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Bikes Beers Bluegrass (B3) Lost River is a weekend-long gathering of Mid-Atlantic cyclists centered around a non-competitive gravel ride that focuses on casual cycling. Andy Karr attended B3 for the first time after years of prioritizing other local, racing-oriented events instead and was left wondering, “What was I thinking all those years?” Continue reading below for Andy’s recap, supported by a wonderful mix of analog and digital photography!
When I first started gathering the necessary gear to give bike touring (or “bikepacking” in the parlance of our times) a go, the concept struck me as an opportunity to escape from the predictable, mundane, “rinse-and-repeat” order of everyday life. An opportunity to embrace a new kind of freedom of aimless wandering through paths and tracks out in the near-endless natural landscape. After a couple of trips, though, I found the reality of touring isn’t the carefree meander I had envisioned. It can involve weeks or months of planning, trail markers, GPS tracks, resupply points… Which is not to say that escaping on a multi-day trip isn’t freeing, it is – very much so – but maybe not in the conventional sense of the word. I think author Robert Moor says it best in his written exploration of travel, On Trails:
“But complete freedom, it turned out, is not what the trail offers. Quite the opposite – a trail is a tactful reduction of options. The freedom of the trail is riverine, not oceanic. To put it as simply as possible, a path is a way of making sense of the world. There are infinite ways to cross a landscape; but the options are overwhelming, and pitfalls abound. The function of the path is to reduce this teeming chaos into an intelligible line.”
The Adventure Cycling Association just announced five new U.S. Bicycle Routes in four states – Maryland, New York, North Dakota and West Virginia – plus Washington, D.C., adding 290 miles to the U.S. Bicycle Route System (USBRS). Check out a breakdown of each of the four-state routes below.
