EPISODE 55
Maps and Miles: Connections Beyond Borders
Israel or Palestine? Damascus, Syria or Damascus, Virginia? West Virginia or Western Virginia? To David Landis, all are points on a map. David has made it his mission to find shared humanity across borders, even in conflict zones like the Middle East, through hiking and bikepacking trails. Having first visited the Middle East for a semester abroad during his university studies, David returned there to live for almost a decade. During his travels in the region, David experienced the incredible kindness of people he met, with several becoming lifelong friends. He’s also felt the sorrow of having some of those friends or their relatives killed in violent episodes that continue throughout the Middle East. As someone who has tried long-distance hiking, bicycle touring, and bikepacking racing (surviving waist-deep snow and concrete-like “death mud” on the grueling Tour Divide), David has come to the conclusion that, somehow, it’s all about the people and building trails that connect them.
Episode Transcript
David: I think for me, it made me realize, like, why do I do what I do? Why do I care about trails? Why do I care about bike routes? And I think for me it’s like they give us a way to cross over a boundary, to meet a person who may not be like us and to find the humanity in them.
Gabriel: You just heard David Landis, whose aspirations to become a physician took a turn during a university semester of study and travel in the Middle East. What began as a week-long hiking trip in the Holy Land that semester has evolved into a decades-long career spent creating, researching, and mapping hiking and bikepacking routes. After graduation, David cycled from Greece to Germany with two friends during a year-long, human-powered, around-the -world trip. Later, he completed the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route twice, first as a bikepacker and later as a Tour Divide racer. In today’s episode, David will be our guide as we discovered trails in the Middle East where David lived for 10 years and learned about new exciting bikepacking routes and races that David has designed in his own backyard, a corner of the Appalachian Mountains that includes parts of Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Regardless of the location, David always has the same goal in mind, connecting hikers and bicycle travelers with people and places beyond borders.
Sandra: You’re listening to The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello bicycle touring enthusiasts! Welcome to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. I am pleased to announce that today’s guest, David Landis, is another podcast connection, this time recommended by Alden Roth from the “Diving into the Silk Road Mountain Race” episode. I can see why Alden thought that David would be a great guest. David has traveled internationally extensively and has lived in the Middle East for a decade. He is also passionate about creating and mapping hiking and cycling trails to the point that he has published guides to the Camino de Santiago and other popular routes. And while David has put together an impressive list of experiences and achievements, Alden assures me that there is an accidental element to all of it. David Landis, thank you for being a guest on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
David: Thank you so much for having me today. I’m excited to find out what accidental parts of my experience have come out in this conversation.
Gabriel: Yeah. Well, first I have to get two questions out of the way. One, are you related to Floyd Landis, the former professional cyclist?
David: It’s a good question. I’ve gotten this a number of times over the years. So not directly that I know of. My dad’s from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in a town called Landisville, actually, where there are a number of Landis from a Mennonite background. So I think potentially we’re some long lost cousins. I do actually believe I knew some of his first cousins when I was growing up that live nearby, but no, not directly.
Gabriel: Sounds like maybe a distant relative.
David: Maybe.
Gabriel: Which is closer than I thought.
David: Potentially, yeah. My family way back would have come to the US from Switzerland, Zurich area, Swiss-German origins. They were Mennonites and went to the Americas to escape religious persecution, started farming communities in Pennsylvania, and lived there for generations. So they would have come to the US in, I think, the 1700s.
Gabriel: Floyd is Mennonite background as well.
David: Correct. So it would have been the same ethnic group, regardless.
Gabriel: Very interesting. Question number two. Alden is from West Virginia and you grew up in Virginia. Is there a huge rivalry between the two?
David: Yeah, so I actually live in Western Virginia, I like to say. I was born in Virginia. I grew up between Virginia and Pennsylvania and ended up back in Virginia. So Alden lives about an hour and a half drive from me, just up the Shenandoah Valley. A rivalry? I don’t know. There’s great riding in both. I think the western side of Virginia is the best side. And honestly, I think the riding in West Virginia is even a little bit more spectacular, because it’s a little more remote, bigger mountains and all. We live about a 40-kilometer bike ride from the state line. So our big rides will go over the mountains into West Virginia and back.
Gabriel: Sounds like you might be a West Virginian at heart.
David: That’s a good question. The people in West Virginia think I live there. The people in Pennsylvania think I live there. I’ve been on the road so much these last couple of years, developing these bikepacking route networks for specific regions, mostly in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. And it’s really neat to see how folks come together. I think we don’t really see the state lines here as much as some people do, because it’s more interesting for us to go across the border, I think, than to be defined by it. That’s a big part of what I’m trying to sort of promote through my work with mapping routes and building that community that connects folks across all those different places.
Gabriel: That makes me curious to know how you actually did meet Alden.
David: That’s a good question. I met him at an event called the Gravel Race Up Spruce Knob. Spruce Knob is the highest mountain peak in West Virginia. I think this is the summer. So Alden, I had never met him before. I think he was on his first major bikepacking trip for this event. It was a grand depart style, I think probably a 300 mile route, about him is he had so much weight on his bike. He had this kind of heavy steel hardtail with, I don’t know, I want to say something like 35, 40 kilograms of weight, which is, you know, if you’re touring around the world, that’s…
Gabriel: That’s on the light side.
David: Yeah, that’s fine, right? But if you’re going for a race in the high mountains, he just had so much stuff. You know, I just tried to figure it out, like, “What are you doing? What’s your plan?” He said he’s racing the Silk Road. I was like, “You should drop like half of that weight, or you’re going to feel it the whole time.” So we started talking and flip-flopped back and forth that last day. And then we stayed in touch and then eventually started working, collaborating together on different projects. And he’s been doing a lot of film and photography, helping to promote the routes I’ve been working on, and become good friends. So yeah, we see each other pretty often. We were all just in Philadelphia for the Philly Bike Expo, which is a big trade show and a good place to highlight and promote all of these different experiences and connect with people.
Gabriel: Oh.
David: That’s how I met Alden. That’s how I meet most of these people on bike rides. Bike rides and trails. People that become lifelong friends, people that I become project and business partners with. It’s usually like when you’re out there on the road, you just run into people who have the same interests and the same goals.
Gabriel: Yeah, or complementary interests.
David: Or complementary. Yeah, exactly.
Gabriel: As a side note, I think I was invited to participate in this West Virginia… What was it called?
David: The Gravel Race Up Spruce Knob. GRUSK.
Gabriel: Exactly. GRUSK. The organizers from GRUSK said, “We listened to your episode with Alden. And if you are ever in West Virginia and want to do this ride…”
David: You should definitely come.
Gabriel: I just think, oh gosh.
David: That region, it’s a great place to ride. In the next week or so, we’re about to publish a gravel and bikepacking route network. For this region, it’s like nine counties. I think we’ll put out probably 40-some day rides and about 15 bikepacking routes that map connections between these 12 small towns that are kind of gateways to the national forest. The Monongahela National Forest is about a million acres, which is a pretty big, big area, and it would take a few hours to drive a car across it. It’s amazing for riding because there’s just tons and tons of unpaid roads. It’s all public land, so you can camp just almost anywhere as long as you’re off a road or off private property. Where I grew up here in Virginia, it’s kind of been our playground to go ride bikes. It’s just over the mountain. Like I said, that 25 miles, 40k, and then you’re up on the top of the mountain. Then all of that is predominantly public land, national forest. So I’m super excited that we’re about ready to push that one out. And so the organizer of GRUSK, Travis Olson, is also part of that project and has been helping to put it together. And that event’s been kind of West Virginia’s bikepacking gravel festival to bring all the folks together and then do a bunch of different rides. So yeah, it’s the second weekend of July each year, so there’s still time. If you want to get out there, encourage anybody else listening to try to get there.
Gabriel: Yeah, it sounds like a great event. I would love to get there, but living in Europe and having two small kids, my free time to go biking in the United States is about zero.
David: Yeah, it’s kind of a complicated time to come ride in the US too.
Gabriel: Oh, definitely. Yeah, that was an extensive answer to the rivalry question, but we touched on some interesting things. I want to get back to the accidental aspects that Alden was alluding to. You were on a very different career path. I think that’s what this has to do with.
David: So yeah, initially in college, I was on track to become a medical doctor. I was planning to go to school for that. I was studying biology and I went to a small liberal arts college in Virginia, Eastern Mennonite University, again with the Mennonite connection. They have this requirement that all students study for a semester outside of the US, which was pretty novel, especially 20 years ago. It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years, but yeah, they had a variety of different programs throughout the world. And one of those was a semester broad in the Middle East. And my dad had actually done this program in the ’70s. So I kind of heard about things in the Middle East and it was fascinating to me. So I decided, I think it was my third year of college, to take a break in a way. Choosing to spend a semester in the Middle East started to alter my track, like it was a little bit less focused. So I spent a semester there. We stayed a lot within Palestinian and Israeli communities and it was in the middle of the Second Intifada, which was at that time a very tense time and kind of broke out. There’s been a whole series of different conflict periods that go way back and continue as we speak. That experience really impacted me and just sort of saying like, wow, like the world is way more complex and maybe there’s other things I want to explore in my life personally, professionally. And this academic / career track I was on was also like a 10-year process in US. It’s different than some other places where you have college, medical school, residency. It’s a decade more until you’re basically able to be on your own, working even. Travelling really challenged that for me. I did like a week-long backpacking trip on that experience and that was, also a number of accidental things happened where I don’t know, we were surrounded by hyenas or coyotes or something one night and you know, the Israeli military ran through our camp one night. And every day was just crazy and weird, and I think it kind of like opened up my sense of adventure even more. I’d been camping and hiking and exploring in Virginia, rock climbing, caving, cycling a bit. But upon graduation, I decided I wasn’t going to keep going to medical school. I decided I’m going to travel. So I’m trying to imagine what’s the most epic trip I could have. I was sort of watching these around-the-world travelers and this was 2004, 2004-2005. So there wasn’t really even many blogs on the internet. It was kind of when the internet was just coming out, I think Facebook had just opened up to like universities only or something. MySpace was kind of a thing. Yeah, I found a trail journal of a hiker, an Israeli guy actually, that had hiked the full trail of the section I had hiked and I decided, hey, you know, maybe I’d like to go back and do that. We became connected through email, became friends. So I wanted to go back to the Middle East. I wanted to see Central and South America, Asia, rest of Europe. So planned out this trip with one of my college friends and it was a mix of travel by public bus and train. But also it had a couple months of backpacking, like through hiking, long distance trails, backpacking in India and Nepal, and the Himalayas through some of those famous routes like up to Mount Everest Base Camp and things like that. We had a plan to ride bikes from Greece to Germany through Eastern Europe, like through the Balkans, not that far after some of the, you know, the war periods and like Bosnia had a lot of landmines still there and Kosovo wasn’t a country yet. A lot of different things than we see now.
Gabriel: The bicycling part, how did you switch modes? You just bought some bicycles?
David: Actually, had friends come and visit while we were in the Middle East, and then brought a bicycle for me. Another, a third friend joined and he flew two bicycles to Athens. But my bicycle actually came and flew into Israel to Tel Aviv. And then I had a professor who was doing this sabbatical journey to sail all the routes of Saint Paul in the Mediterranean. So he bought a sailboat. He was out there for actually like two years. He invited me and my friend to help crew his boat from Ashkelon, which is just north of the Gaza Strip within the Israeli part, up to Cyprus and up to Turkey, sail the Turkish coast and into Greece. So we were on that boat for a month. So my bike came over, got disassembled, put it in the hull of the boat and sailed through the Med for a month. And then we got to Greece. Another friend came. We put all three bikes together and then we took off. Yeah, I think it was about two and a half months we were out traveling on bikes. Just kind of took the equipment I had for backpacking on this longer journey, you know, adapted it to the bike and then converted it back in the end. But I had learned a lot. That was after hiking for a month in the Middle East and I had, like, cut my weight of my gear, probably in half. You really start to realize what you don’t need when you have to carry it all, especially on your body, I think.
Gabriel: It’s kind of interesting. How did you or maybe it was your friend get the idea to even do this bicycle leg in this journey?
David: How did we get the…? I think we wanted to just try to travel in all the different ways we could. We liked being kind of human-powered and it was kind of fun. I broke a couple wheels the first week. I remember I got this old Schwinn steel bike. It wasn’t a touring bike. I didn’t really know what I was doing.
Gabriel: Okay.
David: And I had all the weight and panniers in the back and I remember just coming down some big mountains in Greece and spokes popped in the braking force.
Gabriel: One by one, popping.
David: Once one goes, then, you know, everything’s going out of balance and we didn’t have the tool to remove the cassette. So like we kind of hobbled the bike into some small little town and found the replacement wheel. But that one wasn’t quite strong enough. So a few days later, similar thing happened. And then I remember we found some really amazing wheel builder like near Thessaloniki, Greece, that like just sort of put together a super-strong rear wheel for my bike. And then we was good for a long, long time. I don’t know, it’s like that when those worst case scenarios happen, like my wheel breaks, right? It’s like my passport was stolen Argentina. Super stressful for me on that trip. But then once you figure out how to get a new passport in the process, it’s like, okay, that doesn’t stress me out anymore. It’s a pain and you feel super-frustrated, but, you know, you get through it.
Gabriel: What exactly was your route?
David: It wasn’t a very direct route. We, we criss-crossed all the countries. There wasn’t Google Maps really at this point. We didn’t have internet. We didn’t know how to get off the big paved roads sometimes, so we’d go to like a little like what, tobacco kiosk places like Macedonia and be like, Hey, you know, do you have a map? So we’d pull out some big highway map, which just didn’t have a lot of detail. The writing’s all in Cyrillic, kind of learned how to read that. So we could read road signs and just kind of aim at the next place and you know, see what happened. And I remember the first day out of Athens, we rode to Marathon. We’re like, Marathon’s interesting. That’s where the event comes from, this 43-kilometer run. So like, let’s ride to Marathon. So we just followed the signs and slept out on the coast in Marathon that night. And the next night we ended up meeting some heavy metal Greek band, I think at a town park or something.
Gabriel: Okay.
David: And they decided to host us that evening and brought in food and drinks. And we stayed up all night kind of with them. And just every night, something new would happen. And, you know, we didn’t always know the language. We didn’t even know how to count. It was so many different languages. You know, if you’re hungry, you figure out how to eat. And if you look hungry, usually someone sees that and offers you something. And that’s, that’s what I’ve learned so much through traveling is that, you know, whether you’re on a foot or you’re on a bicycle, you’re at the mercy of the people around you. Like you plan to be self-sufficient and safe as much as you can. But you’re a lot more approachable, I think, by local people, by families, by communities. And especially if you get off the beaten track to places where not many people are bike touring or hiking through, you’re more of a novelty. And folks are really curious and confused, also, usually by you. But there’s something about the bicycle that I think is disarming. You don’t look like you’re just out for trouble. Like you’ve come with a bicycle with some reason, right? I found more and more invitations, especially while bike touring, even than hiking. I had a lot of that same experience on the hiking trails too. But I think, yeah, that experience of riding across Eastern Europe that summer really opened it up for me, like this is the way I want to travel. Like if you’re walking like that’s cool, it’s simple. You don’t have any equipment, but it’s so slow, right? You’re not covering so much ground. You’re getting like deeper into a place and you can get further up into the mountains easier. But I like to cover more ground. In Europe, you can ride across a country in like a week versus a month to walk it. I really like that. I really like this experience of like all the weight of your gear is on the bike and not on your body compared to backpacking. So at the end of the day on the bike, like I get off the bike, I’ve been sitting all day, I want to get up and walk around. I want to walk around town. I want to see what’s going on. And I really liked that as well. I loved like never having to get a taxi to get anywhere. Like you always have your own transportation.
Gabriel: That’s true.
David: You have to worry about the security of the bike, and it getting stolen, which is a bit of a hassle in a lot of places. I really, really loved it. And then we got to Berlin a couple months later and my one friend shipped my bike home with him. And then I took a flight into Istanbul and then into New Delhi, into India. And I really did miss the bike. I kind of actually like wished I had it with me. I would have loved to ride around India and it would have been crazy, but people do all kinds of crazy things, right? That kind of opened my mind to cycling. After that trip wrapped up and I went back to the US, I lived there for about a year with my parents, kind of working, saving money. And I had sold my car to partially fund this trip. It wasn’t a lot of money. It wasn’t, you know, a very expensive trip because of how I traveled, but I just rode my bike everywhere. So like after I was like, I can ride across Europe. Of course I can ride around the area I grew up in, right? So I’d ride two hours to a meeting for work and I’d ride back. I rode over 10,000 miles that first year back, like 16,000k.
Gabriel: Wow.
David: Just as transportation. And then after that, I went back a lot to long distance hiking as well. And I moved to the Middle East a year later and got involved in developing hiking trails there. I did some cycling, but not quite as much as multi-day long-distance hiking and developing those kinds of experiences.
Gabriel: Getting back to the trail in Israel. So what was this person’s name, the person that you wrote to and got to know because they’ll come into the picture later again?
David: His name was Maoz Inon. He grew up on a small farming community in the south, like kibbutz, if you’re familiar with kibbutz. It’s kind of like a communal farm, sort of socialist movement. He had just traveled twice around the world. They all have to do a military service, which he said was the worst part of his life except that he met his wife, Rahmet. He was trying to figure out what he wanted to do. He was also trying to figure out how to build a better world. And in the midst of this conflict, he had witnessed growning up, he wanted to start a backpacker hostel in a Palestinian community and approached it in a very humble way and treated this place in the city of Nazareth. Maoz and I connected and we became good friends. He had a big heart, an open mind, and he had this vision to create a hiking trail that connected places from the life of Jesus as shown in the Bible in the New Testament. A secular Israeli guy. I was kind of mostly secular guy with Mennonite roots, but trying to figure out a way that we could recreate this experience for visitors and people in an area, like we had had all over the world where we were welcomed into random strangers’ homes and shown kindness and how that brought people together, connected people, and also really helped develop kind of sustainable economy for local communities, where you take people out of the big cities and the big sites and you spread travelers throughout these small rural communities, that can have a really positive economic impact on those places and give people a reason to stay living there and find jobs, do homestays, guides, all kinds of things. So we started working on this trail project together and I figured out a route from Nazareth to the Sea of Galilee. It was like a four-day walk. We published it on the website, made a press release, sent it out there and soon like magazines and journalists were knocking on our doors and people started showing up. They were really curious because a lot of people go on these like pilgrimage tours to the Holy Land, but they basically sit in this bus, air conditioned, separated from the local people. They get driven to this holy site, they walk out and they come back. You know, so our motto with this project like, “Jesus didn’t take the bus, why should you?”
Gabriel: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.
David: It kind of took off though. Associated Press ran stories on it, got published in Lonely Planet, all the travel guides and it was in New York Times, Backpacker Magazine. It became pretty well known and it also opened up a lot of other opportunities for me. I mean, Maoz was involved in a whole bunch of tourism things there, but for me like it also got me connected to a variety of trail projects. So a number of Palestinian groups in the West Bank reached out and they were curious, could we do this with a hiking trail on Ramallah? Or could we connect the north to the south of the West Bank with this trail. And later I got involved in other initiatives trying to map out like a 2000-kilometer trail across the entire region. And I spent a lot of time working moreso in Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, later into Iraq, spent some time in Syria, Lebanon and really worked what became 10 years of my life developing long-distance hiking trails in the Middle East that connected communities for economic development and what the funders like to say, social cohesion, like a reason for people to get to know each other and build a better society. So we did a pretty large project in the Palestinian West Bank, which is now emerged to something called the Palestinian Heritage Trail, which connects 20 or 30 communities, a whole homestay network, a local guide training program, the first-ever Palestinian licensed trekking guide program. We kind of came out of that project in wilderness first aid for Palestinian guides and a number of things. I mean, tourism there is right now, it’s basically impossible. And like my friend, Maoz, I actually was able to see him a few weeks ago. He had incredibly tragic thing happen to his life where on October 7th a few years ago, the start of kind of the last big conflict wave between Hamas and Israel, his parents were killed. They lived very close to the Gaza Strip and they were basically killed in that first initiative.
Gabriel: On the big October 7th?
David: The first hour of the event.
Gabriel: That is really tragic.
David: So his parents were close friends of ours. We had actually stayed in their home while we wrote our first Camino guidebook, my wife Anna and I. And so this hit us all super hard. They were kind of like extended family there, you know. We all knew the first big wave and then the aftermath of Israel’s response to that and just decimating the Gaza Strip. And so for Maoz, who’s someone who had put a lot of time into tourism, he switched his mind set that, okay, now we’re not going to really have sustainable tourism until we have a peaceful solution between Israelis and Palestinians. And his response, of course, massive grief and his initial frustration was towards his government for creating this unsustainable reality for all the people of the region, Israelis and Palestinians. It’s been a process for him, where he partnered with a Palestinian guy from East Jerusalem whose brother had been killed in Israeli prison and they became super close. They wrote a book together over the last few years and they’re starting a book tour. It’s called The Future is Peace. And his entire life’s mission now is how can we find the humanity in each other? And then can we collectively see each other, you know, as humans? And then, I guess, put pressure on the bigger political system to start working for change? But from his perspective, we don’t have peace, we can’t have tourism. He’s got probably one of the biggest hearts and kind of person I’ve ever met and the kind of person who says, I can forgive the people who killed my family because we all have to get beyond this hate and the cycle of violence and find a way to live together. I encourage you to check out his story, if you get a chance to, it’s had a big impact on me in my life as well and it’s sort of how I got into trails. But also, I think when this happened, I knew, like, I felt super sad for him and his family, his siblings and his parents were friends. But also, like, you know, your heart breaks, because you know what’s going to happen next. It’s a cycle of violence. The Israeli government basically just didn’t hold anything back on the Gaza Strip, took other opportunities to move into the West Bank and into Lebanon. And we’re still seeing a continuation of that. I think for me, it made me realize, like, why do I do what I do? Why do I care about trails? Why do I care about bike routes? And I think for me, it’s like, they give us a way to cross over a boundary to meet a person who may not be like us and to find the humanity in them. And for me, I’ve continually found that through hiking trails, through biking trips, you put yourself out there. Economic development is great, of course, but the greater connections we have are the ones with other people that we meet along the way. So it was a moment where I reprocessed everything to kind of grieve this loss of my close connections, of all my Palestinians friends’ reality as well, and like what they were dealing with, and just the whole region because it becomes super unstable with just these cycles that we never seem to be able to get past. And I mean, the US is also in a very tough place right now, with being divided internally, with the way we’re relating to the rest of the world. Whether you’re bikepacking in the mountains of West Virginia, or in Northern Iraq, or Turkey, or wherever, or Spain, I think when you’re on the road, you share that experience of vulnerability and connection with strangers that you don’t quite feel when you go about your normal life.
Gabriel: You mentioned your wife.
David: My wife, Anna.
Gabriel: How did you meet your wife?
David: So we met in college, actually. We went to the same school. We did the same study rod program in the Middle East, and I think that’s what really connected us. We started writing guidebooks together. She’s the primary author on the Camino books. We now have three kids, 11, 9, and 5. And we’ve tried to take them on a bunch of family adventures as much as we can. It’s a different pace, a different reframing of it all, which is a good experience and a good challenge.
Gabriel: You lived in the Middle East mostly, I guess, based in Israel for 10 years?
David: I was in Jerusalem and Nazareth mostly. I like to say the city’s more than the country’s because the politics get complicated.
Gabriel: Oh, well, let’s say present-day Israel. Okay.
David: Well, again, it’s debatable. Yeah.
Gabriel: It’s an interesting period. I mean, you’re stating it very matter-of-factly. City or country, doesn’t matter. But you supported yourself by working on these trail projects?
David: Correct. I was working on a variety of trail projects. So, Anna and I started publishing guidebooks. First, we did one to the Jesus Trail, 2010. A year or two later, we worked on one for the Camino. We kind of went and we hiked the Camino to learn from it. It’s a phenomenon. It had hundreds of thousands of people, a year walking it. It has a strong story, a narrative. It has a pilgrimage component. A lot of people go there looking to figure something out, looking for meaning, looking for connection, let’s say. So we were curious about the Camino. So when it was super hot in the Middle East, we would go to Europe for the summer with backpacks and walk different routes. When we walked the Camino, we didn’t really see the guidebook we liked and we had just written another one. So we said, maybe we should take this on. So we worked on that off and on for probably two years, hiked the whole Camino Francés, I think twice. The Camino Norte as well during that period. And then a few years later, published that first guide to the Camino de Santiago.
Gabriel: Publishing a guidebook. How do you actually get it published and distributed and all of that?
David: Print guidebooks are a whole other thing. If it’s digital, you can kind of update it as you go, as you need to. Once you put it in print, it’s like the production of the book itself is a whole thing. Ourselves, we became an independent publisher. We had offers for some bigger publishers to do our Camino guides and things. But for us, when we just actually, we looked at the economics and the size of the market, it’s still like a very relatively small group. Like, it’s more people than walk any other trail in the world, but it’s not like you’re doing a novel that’s always up-to-date and out there and can reach any one of the world that’s interested in it. Still a focused market. And the Camino is one of the bigger groups out there too. So if someone’s like, I’d like to publish a hiking guide at this little trail in this foreign country, I’d be like, well, that’s a passion project. It’s probably not an economically feasible or sustainable project. Just to be honest. My wife Anna does the writing. We edit each other’s work. I do most of the photography. I designed all the maps. So some of those books have well over 100 custom designed and illustrated maps. The first book took the two of us about two years to do the research, the planning, the design, the proofing. And then we just work with different printers and print and ship to US, UK, Spain, and have distributors there who push them out. We also expanded our Camino guidebooks to be about nine different ones. So not just the Camino Francés, but the Camino del Norte on the coast from France, the Camino Portugués from the south, the Camino Primitivo, Inglés, Finisterre. We have a whole series now. So like our main Camino books, we update every year. The hikers, they want to see it. So we just released our 2026 editions. So that’s an ongoing project for us. And I try to get back there as much as I can. I love print guidebooks. I still think they’re out there. I hope they stay around. But they are so much work to produce compared to digital and then they become frozen in that moment of time where you put it on paper.
Gabriel: Right.
David: So that was happening while the trail stuff in Middle East was going on. I worked in a project called the Abraham Path Initiative, which was trying to create a long distance hiking trail starting in Eastern Turkey or possibly Iraq and ending at Abraham’s tomb in Hebron al Khalil, Palestine / Israel, following the historic journey of Abraham with a narrative of kindness to strangers, basically. And like I said, the economic development and all of that. That’s also how I started to get into all the different countries, different communities, making more connections. It was a massive project. We had a grant from the World Bank to develop the trail in Palestine, supported by different international aid agencies. Also just super complex and stressful. I was Middle East program director, developing all the routes and we had a big team based in our office and local partners throughout the region. But it’s also just super, super interesting, exciting. A lot of those regional trails, like the project and our connections in Jordan became the Jordan National Trail. It’s a long distance hiking trail north to the south in Jordan. The spin-off in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt became the Sinai Trail. The Palestinian section became the Palestinian Heritage Trail. And it still continues on, in spite of all of the challenges of the region in different ways. We had the Camino stuff going. We had that going. We had our first child born in Jerusalem. And then when he was one year old, we decided to move back to the US. We kind of needed change. Ten years is a long time. The region was getting more tense again. Every like year or two, there would be a big flare up. And I think for us, just also having a young child there and feeling disconnected from our families, it was a good time for us to make a shift. So we moved back to US. I was also working in China on some hiking trail projects. But then the pandemic just blew everything up. So travel just was put to a halt. The guidebook stuff stopped. I was in China like in November of from Wuhan, actually, before the pandemic broke out about to assess a new project.
Gabriel: Oh no.
David: It was looking like a really busy year. It was going to be a great year for work. And then all of a sudden it all disappeared and the world changed. For me, it meant my work shifted towards developing bikepacking routes near my home area, which was really interesting. When I moved back here, I had to sort of like reinvent half of my world and my life and my work. Ten years is a long time to be away from a place. You know, people assume you’re not here anymore. So like build a new social network and explore. And the bike was away for me to do that. All of a sudden, I was with my stuff and my bikes all in place, and I just started exploring the mountains around me from Harrisonburg, Virginia, where I still live and based with my family. Yeah, I just loved it. I don’t know. I loved exploring the mountains. And I think what I’d realized is like, the bikes and the equipment had changed so much in that decade too when I was kind of farther away from it. So bikepacking became a thing. You know, wide-tire touring bikes. I bought a Surly Troll. If anyone remembers a Troll, it’s a 26-inch, like, all-terrain touring bike. And I took off with a friend and we rode the Great Divide route from Canada to Mexico that next year, over a couple months. And then our two kids were there. We met up a bunch and did like a semi bikepacking / car-supported trip.
Gabriel: Now, when you did the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, did you use the Adventure Cycling maps?
David: Yeah. When I first toured that route, 2016 or 2017, we used the Adventure Cycling maps that started in Banff and went to Antelope Wells on the Mexican border.
Gabriel: What was one memorable thing that happened on the Great Divide?
David: I rode it twice actually. I rode the race later, in 2022, four years ago. Kind of on my 40th birthday, I wanted to challenge.
Gabriel: The racing part, Tour Divide, you are going up against some serious, serious people.
David: Yes, so much can happen on the divide.
Gabriel: But it’s intimidating is my point.
David: It is intimidating. It’s like 2,700 miles. It’s a long, long ways and you cross all different landscapes and weather systems and you have a snow. You have they call this “death mud,” the mud that becomes concrete on your bike when it dries. And you can’t pedal or push your bike through it. It just fills your bike with mud. Actually, a lot of my active memories are more from the race because at first I just wanted to experience it. And I remember just like, wow, these unending dirt roads and doubletrack, jeep track in the mountains. And just like, for me, it was like backpacking with the bike. It was the first real big experience I had like that. And I had a lot of trail experience and nothing really too crazy happened on that trip. We just had a great time in these little mountain towns and, and then the kids were there. So that was a whole nother different element, like setting up camp for the family and getting them going, making breakfast in the morning, getting ourselves off, getting them off and then riding. We average probably 80 miles a day on that first ride. And I think it was five weeks, we did it. So it was like a decent pace, but not race pace. And then when I did the race in years of weather ever. We had so much snow. The first four or five days we were walking or carrying the bike through snow for two to eight hours a day.
Gabriel: That’s brutal.
David: We had like 150 starters, 15 of those were airlifted off the course by helicopter, because of crashing, hypothermia, like snow and extreme weather related incidents. I thought actually the government was going to take us off the route. There was a number of people that were, they were in way over their experience, I would say. Like if you haven’t spent time riding through, you know, freezing temperatures and freezing rain in remote backcountry, you have to be able to like ride around the clock for a day or two to like stay warm effectively. So a lot of people got into trouble on that. I just remember like this amount of snow up to your waist at one point on one of the passes and you can’t ride your bike, you’re carrying your bike for hours and hours throughout the snow. And it’s a wild time. There’s one moment where on the one pass, like it already had a maybe two meters of snowpack. And then we got another like three feet of snow on top of that. And just watching, like, riders dots go up and come back and like, can anybody get through? Can we get through? And I actually took an entire day off at that point, I think on the fourth or fifth day, just because we didn’t know if we could actually get through. The year before or two years ago was the year that Sofiane had turned around in Colorado and then a few other people took over the lead.
Gabriel: French ultra-endurance racer Sofiane Sehili first competed in the Tour Divide in 2016. Despite claiming that he was a rookie and “the whole race was mistake after mistake,” Sofiane finished third. During the while in the lead due to severe record-breaking June snowstorms in Colorado. Sofiane returned to the Tour Divide in 2022 – the same year David competed – and came away victorious with an astounding time of 14 days, 16 hours, 21 minutes. As of this recording, he has no plans to return.
David: You just never know what’s going to happen out there. You’re so, so remote and so wild. I mean, bikepacking racing is a different thing than touring, but if you want to have the highest highs and the lowest lows, that will bring all of that out. Racing the Divide that year, from the snow, we had a lot of the death mud for the South. We had massive reroutes. We had regional forest fires that changed the course.
Gabriel: Yikes!
David: You know, you want to finish, first of all, and then my other goal was to finish under 20 days. And on that fourth or fifth day, I had taken a full day off and I was just like, there’s no way to make up a whole day over 2,700 miles. But slowly, I kept kind of chipping away at it, and maybe two or three days from the end in New Mexico, I had been sort of riding near a guy I got to know, my friend Nick, who lives in Philadelphia, and his wheel broke, and I wasn’t sure if he was going to come back. So I just kind of took off, and I rode through all of the New Mexico section in, it might have been three days, I don’t know.
Gabriel: Wow!
David: It was some really, really long days, including like two almost 24-hour pushes, which was a lot above the pace I had done, but I saw like, I mean, maybe I can actually hit my goal and rode through the last full 24 hours and finished as the sun rose before the 20th day. 19 days, 23 hours. I was, I think, about 20th rider in at a 150, so I felt pretty proud of that.
Gabriel: That is a very impressive result.
David: So I think like the tour I did, you know, years before that, I don’t remember it, because it wasn’t quite as intense as the racing element.
Gabriel: Yeah.
David: I also think after that experience, I was kind of like not motivated to race at all. Maybe never will be.
Gabriel: Oh, I totally get that.
David: But it’s like such an intense experience, and it takes so much out of you. It takes like a month for your body to recover, and it’s like all the time away from home. It takes a toll as well on everybody. So I shifted more like, I want to ride with people, like I want to slow down, I want to be in the place. And this is a pretty common cycle for people who get into this stuff. They start as tours, they get curious at how hard they can push themselves. And then they do that, and they realize like, while it’s a meaningful experience, it’s also has a high cost for our health, for our relationships, for our time. And they shift towards like, I want to go back to touring again, I want to slow down. And I think that’s kind of where I am right now. And from the Great Divide, I was like, you know, I’d love to see something like this in Virginia, we don’t have something like this. So I spent a number of time over a couple years mapping, checking, testing, getting friends to ride a 550-mile, roughly 1,000-kilometer route from Washington DC across the state to Damascus, Virginia, that kind of traverses the high ridges in the Appalachian range, something we call the Trans-Virginia Bike Route. Once I put that out, I made a website, it’s kind of like, literally with the Jesus trail, just like, have an idea, put all the digital guide stuff in one place, and the GPX files and put up on Ride with GPS, and then just started to put the word out, hey, there’s this thing you can go do, build a community around it. And a year or two later, started running grand depart, familiar with the grand depart style, it’s how they race the Tour Divide. So everyone starts the same time, you get satellite trackers, and ride across the state, some go for a fastest time, some tour, and just try to go for the slowest time and, you know, take as much time as they possibly can. So I’ve been doing that for like seven or eight years now. And kind of like my work in the Middle East, that started thing after thing. Somebody saw that and said, “Oh, we’d love to have that where we are.” So I was asked by Grayson County in Southern Virginia, can we create a gravel route that connects these two rail trails into a bikepacking experience? So I worked on that, and then worked on another one to create a bikepacking route around the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, 300-mile mixed surface route that connects eight county memorials to families who used to live on the mountain before the National Park was formed. In the 1930s, the US government converted this big mountain ridge, it’s about 100 miles north to south into a national park. And there were 500 families that lived on that park. So some of them were asked kindly, would you like to move and give them some incentives? And in the end, the government basically put people under arrest and hauled them off in wagons and burned their homes and churches. And it was a very bad, bad interaction.
Gabriel: Imminent domain.
David: Basically, yeah.
Gabriel: Imminent domain starts friendly and ends with arrests and burning of the house.
David: And this, yeah, I mean, this was in the big movement where the US National Parks were kind of being developed and expanded in the 1920s, 1930s. But a lot of these folks still live like where I live in the valley around the national park now. So this project was an initiative to create a narrative that connects all of these memorials to the families and these eight counties through a bikepacking route and tells a story. It’s one thing to say, hey, we’re going to go to this beautiful place and see some great views. It’s another thing to say, hey, we’re going to connect with the people and their story along the way. Like some of the work I did with trails in the Middle East, when you’re looking at a historical figure or a historical event or some sort of thematic narrative, the experience of riding that route becomes so much more meaningful for the cyclist, for the participant. Also really been trying to shift a lot of my work to like, what is the story of a place, of its people, and how do we tell that?
Gabriel: How do you tell the story though? Are there some physical markers at different spaces? Is it digital?
David: Mostly what I do is digital. Like for that right around the national park called the Blue Ridge Hills and Hollows, each of those county memorials has a physical interpretive information. The national park visitor center has a museum that tells the story. The way I approach it is partially you tell the story by how you design the route. Like you can take people in this place or that place. So you spend a lot of time in an area, riding, exploring, studying, talking to folks that you meet, trying to learn about who they are and what they care about and what their favorite places are and what the most significant story their community is. So that’s part of a process of just understanding a place to design a route to take riders through an area. So you take them intentionally in places that relate to the narrative. And like for that project example, the narrative was the story of the people who were displaced from the park and their resettlement in these other communities around the park. So anything that tied to that narrative was relevant. But eventually what we do is then write up a description, write up auxiliary experiences. The bigger programs I’m working with now, there’s usually a bikepacking route that goes through a region that’s multiple days or potentially weeks. And then there’s this network from small towns of day rides. One might be an hour, one might be three hours, one might be a whole day. Each of those is framed around some story of the community. It takes you to this waterfall or to this dam that burst and destroyed the whole town, like one in Pennsylvania you’re working with. We try to find all these little stories and tell them by where the routes go, by the interpretive digital content and by really, really good professional-level photography, video work, social media, and sort of ways that other riders can also connect in with the local community like bikepacking events, gravel events, this kind of thing. So I’m not really publishing print guidebooks for the bike stuff at this point. Most of that lives on Ride with GPS. It’s become sort of the go to platform, at least in the US, and I think it’s growing globally. You know, really good interpretive content, digital maps that show the exact road surfaces, all the places you can eat and stay and points of cultural human, natural interest. So a big part of that for me is like you go through the towns and the communities we don’t just keep people up on the mountain. We want people to go through, sit at the country store, talk to the folks who are there every morning for their breakfast and coffee and engage like into this like living story of a place as well, which is where the people are.
Gabriel: How do I find if I want to search for some of these different routes? Do I just go to Ride with GPS and type in the name or?
David: Yeah, that’s a good question. So my publishing brand we use was called Village to Village Press, like routes that connect communities, Village to Village Press. So if you look at Village to Village Press, you’ll find all this stuff on the Camino and the Jesus Trail guide we did quite a while back. I also have a rival GPS account called V2V Trails, like Village to Village Trails. So if you look up that, you can find links to all of these. So initially, I started just doing stuff under that. We’re in the process of kind of rebranding that to more develop this platform for routes, rides, trails that connect communities that will be coming up quite soon. But what I’ve been trying to do when I work with a region now, like this part of West Virginia, this part of Pennsylvania, is really try to find out what is their story, what is their brand, and put that front and center rather than my own. Mine can be kind of a cohesive connection or way to get people there. But like the Northeastern Pennsylvania, the Endless Mountains region, this was a term that George Washington used to describe the region in the 1700s. And it’s just rolling hills and endless, endless gravel roads. Like it’s this huge network of unpaved roads.
Gabriel: It sounds difficult.
David: It is difficult.
Gabriel: For bikepacking. Sounds depressing.
David: It depends how you approach it. So yes, we rebranded this, not just Endless Mountains, but Endless Gravel.
Gabriel: Smart move.
David: Because what people are looking for is mostly to get away from cars and gravel riding keeps growing and gravel and bikepacking have a close relationship. So Endless Gravel PA, if you look that up, you can find them. We host an annual grand depart in September. And what’s become the real story there is like as endless and challenging the riding is, equally, the community is as kind and hospitable. If you’ve heard of trail magic, I don’t know if you know this concept from the hiking world, it’s kind of when local folks spontaneously put out drinks, food, coolers, support for people like a long and established trail or route, just to be kind. And so what started happening in this incredibly challenging place to ride was that people would see like a bikepacker go by every hour and they’d be like, what’s going on? They started to say, maybe they’d like some cold water, maybe they’d like some, you know, candy or snacks or something. And so that’s called the trail magic. We call these people trail angels. And so we said, let’s just really promote this more and more. So the second year we ran the event, we kind of reached through our whole network of people we knew and said, who all lives on the route? Who might like to put some stuff out for riders? And this became the defining moment of the route, not how challenging the hills were, but how kind the people were.
Gabriel: I like the evolution of the marketing from Endless Mountains to Endless Gravel to Endless Magic. Next thing you know, it’ll be called Endless Chocolate Chip Ice Cream.
David: Nice. But a new one we just put out a few months ago is called Wild Elk Gravel. It was gravel and bikepacking in Northcentral Pennsylvania. And this is a region that has the largest wild elk herd in the Northeastern US. So there used to be elk here. And in the and killed in Pennsylvania. 50 years later, they decided to bring elk back. So they put elk on the train from the western US, from like Yellowstone, and shipped about 100 elk by rail car into Pennsylvania and reintroduced to herd. And that’s now about this area that has about 4,000 people living there. So there’s many elk, few people, relatively. And so we decided to, you know, tell a story of the elk and the community through this reality that there’s wild elk here. So it’s pretty neat when you see them, they kind of travel in herds, they have like a leader, they make this bugling sound. It’s a pretty special moment when you see them and pretty unusual. So a lot of people don’t know that this animal exists anywhere near here. So we use this as a way to kind of encourage visitors to come also work towards conservation. The forestry offices really love bicycles, because they’re not loud. There have been a lot of like motorcycle and ATV use in the region that really disturbs the elk. And so where they brought in ATVs for tourism, the elk have started to leave those areas. We’re trying to create sort of a network of rides that are in harmony with the elk. So we’re super excited about that. Alden and I just worked together and he produced a 15-minute short film about that project. Yeah, the Wild Elk Gravel project, super exciting.
Gabriel: I’d love to get a link to that.
David: Yeah, we can get those links up. Many, many things are happening, but V2V Trails is my main platform now and I’ll be working to kind of build out better and better gateways into information for riders. I think trying to like find the meaning, find the human part, like sit down and have a coffee and talk with someone. Like for me, that’s more meaningful than pushing those limits. But I totally understand why people are driven to do that.
Gabriel: Yeah. Well, this podcast is all about connection and meeting people and so forth.
David: No, I totally hear you. I think potentially the most meaningful bike trip I was on was two years ago, almost exactly, where I got a kind of like a fellowship / scholarship to do a storytelling project and was from the Abraham Path Initiative, who I’d worked with 10 years ago and I had spent a lot of time 10 years ago in this eastern part of Turkey, in the Kurdish region developing a hiking path until a very tragic incident happened there around the local election day, when a bunch of people from two rival tribes, families in a village came out and shot a number of people, including our main friend and partner. He, two of his brothers were killed, people we had rented an apartment from. So again, all this tragedy, I don’t mean to bring into the story, but that basically was the end of that project then. These people, we had spent months in some of their homes too and knew them quite well. I was in the country when that event happened. I was like an hour away from where the site in this small village, I didn’t have an opportunity really to go back there. Our friends kind of became refugees in their own land. They were pushed aside. There was kind of like blood money out for them, even though they were just sort of tangentially connected. That area’s been through so many hard things in eastern Turkey. They had that, they had the ISIS period. That was kind of the way ISIS was going between Europe and Syria and that was very destabilizing. All the Syrian refugees were resettling there and then they had this earthquake a few years ago, which just decimated these communities. I hadn’t been back, so I got this storytelling grant to go revisit the place, tell the stories, and also dig a little bit deeper into what had been happening. I sort of proposed, hey, could I actually do this by bicycle? Not just go visit. I’d rather go with a bicycle. I’d been doing mostly bike things these days. I had also worked on another trail project since then in the northern part of Iraq, the Kurdish region, which is not actually very far from this part of Turkey. I was like, I’d love to just ride between these places. The area had re-stabilized for the most part and I wanted to see these friends. I hadn’t seen them forever and so I went back and I spent a lot of time just catching up with my friend Omer, was my main connection there and just seeing how his family was affected since they had been able to come back and the building’s still half destroyed from the earthquake that they haven’t been able to rebuild and how they’re trying to bring tourism back, but it’s super challenging. The region’s so challenging. But then for me, then I decided to ride from that area through some of these villages I had worked in eastward and I crossed the border from Turkey into Iraq, which is called Ibrahim Khalil, like Abraham the Friend. They named the border after Abraham, so it felt interesting for the project too. And I always thought about this border, like when I worked there, but it wasn’t quite accessible. The Kurdish-Turkish conflict’s a little too hot. It still is very unresolved, intense, but it’s at least possible more now. And the Syrian border’s been basically sealed with a fence, with a wall, where it had been open then. So anyway, so I did this bike trip. It was maybe a two-week trip, 500 miles, and just the adventure of it all was part of it, the unknown. But for me, like personally, to connect from there to this other trail system in northern Iraq I had worked with and reconnect with local communities and families and friends that I had made on one journey for me was super meaningful. And just sort of like reflecting back on what happens in a place over 10 years? So you get like this snapshot. I was in Turkey before I had kids, now I have kids, and the kids I knew there are now grown up and married or, you know, it hit me. Like all the hardship people had been through, we’re still connecting at a human level. And somehow I, as the traveler, as the bikepacker and the person that’s able to also go there across the international border into Iraq, link up these two projects, these networks of communities. And so for me, there’s a lot of like self-reflection. I did a nice story map, put it all up on Instagram, and it was just really neat. Like I’d meet some little kid in a bakery and he’d come out with hot fresh bread for me. And then he’d be like, “What’s your Instagram?” This is all like in Kurdish. So I’d open up the app, he’d type in his name, he’d hit follow. So I’d follow him, he’d follow me back. And every day he’s watching the pictures I’m putting up, and he’s, you know, making comments, and he’s following me into the Kurdish region of Iraq, and then vice versa. So like all these people are suddenly connected through the social media, through the storytelling, and they all become a part of the journey, even though they may live in different countries, but be part of the same general ethnic group. Super interesting trip. And it kind of opened my eyes about how like storytelling through social media along the journey can connect people that wouldn’t be connected by the connector, which is the traveler. I sort of took some of that back to the bike events I run in the US too, to think about. How do we link up networks through some of these digital tools?
Gabriel: Did you end up in Erbil?
David: In Erbil, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, which is the capital of the Kurdish region, it’s got an autonomous area.
Gabriel: Yeah.
David: And I had worked there with an Irish friend who was based there, and a Syrian refugee who was Kurdish ended up in Erbil. They mapped out a 12-day hiking route that goes across the mountains called the Zagros Mountain Trail, kind of up to the border with Iran. It’s a beautiful, beautiful country. I mean, big, big mountains, snow-covered mountains, peaks, and super dramatic landscape, and also, you know, many tough layers of history that you encounter people who live through. A war every decade for two generations, and they don’t even know where all the landmines are, because people have taken the signs for scrap metal, and it’s like a complicated place to try to make a hiking trail, but it’s the process that is so meaningful for the communities and for the local hiking clubs out of Erbil were getting super involved. And again, same sort of model with community development programs, homestays, guide training, and so that’s still there. In the last few weeks, Iran has been bombing US bases in the Kurdish region of Iraq, and there’s a lot of conflict between the Iranian Kurdish community and the Iranian government as well. It’s so complicated. All these places I worked with are getting caught up in this war again. It’s such a mess. It’s the normal people that get caught in the middle of this, and if you ask anyone that’s biked through Iran, who’s toured through Iran, the story you hear is like, these are the kindest people in the world.
Gabriel: Definitely.
David: The hospitality is unmatched. I’ve always wanted to go there as an American who had a bunch of Israeli stamps on my passport, it was always a challenge for me. I’ve spent a bunch of time all over places that were complicated for me to enter, but that place, it would have been harder. But my friend Leon, Leon McCarron, who developed that Zagros Mountain Trail, he had taken a journey by pack raft from source to sea in Iran’s longest river some years back. And his story was, I paddled my raft into a village. They arrested me because they didn’t know what to do with me, so they take him kindly to the police station. They’d serve him a hot meal, tea. They’d sit there, then they’d say, “Don’t go back to the river.” But what do you do when you have a raft and a paddle and a river? You go back to the river, and he’d float to the next town. He’d get arrested again, and this would happen for a couple of weeks, day after day. You get picked up. They don’t know what to do with you. They say, don’t go back. At one point, they took his paddle, and then he found a fisherman who like carved him a new paddle, and he kept going. But it’s just like these are the kindest people in the world, and we all just get stuck in between these governments and their military or financial interests. If you’re out there and you’ve connected with people on a human level, you know that we don’t want this conflict. We just want a place to live with our families in peace. But there’s something about that part of the world, the Middle East, I think. It’s like the hospitality is a step higher than anywhere else. It’s ingrained in people’s culture and well-being. I’m not saying other parts of the world aren’t, but there are so many days I’d show up in the community with a backpack and backpacking gear or bikepacking gear, and I’d say, “Hey, could I camp here on the edge of your farm” or something? The first question would be like, “Well, how many days do you intend to stay?” It wasn’t just like, “Sure, if you don’t make a problem.” That was an invitation. And then the food would come and the tea and the coffee. And we used to call it like being imprisoned by hospitality. Like you’d basically be so captured that you could hardly leave. And it was a good thing, but it was a lot of energy sometimes, but it was always a good thing. But yeah, I mean, all of those people, Iranians, Kurdish folks, Palestinians, Israelis, Syrians, all super kind people. Americans are the same way too, but we get caught up in these ideologies. I hope that in some ways by being travelers, by being bikepackers, we can be somewhat ambassadors for the good in humanity and try to see through some of these differences that can create a lot of harm when we take them to the extreme.
Gabriel: Say I want to make my own trail. We got to the part where, okay, you go to the area, you try to find the theme, you find places that connect to that theme. And then what are some of the other considerations for making a popular trail?
David: Yeah, it needs to have that concept and narrative that’s compelling and unique. So it needs to have that as a baseline. It also has to practically work really well. I try to find all the map sources of the unpaved roads and trails, use that, talk to local riders and local communities and try to figure out what all the options are for the best places to go. There’s more and more car traffic and distracted drivers on phones and things like this. So that’s a lot of the push towards the unpaved roads, I think, in the bike community. We have the tools to navigate anywhere with smartphones and GPS and platforms like Ride with GPS. But someone has to figure out, does it all work? Is it legal? Is it private land? All of these things. So it’s a combination of like a digital mapping, putting together all the practical pieces. Someone has to go out there and check it. Like if you’re working in a whole region, like one person has to sort of know how this compares to that and what actually works. So it’s a process of checking it all out. And then publish it all really well on Ride with GPS is what I use, often with a companion website, which has like a digital guide for planning considerations, itineraries, where you can sleep overnight that’s safe, legal. All the food, resupplies, water sources, and then just any other human interest stories that you can build in. I feel super fortunate that I’ve been able to make a living out of this and like it’s, it sounds super exciting and it is, but it’s also just a ton of work, a ton of details, a ton of relationships to manage. And I love that part of it, but it also, in some ways, it starts to feel more like work than like adventure for me. So I also try to find ways to have my own adventures and still have enough time to go around. But yeah, I’d encourage anyone out there, you know, just explore, find, but find a story. Find a story you want to shape your route or you ride around. Like it’s so much more meaningful than just saying I’m going to go from A to B or check this thing off a list or someone else did it so I want to do it. But like think about a way to like build that narrative. Like you’re writing a story through your experience and make it personal. It’s always going to be more meaningful if it’s like that.
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s great advice. To be honest, I’d never even thought about making my own trail prior to this conversation. It’s inspiring.
David: Yeah, and maybe it’s even just for you and it’s your experience.
Gabriel: What an amazing thing to develop bikepacking routes, to maintain them, to create a digital presence for them. And at the same time, to have authored a series of printed guidebooks with your wife. You’ve built a really unique career for yourself.
David: It’s been a wild ride. I’m curious where it all keeps going. I’m really excited about the stuff we’re doing here in the US. I love working internationally, living internationally. I hope that’s still always a part of who I am and where I go with my family and stuff too. But I think there’s also something really meaningful about doing this kind of stuff from the communities you’re from too. The principles are all the same all over the world. To develop routes and find the stories and connect the people. It’s a big gift to be able to do that where I’m from too and make it work for folks and build the community here. It’s amazing how much you can learn about what’s close to where you live to and explore that by bike.
Gabriel: As a closing remark, have you heard of Alistair Humphreys?
David: Yeah, I know Alistair.
Gabriel: He’s a proponent of this concept of micro-adventures, which is kind of like, hey, just get out to a place that’s in the vicinity and you’ll discover something new.
David: Yeah, exactly. I was at Philadelphia at this bike expo last weekend. There’s these guys that are all like 18 and they have all these old steel commuter bikes and I’m like riding back to my car on the bike and these guys are pumping up a flat tire. They’re so excited and they saw my bikepacking bags on the bike. Like, “Hey, do you go bikepacking?” I was like, “Oh yeah.” And they’re like, “We’re going up to this Green Lane Park next weekend.” It was like right where I grew up in PA, where the bike trail started. And they’re like, “Any advice?” And I was like, “Just have fun and don’t overthink it. Put your camping stuff on your bike. You ride up this trail, spend the weekend.” Gonna totally imagine these young guys, so much energy having that experience was so simple but so powerful for them and probably going to open up their whole world to exploring and traveling by bicycle. It’s always just fun to see how little you need to do to actually get out there and have that adventure and you don’t have to go across the world. It’s amazing if you can, but so many people will never be able to and the bicycle is a simple tool to just explore and have an adventure. When I traveled after college, I remember someone said like, “If you want to have an adventure, cut your budget in half, right?” You’ll figure it out.
Gabriel: The transcript for this episode is available on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife, Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you.
David: The Camino Francés has gotten this reputation. It’s so busy, but I really think every time I’ve gone back to the Camino Francés, from Saint-Jean to Sarria, it really spreads out. Then the last hundred k is a madhouse, basically.
Show Notes
David has an account on Instagram. His Urfa-Urbil bikepacking trip is catalogued in this story map.
David’s Camino de Santiago guidebooks are published by Village to Village Press and his trails are developed through V2V Trails.
You can watch the movie about the Elk Rut Ramble on YouTube.