EPISODE 62
The Original Bikepackers and the Improbable Bikecentennial (Part 2)
What happens when you combine empty pockets, stolen bicycles, sheer determination, and a healthy dose of pure 1970s idealism? You get the parallel wild stories of riding the second half of the Hemistour expedition and organizing the landmark Bikecentennial ’76! In this episode, Part 2 of 2, join June and Greg Siple as they recount the chaotic, beautiful journey of cycling the rest of the way to Ushuaia, Argentina. Then, hear Lys and Dan Burden tell how they proposed the idea of a massive, transcontinental bicycle ride to established cycling organizations, all of whom flatly rejected it. Instead of abandoning the dream, Lys and Dan built their own organization, starting from a small apartment room with an electric typewriter and a telephone. Tune in to discover how a few young dreamers on two wheels quietly laid the foundation for modern bicycle touring in the United States.
Episode Transcript
Gabriel: Previously, on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
June: And that’s what Hemistour was like up and down, up and down, up and down, mood, money, everything.
Gabriel: That was June Siple’s honest assessment of the Hemistour, an ambitious project to bicycle from Alaska to Argentina with her husband Greg and another couple, Dan and Lys Burden. Now here’s Lys recalling the day in the small town of Chocolate, Mexico that the group committed to the idea of Bikecentennial.
Lys: June came up with the name Bikecentennial, the bicentennial. Two centuries, two wheels. And so in Chocolate, it’s the day that June dreamed up Bikecentennial and the day that we dreamed up organizing it.
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 Part Two of a two-part series commemorating the extraordinary bicycling event called Bikecentennial ’76. To give an idea of the influence and legacy of what is arguably the largest bicycling event in American history, the Bikecentennial has been mentioned three times on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast, even though it took place 50 years ago. In Episode Six, Christopher Briscoe camped out with groups of Bikecentennial cyclists, but remained an independent rider. In Episode 17, Steve Roberts implied that the roster of Bikecentennial riders was a great resource when searching for people to host him. In Episode 46, Mike Vermeulen cycled from Amsterdam to Vladivostok with a woman who had pedaled Bikecentennial coast to coast, 4,250 miles in 82 days. Part One concluded with Dan contracting hepatitis and the two couples splitting up. As in Part One, this episode combines two separate interviews that I conducted with the Burdens and the Siples. This time, we are first going to hear from the Siples, as they regroup after the Burdens unexpectedly had to abandon. The Siples then continued their quest to reach Ushuaia.
June: Dan is sick and they’re all back in the States and I’m working my way north by bus to Salina Cruz, which is where we stopped riding. That’s as far as Dan and Lys made it, Salina Cruz, Mexico. My task, okay, I have to pack up their bikes. I have to take their bikes apart, pack them up in bike boxes, take them on the bus to Mexico City and ship them back to them. So that was kind of the end of that phase of Hemistour. And they wanted us to come back with them and help them organize, but we had so many problems getting along with the Burdens that we were actually looking forward to being on the road without them.
Greg: I think more important is that we had gone out and said, we’re going to do this ride. We would need your support, and we had lots of support and also expectations. We’re going to achieve this goal and it just seemed wrong that we couldn’t continue. We felt an obligation to all those followers and supporters we had. So we really wanted to go on to Hemistour and to fulfill the promise.
June: We have a flyer that we sent out to people we thought would be interested. If you give us 10 dollars, we’re going to mail postcards to you along the way. You have 231 people did that, which equates to over $2,300. We were trying to fundraise and that represents people from 34 out of 50 states, people all over the United States, because we were reaching out in bike magazines and things like that so that people knew what we were doing, what we were up to.
Greg: We had to get some money together. I worked in a bike shop and June worked for…
June: Exxon Chemical.
Greg: Exxon Chemical. Like a day laborer situation. We found a free place to live and so we’re just accumulating money so we can go back and continue the ride.
June: Because we had no money. I worked for those people for three months in their computer department, which was like new. There weren’t very many places were using computers at that time. They sat me and eight other women, young women, down in a room. A big table and we each had a big stack of computer printouts, two stacks of computer printouts, and we were supposed to go through those stacks and reconcile one to the other.
Gabriel: Okay.
June: And after about a week, I was the only one left.
Gabriel: Yeah, sounds brutal.
June: They knew about Hemistour. I told them all about Hemistour, that I was just going to be there temporarily. And just before Greg and I were about to leave, after five months of working in Houston, my boss said to me, “We want you to stay on. We’ll double your salary.” And I said, “Why didn’t you double my salary to start with? We need that money.” And I just turned him down. I said, “No, we’re leaving.”
Greg: We have a quest.
June: We have a quest.
Gabriel: June, you had mentioned the bicycles, but there was a twist to it. I remember reading, Greg, your bicycle was stolen and you had to ride Lys’s bike?
June: So there are four bikes that were assembled by Sam Braxton. He’s not building frames at the time. He just assembled.
Gabriel: Yeah.
June: We’re in Panama. We always carried a lock. We always locked our bikes at night. And Greg left a lock behind where we had camped the night before. And it would have been like 20 miles back to go retrieve that lock. So he didn’t want to do it. And I didn’t blame him. We figured we could just pick up another lock in Panama City. When we got there, we had been invited to stay with this fellow who was a veterinarian, right?
Greg: Former director of the San Diego Zoo.
June: Yeah, former director of the San Diego Zoo. And he was creating a zoo in Panama. There were flying squirrels in the cage at night where we were sleeping.
Greg: There were little owls.
June: Flying around the cage at night.
Greg: Little owls too.
June: His wife told us, “Oh, don’t worry about locking your bike. Nobody ever steals anything here.” Blah, blah, blah. And after the bike is stolen underneath their house, like a house on stilts, the husband says, “What do you mean? Things are stolen off our clothesline almost weekly.” Things are being stolen all the time because the Panamanians, you know, they’re resenting the US presence there. And so they’re always sort of nibbling at the edges.
Greg: It was in the Canal Zone.
June: Yeah. And then we had a Japanese cyclist with us at the time, a round-the-world cyclist named Kunio Katsumura. And he rode with us in Central America as he was recovering from hepatitis. We were slow enough that it was good for recovery for him. He left his bike unlocked and it was stolen. But my bike was not stolen because I had a chronic flat tire, one of those slow leaks that you know you should deal with, but it takes so much time that you don’t deal with it. And in this case, it worked out for me because I had a flat tire. They didn’t take my bike. So Greg’s bike was stolen in Panama. My bike was fine. There’s two other bikes, which Dan and Lys have in Missoula. And Dan, you know, he’s not one for the details. He had his Hemistour bike at the post office and he had a handlebar bag full of film that had been shot by some people that were crossing the trail, the Bikecentennial trail, just as for research. Somebody stole his bike from the front of the post office, along with all that film that was taken. So then we were down to like two bikes, two original bikes. My bike and Lys’s bike. Another friend from Ohio wanted to join us in Panama and ride with us into Colombia. So Lys said, “Oh, take my bike.”
Gabriel: That’s what it was.
June: So this fellow, Jack Scholl, he comes down to Panama City to meet up with us and he’s bringing Lys’s bike, not knowing that Greg’s bike had been stolen. So Jack rides with us, he was just with us for a few hundred miles, I think. We had an association with the Lions Club and a Lions Club member, he owned a bike shop and he decided to discount a Benotto bike to Greg, so that Greg would have a bike to ride. So the Benotto goes to Colombia and Greg’s riding it there. And then Jack leaves. Greg takes the Hemistour bike, Lys’s bike, and he continues the rest of the way on Lys’s bike. The Benotto gets sold to a Swiss guy who’s living there. He said, “I need a bicycle.” So we sold him the bike and it’s probably still down there.
Greg: And I have to say that the theft of the bike was really hard on me. It’s like you go, you go into the store and you come back and there’s a foundation where your house was. You know, that was my house, so important. But of course it pales with, we did have a fatality in the trip.
Gabriel: A fatality?
June: Yes, his name is Jeff Cartosian. He was 19 or 20 years old. It was really funny when he first joined us. It was here in Missoula. We’re getting ready to head to the west coast. We look out the window and there’s a strange tent in the backyard and we go, who’s that guy? And it turns out to be Jeff Cartosian. He comes in and introduces himself because we had like sort of generally invited people to come along. Most people would say, “May I come? How does this work?” But Jeff just showed up. He got himself equipped and he showed up. And he was a wonderful companion. He rode with us into California.
Greg: San Francisco.
June: San Francisco. And he quit there because he had run out of money. He needed to make more money so that he could continue with us. He stopped to work for his father in California and then joined us in El Paso, Texas. And then it was just not long after that, in northern Mexico, that he was the victim of a hit-and-run accident. Greg and I were trying to help him and he died. He died. Internal bleeding. And then we were trying to work with the Mexican authorities to try to find out what happened. They thought that they got the guy. It was a Mexican-American actually who was in Mexico, they claimed. We don’t know, we don’t have a lot of faith in the Mexican system of justice.
Gabriel: He died while you…
June: He was died in our arms.
Gabriel: Oh, yeah.
June: Yeah, he died in our arms.
Greg: Yeah, it’s so hard.
June: And that’s something that’s really held me back from writing the book, besides all of the difficulties getting along with Dan and Lys, and then we have a fatality on top of that. How do you write about these things in a positive way?
Greg: No, I don’t think that’s the way to put it. It’s just so hard to do.
June: We think about him so much. And on Hemistour, we just felt like he was with us a lot.
Greg: And also some people say, “How could you go on if something like this happened?” But we thought he would have said, “Go on.”
June: Yeah.
Greg: He wouldn’t have wanted to be the reason that we stopped.
Gabriel: Yeah, that makes total sense.
June: Oh, another aspect to the butting of heads on Hemistour. In the beginning, while we were planning, we received some advice from some advisors, older people, like 15 years older, saying, you guys, you’re not getting along. Why do this now? Why don’t you wait a year, figure out what’s wrong, try to fix it, and then hit the road. And of course, none of us wanted to do that. We just wanted to get going.
Greg: And it was the right decision to get going too.
June: Right.
Greg: And we already waited four years of Navy, two years of conscientious objector. It was time to go.
June: But they came up with this system of inviting, what do you call it?
Greg: Buffers.
June: Buffer riders. They told us to our face, “We want to have buffer riders.” And what it meant was, we don’t want to have to deal with you guys. We want to have other people to talk to. It’s like the ultimate insult. I mean, my gosh, we took it. We took it.
Greg: And I think another way to look at it too is that we’d been married two years when we set out, but we are kind of in a sense newly-weds. We were kind of working things out. And suddenly, you are a marriage to four people. And that, you know, like June and I are learning how to spend our money together and how to arrange our meals and, you know, how, what time we get up in the morning, all these things. And they’re, Dan and Lys, are doing the same thing. Suddenly, the four of us are thrown together. And you have to develop this whole new system. And I think any two couples that would be thrown together in any circumstances, they’re going to have the same thing happen to some degree.
June: Yeah. That’s a big dynamic, really.
Greg: And it’s just that we were thrown into, you know, being together for two years, living in tents.
June: With buffer people. But it turned out having other people along…
Greg: It was great.
June: It was everything. You know, we’re riding 18,272 miles and to have new people dive in and out, it was just fun. It was just fun.
Greg: Yeah. I mean, it has nothing to do with the buffering. It was just a great addition to what we did.
Gabriel: Yeah. That was a kind of an unfortunate way of putting it, because it actually is good when you’re on the road for that long to have, yeah, new faces and new stories. It’s a long time.
June: Yeah.
Gabriel: I mean, obviously they didn’t go all the way, but it was long enough. I get the impression. Anyway, I want to hear about some of your more colorful companions.
June: We had one fellow that was particularly interesting and this shows how long we were on the road. He was an Iowa corn farmer, soybean farmer. He would shut down the farm every fall and come and join him a store. And at the time he was 42 years old around there, we thought he was like, oh, this is an old guy. You know, we’re in our twenties. He was just a delight. He was a very efficient individual. Always had a lot to say about our surroundings. “Oh, that’s such and such a crop over there.” And it just added. So he was with us in Baja. He joined us again in Mexico and then in Argentina.
Greg: Three times.
June: Yeah. Was he with us in Central America?
Greg: Yeah.
June: Did he come four times? Oh, it was four times. Four times he joined us.
Greg: His farmer perspective is that he could look out in a store or anywhere and he saw things as we could not see them. And he was very practical and spare in the way he would equip himself. Like he’d carry water in Ziploc bags. For example.
June: That’s just a good example of the enrichment that people brought.
Greg: And he had this thing with, you know, he carried a little plastic bowl and he had a roll of paper towels and he put each paper towel through like…
June: Six steps.
Greg: Six steps. You know, you use it first for this and then use the same paper towel and it came to the final use, of which you might.
June: You can imagine.
Gabriel: Oh, yes, the final stop.
Greg: He was just great.
June: He would get impatient with us because we were not very efficient in comparison.
Gabriel: Yeah, I can see that if that’s the steps you go through with a piece of paper. So I want to just finish out your trip on a positive note. From the time you were riding on your own from Mexico all the way down. What’s one of your favorite stories of something that happened that was memorable, beautiful, positive?
Greg: One of the things that always comes to mind is the climb. We were on the coast and we went to Lima, Peru. And at that point we decided that we were going to go over to the other side of the mountains.
June: At the widest point in the Andes.
Greg: Yeah. And so we were riding from sea level and we begin a climb, a single climb. And when we reached the top of the pass it was at 15,800 feet.
June: It’s the Anticona Pass.
Greg: And it took us five days, six days, I forget now. It is just day after day of doing nothing but climbing. There was a real achievement along… It’s one of the cycling things that was strong, you know, a notable thing about the physical bicycling, which a lot of times was not that interesting. And with us there was a man who joined us who was 50…
June: He was 58 years old.
Greg: And he was a Kansas language professor. He joined us in Lima and started the climb with us. He was proud of the fact that he only weighed a pound more than he did when he was a boxer in college. We were only nine miles from the top and we overnighted in this little town. During the night, his heart started to pound and he was not feeling well. So he went to the clinic and he took oxygen.
June: They put him on oxygen for the night.
Greg: You know, because we’d come all that way and the big factor in a climb like that is oxygen. It gets thinner and thinner of course. And the professor did recover and he was able to ride over the top with us.
Gabriel: Amazing.
Greg: That climb really stands out as a big thing in my life, to have done that climb.
June: So one thing really stands out to me, I just can picture it still. Greg and I were at high altitudes in Peru and Bolivia for three months. We were above 10,000 feet. And here we are on the Altiplano at 13,000 feet. We’re riding along and there’s a big lake. We look over over at the lake and it’s pink. It’s kind of a pinkish color. We get closer and closer and we realize, that lake is full of flamingos. Flamingos at 13,000 feet. I’ve never heard anything about that before. It’s just crazy. Crazy, crazy. We have so many people’s stories, that people were just so kind to us. We had a Frisbee along which was a relatively new toy in the United States. We always carried a Frisbee.
Greg: And you know what a Frisbee is.
June: We get to like the central park in every town. Throw the Frisbee and all of a sudden there’s a gazillion kids just having a blast and playing with us.
Greg: The kids are very curious about us. And a lot of kids had never heard anything but Spanish spoken. And we’d be talking to each other in English and they’re just, that boggles their mind, like, what’s going on? What is it this?
June: It was so much fun.
Greg: And I think overall our contact with the people was just marvelous. People were so good to us. And I think one of the reasons was, they probably had some image of Americans based on certain characteristics of American traveling in South America. And we’d show up and a lot of the people we met had never met an American, and they were surprised at us, because…
June: We were on a bicycle.
Greg: We were on bicycles. And sometimes they were on bicycles and they immediately trusted us because we weren’t displaying great wealth and we weren’t going on to the next resort hotel. Very wonderful relationships with people. And often we’d stop along the road and we’d ask if we can camp near their little house.
June: I remember in Colombia we asked to camp near somebody’s house and they very graciously said that would be all right. So we’re just waking up in the morning. Somebody’s tapping on the tent. Open the zipper of the opening. We look out and here’s this woman with a tray with coffee, sugar cubes, and cream to hand into the tent for us so we can have our morning coffee.
Gabriel: Lovely.
June: It was just such a touching thing for them to do yeah. That was really nice.
Greg: There’d be instances where very, just poverty-stricken people.
June: We started feeling embarrassed by our wealth because we had a bike, we had a tent, we had all this equipment and these people just, they live in a straw hut or whatever.
Greg: And I remember we’d buy, a lot of times we’d buy strawberry jam to put on bread and some of them, we were done with the jar. Sometimes we’d lay it out on the road because we know somebody…
June: Yeah, we did that every time we had a glass jar.
Greg: Somebody would like to have that jar.
June: We knew that people would make use of those things.
Greg: And I remember once in Peru we were in a restaurant and there was a kid, it was a girl, you know, watching us and when we were done and she saw that we hadn’t finished everything, she asked if she could have and she came and she held up her dress like this.
June: Her apron.
Greg: Her apron and she scooped the food into it.
June: Yeah, so people would ask us for money. We didn’t really have much money. We had more than a lot of people but…
Greg: Well, our money was, you know, vital, a little we had so we couldn’t help people.
June: We would give people our leftover food. In one instance, we just said to this man, just come and sit down. We’ll get something for you.
Greg: Yeah.
June: So that was really kind of nice.
Greg: Yeah, overall theme is this wonderful contact with people. There’s a story we love to tell that’s not about hard bicycling, it’s not about meeting people but it’s something completely otherworldly. We saw something that very few people have ever seen and we saw it for real and you won’t believe it.
Gabriel: Oooh. We’re in the finals right towards the tip and we’re in Patagonia.
June: No, we’re in the middle of Patagonia.
Greg: Well, middle of Patagonia. In terms of the trip, we were getting towards the end. And the Patagonia is long stretches of road with very few communities long way and a constant wind. The wind blows like 50 miles an hour all day.
June: 50, 55, all day long.
Greg: It comes in from the front right. And there were times when we’d go under a culvert, under the road just to be out of the wind. And we couldn’t set a tent up.
June: You couldn’t read a map.
Greg: Couldn’t read a map.
June: The wind would just blow it away or tear it up.
Greg: You have to get close to talk. Anyway, it’s late in the day in this particular day and it’s starting to get dark and we knew we got to get to this little community where we can set a tent up.
June: It was basically a gas station cafe.
Greg: Yeah, we didn’t know what it was but we knew that there was something there.
June: We’re watching the sun go down.
Greg: Andes. The sun’s going down and I say, oh my god, the sun’s gone down behind the top of the mountains.
June: And all of a sudden..
Greg: Fear not, the sun came back up.
June: The sun rose.
Greg: We saw the sun rising in the west. And we saw this. And I was ahead of June. I had this terrible fear because what I was seeing was not possible.
June: And I was feeling the same thing.
Greg: And I got…
June: Rubber-legged.
Greg: Yeah, but you know, it was like this…
June: Chills.
Greg: Tingling in my legs, like this gut fear.
June: The sun is not supposed to come back up.
Greg: And I’m thinking, well, maybe there, a nuclear war has begun, and…
June: Somebody dropped a bomb on Santiago.
Greg: There was no explanation for what you’re seeing. And yet, at the same time, I’m thinking, this could be the end of the world, but…
June: I’m going to get in some miles.
Greg: I’m going to try to get in as many miles as I can.
June: Before we die, we’re going to get as close to the tip of Argentina as we can.
Greg: So, June and I, we’re witnessing this thing separately. And then, finally, the sun sinks down again.
June: What just happened?
Greg: Yeah.
June: And we can’t talk to each other because the wind is so…
Greg: And there was nobody around. And I think we went into this little town, we asked, “Hey, did you notice the sun?”
June: We walked into that. It just was a gas station and a cafe out there all by itself, 50 miles from the nearest similar place. We walk in and the place is full of people. And as we walk in, they saw us, they all go, “Ahh!” I went into the restroom and looked in the mirror and my face was black from sand being stuck to my sun cream. We looked like we just walked out of a mine. We had all those dust stuck to our faces. And that night, we ended up sleeping in their supply room.
Greg: Now, we finally found out what happened.
June: Three years later, we found out what happened.
Gabriel: Okay. And what happened?
Greg: What we saw…
June: Let me just…
Greg: Oh, okay. I mean, what we saw was we really saw.
June: Well, it was real. It was real, first of all. We learned that a volcano in Guatemala, Fuego, blew. It had an eruption. It’s one of these ash-type eruptions. That ash went so high in the air that it got up into the layers of the atmosphere. And when the light of the sun setting hit that layer of ash, it refracted. It caused a refraction that we then saw as the sun coming back up.
Gabriel: Is it a refraction or a reflection?
June: Refraction. Yeah. I mean, it refracts light.
Greg: And I just thought of this. Because there were these mountain peaks and the sun was right on top of those peaks, I think that might have exaggerated where other people might not have noticed where the sun was sinking into a flat landscape.
Gabriel: That is an incredible event.
June: Even in the very end, way down in Ushuaia, Argentina, we ran into this fellow who had been bicycling around Argentina for seven years.
Greg: He was Argentine.
June: Yeah. We rode 40 miles with the guy all the way down to a place where it overlooks the Beagle Channel, to the very end with him. We always hoped for a Latin American rider to join us, but he was the only one, at the very, very end.
Greg: When we did finish, that was one of the great moments of my life, because there was this feeling of deep fulfillment that we had done this thing that had taken so long and there had been so many roller coaster moments. And it was just this wonderful feeling of contentment and fulfillment that there’s no other way to achieve that. You can’t do it over the weekend.
June: We had a hard time getting used to the idea that it was over. It was like, what just happened? Oh, we’re done. Strange.
Greg: There’s that great photograph of the two of us sitting there in front of that Tierra de Fuego sign, and just a great moment.
Gabriel: And you felt the same way, June?
June: Oh, yeah. I wrote extensively about it that night, just how we were feeling. And I just read it recently. We came in into Ushuaia and we were told that the mayor had a guestbook that we could sign. So we went to the mayor’s office, signed the book, they gave us some sort of treat, and then we said, “But we don’t have any place to stay.” And so they start calling around and they finally found us a place in the Catholic church dormitory that was off-season. There were no kids there, because there would bring kids in from surrounding areas to go to school. So it’s this big, empty dormitory. It’s freezing cold in there. There’s no hot water. It’s like a cold shower. And here we are at the end of the trip. So we didn’t take a shower the same day that we finished the trip. We waited for the morning and they had like a sportsplatz there, where you could go and play different sports and they had hot showers, had a little cafe. So that’s where we went.
Greg: And, you know, there’s a lot of story about, you know, when we went on south, but it really, the focus then goes to Missoula. And that period where Dan and Lys are back in Missoula, Dan’s recovering and they began working on what became Bikecentennial. And I always say it was heroic, in that very they don’t have any money either. They haven’t finished school yet and they just had this long adventure and the article, National Geographic, and wouldn’t it make sense for this young couple to start a family, finish school, begin some kind of career? But no, they sit in their little apartment with a typewriter and a telephone and they just begin working on the idea. You know, and up until that time it was just basically an idea and they began to put the meat on the bones there.
June: Without Dan and Lys, Bikecentennial would have never happened, because June and Greg were going to go to Argentina and nothing was going to stop us and so they did it.
Gabriel: Did you want to say anything about the time between you getting back from Hemistour and the actual Bikecentennial event?
June: In early 1974, after the incorporation took place for Bikecentennial – I think it was 28th of March, 1974 – At that point they started hiring people. We give them all the credit for Bikecentennial and of course when we got done with Hemistour, we had jobs working for them here in Missoula, Montana. We came back here, they had a lot of enthusiastic young people who just were thrilled by the whole idea. Most of us didn’t have any particular training to do these things and Greg was the only one really that had the training, like formal training, to accomplish things, and…
Greg: Yeah.
June: He did all the publications.
Greg: Yeah, I went to art school so I did art things. Another one, a little twist in the story is that Lys went out on the road to develop the TransAm Trail, to find the TransAm Trail. And she went out with Bill Bisbee, who was Dan’s high-school friend who had planned the big adventure, so he’s drawn back in.
Gabriel: He’s drawn back in.
June: In his van.
Gabriel: It’s the mob. Once you’re in you can’t get out.
June: Yeah.
Greg: The office was an old hotel that had been empty for some years. It was not in great shape but you know, it was kind of a grim looking place. You know, it was an old railroad hotel.
June: No walls, just studs.
Greg: You know, going back, maybe built the 1890s and yet it was full of these enthusiastic people that come from all over to be a part of this thing. And sometimes people coming not knowing what it was they were going to do and finding themselves doing something that they had never had any experience with. It was all typewriters and…
June: One typewriter.
Greg: Well, you know, electric typewriter and they were file folders and you’re dealing with 4,000 people and I realized looking back that it was what they now call a startup.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Greg: Nobody’s there because I’m going to go there and make my fortune. You know, you just wanted to be a part of this thing, and people were there late in the evening. They were there on weekends and everybody was paid $250 a month.
June: Even Dan and Lys.
Greg: Yeah. It was good to be a couple because then you could pull your money. It was just an exciting, exciting place and we’re getting attention from media. You know, we had a little article in Time magazine and we’re getting lots of press. And all we had to do is send out a press release and because the nation was so excited about the bicentennial and the press is looking around, they’re trying to get a hold of some kind of a story and you know, there were the tall ships that were coming into New York Harbor. There were little communities that were going to refurbish the log cabin down in the park. But this idea of bicycling across America, oh, the press loved it. We generated lots and lots of attention and it was just a wonderful place to work and to be a part of.
June: You can imagine coming in after an expedition of the scope that we attempted to an office job, that’s basically 17 hours a day, it was very hard on me in particular. I only lasted nine months, but I worked hard. I worked very hard. I put everything, every ounce of energy I could into it. I know I helped. I know I helped the cause.
Gabriel: Now, let’s go back to the Burdens, who returned to United States and immediately began turning the idea of Bikentennial into a reality.
Lys: Greg and Dan and I went to Washington, D.C. in September of 1973 to visit National Geographic. We took a hiatus and we were amazed because the guys had sent this bulletin out about what we would like to do, and it was all over D.C. It was in the agencies that were involved in outdoor recreation. It was in the DOT. Everybody had copied it and put it up on their bulletin boards. Every department that we walked into about, that we would be connected, they had this up on their bulletin boards. We just had goosebumps and said, wow, this is an idea whose time has come. It was during that break that Dan, at the end of that break, that Dan got sick and we realized we couldn’t return. He turned all…
Dan: Yellow.
Lys: He was in the hospital a couple of days and they said, “Well, this is the kind of hepatitis you’re just going to have to ride out. We can’t do anything for it.” Greg went away to meet June down in Mexico and Dan was sick. Even though he was bedridden, he was on the phone a lot and just talking about this idea. We said, okay, American Youth Hostels, do you want to organize this ride, because we’ll have to have places to camp or overnight in every city on the route. Can we call them temporary hostels and would you like to organize it? You know, we’ll help. They said no. And then we went to the League of American Wheelmen. We went, League of American Wheelmen, here’s this great idea. And so Dan made presentations to their boards and they all said no.
Gabriel: It’s a crazy idea.
Lys: Yeah, it was.
Dan: They didn’t think it was possible. Yeah, they thought it was too bold, too audacious. So we decided, well, we’ll do it then. So we created the organization. We started with the board. A very small board and just worked out of an apartment room and grew it and grew it and grew it. And then it became what it did. But again, everybody turned it down. They were all saying there’s no way to make this happen. And as the idea got bigger, then they were even more clear, there’s no way this is going to happen. In fact, one of the fun stories, Sports Illustrated found out that we were planning this thing. So they sent up one of their ace reporters, who showed up in our office one day unannounced and he said, “I’m here from Sports Illustrated and I’m here to either prove you’re real or you’re fake.” And I said, “Okay, go out, interview all the staff, come back in the evening and tell us if we are real or fake.” And he said, “You guys are real.”
Lys: Yeah, after seeing what was going on.
Dan: Yeah. You know, he didn’t know if we’d pull it off or not, but he knew that we were real. It just kept growing and growing, and in time even Playboy magazine covered it.
Lys: Yeah.
Dan: Every media was looking for something. You know, we were coming out of the Vietnam War and everybody wanted something hopeful. So a lot of people were looking to see if they could tag on to something that would offer that hope. So we got incredible press coverage.
Lys: We did.
Dan: And it was really the times.
Lys: Yeah.
Gabriel: I’m sure you also worked hard to get that coverage too.
Dan: Yep.
Gabriel: How did you go about fundraising?
Lys: We had sat down while we were in Ohio and that’s where we figured out we shouldn’t go as a mass ride. And that actually appears on the first poster, which was paid for by Huffy. They have a big manufacturing plant in Ohio. Dan made a call to him.
Dan: Horace Huffman.
Lys: Yeah. And did you go and visit? Because we got a tour of the manufacturing plant. So I think we went up and visited.
Dan: Yeah.
Lys: Right. And then just the idea excited one of the managers at National Geographic.
Dan: Carolyn Patterson, the first executive woman ever in National Geographic, was president of the Wally Byam Foundation, the Airstream industry? When we told her about what we were planning, she wrote a check right there. I think it was $15,000. So that was the very first money we had. And it was later that I sat down with Horace Huffman, Huffy, to get the second check, which I think was in the $30,000 range, to pay for the poster. It was really getting that poster out. It was so popular, I think we even went to a second printing.
Lys: It had a beautiful graphic that a friend of Greg’s did. It’s published on the back of that poster as a mass ride. But then that had to change. And when we brought out our next brochure, we talked about the small groups.
Gabriel: One of the things that must be discussed is you have this idea, coast to coast, but the United States, it’s a big place. So how did you settle on what went on to become this TransAmerican route?
Dan: Ah, that was Lys the planner.
Lys: I’m a geographer nut too, and a geology nut. We appealed to our legislators to provide us with some maps. And they did, the 250-degree topo maps. In Ohio, I started to study the geography and talk to people. We actually had two routes. One was farther north of the actual one that came to be. We wanted coast to coast. And there was an obvious place to start in Virginia, the historic triangle of Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown. And we didn’t really have the destination yet for the west, because I researched it east-to-west. And so we had this big bunch of maps from our congressman. Dan had a friend, Bill Bisbee, with a VW bus that he had kind of rigged out as a camper. And I got a tent and a sleeping bag. And he slept in his camper, I slept in the tent. But he and I drove across the country that fall. The snow was chasing us. So we had the western end of the route done because we had ridden from Missoula to the coast. And I had really researched that. So we had to bring the trail up the Rockies to Montana. And then we could do the ride that we had done on Hemistour. So what I would do is when we crossed the border of a state, I would get a state road map for free. They were all in all the gas stations. And I would sit down the night before we were really going to explore that state and make a little orange dot on everything I could see on that map that was scenic, historic, something interesting. And then I connected the blue roads. It was connect the dots. And so we would drive the connected dots, and sometimes I would move that route up because there were just weren’t enough connected blue routes. I’d look for both. I’d look for things that would educate people about the geography and the history and the people, and then it had to have a good enough network of blue roads. So that’s what we did across the country.
Gabriel: Very scientific.
Lys: I wanted to really celebrate all of this geography and all of the different kind of cultures there are coming across America. And so I wanted to hit the Ozarks, which were some of the hardest riding on the road. They’re short and steep, but they’re not that short. It was actually hundreds of miles of going through the plains. Toward the end, I think we left the western part of it a little nebulous, because it was getting really cold when we were in Wyoming and Montana.
Gabriel: And so you had this staff of was it paid or volunteers?
Lys: Well, at first it was Dan and myself.
Gabriel: Sure.
Lys: And then we grew in early ’74 to go on top of the Eddie’s Club bar. It was real cheap rent.
Gabriel: And cheap drinks downstairs.
Lys: And the first person we had money to hire was the secretary and she could take dictation. But we worked for, I’d say, well, all of ’73 and then three quarters of ’74, pretty much living on Dan’s…
Dan: VA.
Lys: VA income. Yeah.
Dan: I was going to college and the VA paid me to go to college. So yeah, we were just literally living on nickels. In time, I was able to raise some money through the bicentennial and things like that, that we were able to hire additional staff. Everyone across the board earned $300 a month, but worked 10-, 12-, 15-hour days, steady seven days a week.
Lys: The thing that was also amazing, especially in the summer of… beginning in the summer of ’74, but absolutely in the summer of ’75, people would take their vacations to stop in Missoula and help us for a week in the office. It was just amazing. They’d walk in and say, “What can we do?” Well, we could put them to work.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Lys: So that was amazing. After my trip across the country, kind of identifying this route, we had to start communicating to the DOTs and all the bike clubs along the routes to kind of cement this and get any better routing. If the locals knew any better routing, please contribute. Again, we did have two routes. We sent two couples out to ride these routes and one was east-to-west and one was west-to-east. And the east-to-west folks were Pennsylvanians and they did ride all the way across on that route.
Gabriel: What about that west-to-east team?
Dan: Jim Richardson, he and his wife Linda were Weight Watchers. They each lost over a hundred pounds. They decided they wanted to bicycle across the country with us. They did it on tandem. Immediately after they got married, they got married at the end of the ride and it was really well celebrated.
Lys: In Yorktown, Yeah.
Dan: They were just the perfect people to have out there and they just garnered all kinds of press. When Jim got back to Missoula, he decided they wanted to work for us full-time and so they became among our very first employees and was well into our process that Jim was studying what we were charging or proposing to charge and so on. He said, “Dan, you’re going to go bankrupt,” and so he had corrected all the numbers and he said, you’ve got to increase and I think it went up 40 or 50 percent. This is where you’ll break even. Had he not read this bulletin and fallen in love and come on that ride and then stayed with us, bikes and tenure would have been a total disaster. Things just fell in line by chance. For example, when Datson found out about us, a daughter to one of the executives said, “Dad, you’ve got to support these people,” and they gave us six little Hustler Datsun.
Gabriel: This is the car manufacturer.
Lys: Pickup, pickup.
Gabriel: Small pickup truck.
Dan: Oh yeah, now Nissan. So they gave us six vehicles for our field teams and then Winnebago gave us a big camper and that too was used for the field research.
Lys: We called it the Ameripig. And there was a huge amount of discussion on the staff and we kind of made this group decisions. It was just in a circle. Everybody said their thing and we came to consensus.
Dan: So we were idealistic young kids, not wanting to be part of the establishment, but we made it work. At one time, we had the biggest account in our local bank, more than any other corporation.
Gabriel: You’re the Missoula Bank platinum account.
Dan: Yeah. And another fun part of this story is that my college professor – I was in recreation – my college professor became the president of our board and I went to him one day and said, “Joel, we need credit. We need something.” And he mortgaged his house for us, college kids. I mean, people believed in us, including my college professor who basically wrote that amount over.
Lys: We did pay him back.
Dan: Oh, we did.
Lys: He and his wife became lifelong friends. He’s a great guy.
Dan: The other fun thing we love to tell is that Max Baucus, when he was first running for Congress, he was walking across the state and he came into our offices. He had heard about us, and he came into my office and we had this big PERT chart across the entire wall showing every step we were to take and he became so enamored with the quality of our thought process that years later, maybe 20 years later, I’m in his office in Washington D.C. when he’s a senator, Senator Max Baucus, and he brought his wife in when he realized I was going to come in, and he said to his wife, “If I ever run for president, these are the people I want to run my campaign.” I mean, it was that well thought through. We weren’t just kids. We were kids that collected this ability to attract best ideas and help. We didn’t build that PERT chart. It was the top university professors that built that pert chart, but they did it for free. They just knew what we’d have to do to pull it off. So all these things seemed to be by accident.
Lys: We helped, too, because we had to describe our operation. PERT is program evaluation and review technique, PERT chart. And so each division, like the leader trainers, like the mapping, like the guidebook writing, everybody laid out what they wanted to do and then we had to help with how to break it up, but we were guiding the process.
Gabriel: We have to use a few minutes to talk about the actual event. We’ve led up to it, and now I don’t want to run out of time before knowing, how was your experience on the ride, the 76 days or however many days it was?
Lys: We talked as a staff and we said it’s important for every one of us to ride at least a part of the trail. And we had broken it up into 12-day rides, if you didn’t have the time to do a quarter or a half. And so we would all go on a 12-day ride to educate us. And then we were busy. We were very busy. We had a war room where somebody was on call 24/7 for our leaders, which was needed.
Gabriel: Oh, yeah, we need to talk about the leaders real quick.
Dan: Yeah.
Lys: Absolutely. And then our trail heads. We had trail heads and we had guidebooks and printed maps. So Dan, take it away.
Dan: Tim and Bonnie Leifer came to us. They were AYH people, American Youth Hospital people, and they led leadership training courses. And when they found out what we were doing, they said they wanted to come across the country and work for us. They became our leader trainers. Six hundred leaders, or however many we had, they trained every one of them. They put on all these courses and certified and picked those who would actually get to lead the full trips or the partial trips. And it was amazing that that came to be. That’s what made it work. That was the magic, that we had skilled people that were well trained to lead bicycle trips.
Lys: Well, and really based on knowledge learned through hostiling, the American Youth Hostels and the Europeans. So absolutely knowledge based from that is what we relied on.
Dan: Yeah. But the rides themselves, we had rides starting daily from both coasts. They would cross in the middle and they would fill the buildings at night or the campgrounds. They’re all kinds of stories. They’re probably a thousand stories that we could tell, let alone the riders.
Lys: Yes. So by the time ’76 rolled around, some of the states had the road signs up for ’76. Others, you know, had just embraced the route and made their districts aware and, you know, so everybody was aware except for the people along the route. And that’s another story.
Gabriel: What happened? I got to hear about that.
Lys: The people along the route were just flabbergasted at first and then really supportive. I would say in Kansas, they opened up all their swimming pools to anybody on a bicycle coming through. Kansas, the riders would say, Kansas gave us the most incredible hospitality because they would take whole groups up their gravel roads for the mile or two to their farm and feed them dinner. And so, you know, you can camp here so you don’t have to go out, you know, all that stuff. In Kansas, they were thrilled, because they were meeting people from all across the country and the world. They said, you’re bringing the world to us. And they were just thrilled about it. We had a slideshow worked up to explain the idea of Bikecentennial and I would give it to all the bike clubs. Since I was doing that research, I would give it to anything that would lessen in the time that I had. It was usually one or two nights, max. Yeah. So we would explain the idea and in Kansas, in Lawrence, their professor fell in love and he just was so excited about this idea and really helped on the route through Kansas. He instituted a Ride Across Kansas even before, in ’75. And I think they rode our route to do a little test and then has done that every year since. So it’s just amazing and they’ll take different routes across Kansas.
Gabriel: Another lasting influence of the Bikecentennial.
Lys: Do you know about the Cookie Lady?
Gabriel: No.
Lys: The Cookie Lady of Afton, Virginia. The riders that were coming from the east were some of the first to really get in contact with a lot of people. And so halfway up climbing the Appalachians and getting up to the ridge road is a little town of Afton, and there was a lady who saw these people huffing and puffing up and she said, “Do you want any water?” They all said yes. And so she put a water sign out and then so many people were stopping and chatting with her. She started to bake cookies and so she’d have cookies and water, and then it grew from there. People started to know that there was a Cookie Lady in Afton, especially when the western group came. They all knew about the Cookie Lady. So she ended up giving about five or six ladies in town baking cookies for all these, and then they put the sign out. Her house became a museum of things that the riders left her and thank you for cookies.
Dan: I think when we sit back and think through what Bikecentennial was for the bicentennial, it had to be among the most authentic, certainly the hardest to pull off, but real celebrations of what this country is about. That we were kids with dreams. We had an impossible dream and what we were able to do is take everybody else’s dream and package them and put them into what became the foundation of their lives. I know many people who rode that year that are now, some of them very famous, but that gave them their start. It proved that they were worth what they didn’t know before, that they could test their mettle and find out, my gosh, I can do this. I could do anything in life, right? Some are now the top strategists in wellness, in health, and other fields, but it’s amazing what gift this movement, just kind of a dream, started in the desert, that just blossomed and blossomed and blossomed and became far more than anyone could ever have been up for just because the time was right, right? Had this not been the end of the Vietnam War, where people just wanted something to latch on to, I don’t think it would have been pulled off. I think because the times were so tough and we were trying to re-establish our footing as a nation, that this was something that really came to be.
Gabriel: Thanks to the efforts of the Siples and the Burdens, the Tour of the Scioto River Valley, Hemistour, and Bikecentennial collectively laid the foundation for modern American bicycle touring, transforming what was once a niche activity into a mainstream cultural movement. Beginning in 1962, TOSRV demonstrated the immense appeal of mass-participation, long-distance weekend tours. Hemistour’s subsequent 18,272-mile journey from Alaska to Argentina in the early 1970s captured the American public’s imagination through a National Geographic article and other press. And Bikecentennial ’76 catalyzed the mapping of the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail and went on to become the Adventure Cycling Association. These landmark achievements relied on the dedication of the Burdens and the Siples, but also on a cohort of young staff and volunteers who worked grueling 12- to 14-hour days for minimal, flat-rate stipends out of sheer dedication to the cycling cause. I just love what that low-budget idealism of the 1970s could accomplish. Tune in next time as we dive into the story of those west-to- east TransAmerica Bicycle Trail test pilots, Jim and Linda Richardson, true accidental bicycle tourists. As Dan Burden said, a tandem bicycle, support from Weight Watchers, tons of press coverage, and a wedding and costume are all part of the upcoming episode.
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.
June: We’re using basically a racing bicycle frame and the smaller wheels, the tougher wheels. There are some other innovations as well. Oh, I forgot your question.