beautiful growing in their front yard.

Matt works at Nike who coincidentally had their company-wide field day a couple days after I got to town. It was a wild event on their huge campus with over 10,000 attendees. There were multiple sport events including an invitational employee track meet where someone ran a 3:59 mile 🤯

The big ride!

Here’s (one of) the main events for this trip! A bikepacking trip through the mountains in Oregon from Bend to just outside Portland. I did this ride with Jan & Landis, two good friends from Portland (Maine) who have lots of experience living off of a bike and riding on rough trails. Even with all that experience this route threw some new and challenging things at us, and was overall a super fun and rewarding experience. 

Here’s the map of our route, with our camp spots each day marked out. For the last 3 nights we did a big loop with 3 more friends who drove up from Portland to meet us. This route combines a handful of established off-road bike routes to create something that worked for us. All credit to Jan & Landis for coming up with this route & plan. I’d estimate about 25% of the ride was on single track trails, and about 5-10% was on paved roads, with the rest being double track/gravel/forest roads. 

One question we kept getting early on in our trip was “how far are you going?”, and truth be told we didn’t really know how long the route was. It ended up being around 340 miles and somewhere around 30k feet of elevation gain. Each day was between 30-50 miles of riding, which isn’t too much by bike riding standards but the elevation and terrain made them all full days.

We were all super excited to get going on day 1. The weather apps were giving us this symbol featuring every possible weather condition,

and the apps were absolutely right. Cold temps at higher elevations meant we had to nix our initial plan to camp up high and instead keep riding farther on the route to camp at a lower elevation.

I was also battling the tail end of a cold which combined with allergies and made these first few days a bit more difficult.  

Jan and Landis’ enthusiasm kept my spirits up, combined with absolutely stunning scenery right out of the gate. As we climbed into the mountains on day 1 we passed a series of gorgeous waterfalls.

  Jan showing Tony the Octopus a waterfall.

The trail conditions on this first day, and really the whole trip, blew away our expectations. The trails were definitely challenging, but they were a far cry from the rooty rocky trails we were used to in the northeast. 

As we reached the top of our climb for the day we entered a burn zone where a forest fire came through about 10 years ago. This was a surreal landscape to bike through, especially in the alternating sunny then snowy conditions.

Starting day 2 on forestry roads..

…then some rougher steep trails.

Jan w/Mount Washington (Oregon) in the background

We descended a long a section of the Santiam wagon road, an old migratory/trading path for settlers. This “road” was sketchy on bicycles, I have no idea how people took wagons up and down it. 

We popped into in a campground mid-morning that had fresh baked goods!

Riding with a cold was starting to catch up to me, so I skipped a large technical trail section and opted for a smooth road that led to the hot springs we were staying at on night 3. Jan and Landis showed up a few hours later soaking wet, muddy, and with big smiles.

This is where I’ll end this first update. At this point we’re at the 3rd camp spot on the map above. There’s lots more to share, but I’ve got to go catch a train!

It’s been a week since the last update and a lot has happened! Almost all of the last week was spent in Washington State, here’s some of what that looked like:

Before he got off in Montana I snapped a pic of Danny with his hitchhiking sign. He’s used this exact sign to hitchhike over 30,000 miles and was, in fact, not a weirdo.

Although the Empire Builder (Amtrak’s name for this route) passes right through glacier national park, that section of the route is done almost entirely at night unfortunately. When I woke up I walked to the back of the train and took this shot of the sunrise in eastern Washington.

In Spokane the Empire Builder usually splits in half, with the back half of the train (including the observation car & cafe) heading down to Portland and the front half heading to Seattle. 

At some point in the night, however, a freight train had been blown over en route to Spokane from Portland, and the derailment meant that the entire Empire Builder would go to Seattle. Folks who were headed to Portland would be re-routed on a Seattle to Portland train.

The upshot of all this is that I got the rare opportunity to see the columbia river gorge and the north cascades through the huge windows of the observation car. 

We took this really tight curve and had a pretty incredible view of the front of the train from the back.

The low angle sun created this cool train silhouette shadow.

Entering day 4 of being on the train I was starting to get pretty tired. Even still, it was hard to not appreciate these views of the columbia river.

On the final stretch into Seattle along the puget sound. 

We got some fun train reflections pulling into town.

Made it to Seattle!

I spent the weekend in Seattle visiting some good friends from college including Duffy, pictured here with Tony.

And Henk and Anna, who just got engaged!

And Lindsay, who met up with us for a long day ride.

We also did some hiking to a scenic alpine lake…

…which involved some mild snow traversal that I had not really packed for.

After closing out a lovely weekend, I met up with another college friend, Linus, and we embarked on an overnight bikepacking trip in…

…Mt. Rainier National Park! This view of the mountain towering over everything really never got old, and also never felt normal. It always seemed like this surreal presence on the horizon.

Many threatening signs made it seem like we should definitely not go over this bridge which had been deemed structurally unstable.

So instead we scrambled down under the bridge to a trail which ended up being quite rough. The next day we ran into a ranger who told us (in an unofficial capacity) that we should have just gone over the bridge.

We made our way up river towards our chosen campground, but on the way learned that the road to the campground had washed out in multiple places…

…and that we’d be better off camping at this abandoned ranger station. This ended up being a real blessing because it was already getting pretty late by the time we got here.

That ranger station was right next to the Carbon river, which we spent the next morning biking back down.

We must have passed half a dozen skate parks during these two days out on our bikes. This one was definitely the most creative though.

After a very scenic ride long lush rail trails Linus and I parted ways and I biked to the Tacoma Amtrak station to catch a train down to Portland (Oregon).

Portland’s beautiful 130 year old union station fortunately survived the downturn of passenger rail in the US in the 70s, and is among the busiest Amtrak stations in the system. 

Fun fact: The house I live in in Portland (Maine) is 20 years older than this building! 

That’s where I’ll leave off for now! I’m currently in Portland (Oregon) prepping for a multi-day bikepacking adventure in the mountains and won’t get to post another update for a couple weeks. Thanks for reading!

I’m writing from sunny Wheelock North Dakota rolling along past endless farmland punctuated by the occasional small town or piece of oil field infrastructure. I’m 3/4ths of the way through crossing the US by train and it’s been a whirlwind. Here’s some of what the past 72 hours have looked like:

Zipping through Connecticut on what will be the fastest (and only electrified) train of the whole trip, the northeast regional, which tops out at ~125mph. This view out the back of the last car is one of my favorites.

The first long distance train on this journey is the Lake Shore Limited from NYC to Chicago. The first section along the hudson is gorgeous.

In Albany the Lake Shore Limited from NYC is combined with a section from Boston. This involves spinning the NYC section around and linking it to the Boston section. During this layover I successfully convinced some guys from the RPI frisbee team to bring me food from a really good Mediterranean place near campus, in exchange for buying them some. The food on the amtrak trains is generally pretty mediocre so this was a welcome change.

 

This is what a coach seat on an Amtrak long distance train gets you! The seats are wide and recline pretty far. When you have the whole row to yourself it’s not too hard to sprawl out and get comfy.

One of the first sights of the second day: Toledo union station. Like many other stations across the US it’s a shell of it’s former self. Despite having 7 platforms it now only serves 2 trains a day in each direction.

I had a ~4 hour layover in Chicago and spent most of it with my friend Patrick biking around…

…and going for a dip before getting on the next long distance train, the Empire Builder, which runs from Chicago to Portland/Seattle.

After getting back on the train I met two guys in the observation car (pictured below) both name Danny. Danny on the right lived in one of neighborhoods I grew up playing in as a kid. We also happened to have worked on the same construction project in mid-town manhattan. Small world!

Danny on the left is a recently retired addiction counselor from the Adirondacks and regaled us with endless anecdotes about hitchhiking all over the US. If you’ve ever seen someone hitchhiking with a sign that reads “not a weirdo” it was probably Danny. After two hours of chatting he had recommended no less than a dozen genuinely interesting seeming books/movies/podcasts.

The observation car sits in the middle of the train and has floor to ceiling windows, and a cafe downstairs.

As the sun set on day 2 a huge storm rolled through and left some wild looking clouds that I could hardly capture on camera.

A few times a day there are “fresh air breaks” where they let everyone get off the train and stretch their legs.

I’ll close out this post with some cool sights from today so far

The Bike:

“It is, objectively, not a good bike”

 

I’m riding what I think is a 2017 Fuji Nevada that I got from a friend a few years ago, with a smattering of random parts. The only two things that are original to the bike are the frame and cranks. Here are some of my favorite bits:

• 3×11 with a really really low granny gear
• Internally routed dropper seat post 🙂
• Slightly swept flat bars & aero bars that don’t really fit on the handlebars but fit with my arms/body really well
• Rear rack tang mounted titanium water bottle cage because it makes Gordon mad (and has actually worked pretty well so far 🤞🏻)

The Stuff:

 

Here’s (almost) everything I’m bringing! Happy to dive into more detail if folks are curious, but here are some best bits:

• Maybe my only truly brand new piece of gear, a MH nimbus 2 that I can’t wait to actually sleep in
• 30 degree EE quilt that I’m borrowing from rachel that will be so cozy
• Caturday cat ears

Here are the bags & stuff I didn’t want on my bed. I made the stem bags & bar bag (with help from Landis), and Jan made the lovely fork bags that I will treasure forever <3.

Not pictured but coming: Chain lube, extra bike bottle, extra tube

Pictured but not coming: Hacksaw

 

Thanks for reading! The last thing that’s coming with me is Tony the octopus, everybody say hi Tony