by Jess Evans
June 5, 2018
The Great Divide Bike Race starts the first Friday in June. It is a 2700+ mile unsupported bike race from Banff, Alberta, Canada to Antelope Wells, New Mexico, USA. The route follows mostly forest service roads with some pavement and some single track. The winning time on this mountain bike route is less than 14 days set by Mike Hall in 2016. Sadly, Mike Hall was struck by a car and killed in Australia last year while riding across Australia in another unsupported bike race.
While it took Mike Hall and many other racers less than 20 days to complete the entire distance, I have been on the route twice, and have only completed 2/3rds of it. In 2015, I rode with two friends from Banff, Alberta to Butte, Montana. In 12 days, I rode 707 miles and met people from all over the US and the world doing the route. We briefly met the Israeli and the German who came into the Canadian diner just as we were leaving, in the lead of the pack. We encountered a few times the Loud Swiss and the Quiet Kiwi traveling together through Canada. There were the two Italians who only work long enough to support the cost of their next bike ride. There was the Oklahoma man who dislocated his arm trying to ride down a steep, gravel section I struggled walking down with my bike. There was the lady from New York who hated biking, but was there to prove a point. There was the young kid from Washington State who grew up in Colorado mountain biking and loved the idea of traveling nearly alone through the Rocky Mountains. The personalities and reasons for biking this route seemed endless, although it was only about 150 people in total. We started one day ahead of the main pack, which gave us a chance to talk to many of the racers as they passed us.
In 2016, I started in Butte, Montana (picking up where I left off the previous year) and rode to Hartsel, Colorado doing some of it by myself and other sections with friends. This time I was out for 14 days and rode 1093 miles. I had started this section just a few days before the official race in Banff began and over 700 miles south. It would take a while for the leaders of the 2016 race to catch me. This time, it was much more solitary for me. I spoke to few people and crossed paths with bike riders going north on the route past me. The TransAm race, an unsupported road bike race across the US from west to east, had started and some of the paved roads on the Great Divide Route overlapped with the TransAm Route. I met and rode next to Leal Wilcox, the woman who won the TransAm in 2016, for a mile or two in Wyoming. As I traveled along in Colorado, I met riders doing the TransAm in Kremmiling, Colorado and later Dillion, Colorado. A man making a music film of his journey on the route passed me in Colorado going north just south of Breckinridge. I still have the last 900 miles to go. I am trying to work that last section into my future plans.
I would recommend to everyone to take the time to bike pack this route, or any route, to really experience the joy of being “out there” in our beautiful world. Not to sound too cliché, but it is an adventure of a life time.
