12/29/2022 0 Comments Wild wonderful off gridThat said, the fact the GAP and the C&O stretch out in front of you and offer such a clear path to follow as you continue on your way is no accident. As a traveler, the fact the trail stretches behind you is partially a result of your own passage. You aren’t just a traveler but a participant, and by the trip’s end you’ve become part of the work of making and remaking the trail. Worn into the ground by footsteps and bike tires. The GAP and the C&O are trails constantly being remade by the tread of these travelers. Used first by workers, then by mule and train, then by walkers and bikers. The existence of this uninterrupted 334-mile traverse is no happenstance, it is the result of decades of use and the fervent defense of its users. The Great Allegheny Passage follows an old rail route, and rail bridges such as this, the McKeesport Connecting Railroad Bridge, crossing the Monongahela, abound. When beginning the trip from the Pittsburgh terminus of the Great Allegheny Passage trail, your first “trail town” comes as you cross the old railway bridge into McKeesport, PA. To stray from the path is often an option: to visit trail towns, to examine the ruins of 19th and 18th-century infrastructure, or to explore vast primordial caves, but the trail is always there to return to. Linked, end-to-end, in the middle of a bricked plaza in downtown Cumberland, Maryland, they form an uninterrupted 334-mile long ribbon of mostly dirt, crushed limestone, and gravel that is impossible to lose, even on the darkest nights. This facet of bike travel is never so acute and clear for me as when I return to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (C&O) towpath and the adjoining Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) trail. WILD WONDERFUL OFF GRID FREEThe function of the path is to reduce this teeming chaos into an intelligible line.”Ī touring route isn’t freeing because it is aimless, it is freeing because of its wonderful ability to mostly limit choice down to the following of the path and the resulting ability to free your mind to wonder. There are infinite ways to cross a landscape but the options are overwhelming, and pitfalls abound. To put it as simply as possible, a path is a way of making sense of the world. The freedom of the trail is riverine, not oceanic. Quite the opposite – a trail is a tactful reduction of options. “But complete freedom, it turned out, is not what the trail offers. I think author Robert Moor says it best in his written exploration of travel, On Trails: It can involve weeks or months of planning, trail markers, GPS tracks, resupply points… Which is not to say that escaping on a multi-day trip isn’t freeing, it is – very much so – but maybe not in the conventional sense of the word. After a couple of trips, though, I found the reality of touring isn’t the carefree meander I had envisioned. An opportunity to embrace a new kind of freedom of aimless wandering through paths and tracks out in the near-endless natural landscape. When I first started gathering the necessary gear to give bike touring (or “bikepacking” in the parlance of our times) a go, the concept struck me as an opportunity to escape from the predictable, mundane, “rinse-and-repeat” order of everyday life.
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