MISSOULA, MT (BRAIN)—Adventure Cycling Association—North America's largest cycling membership organization—was recently presented with a $10,000 check from Recreational Equipment at Adventure Cycling's headquarters in Missoula, Montana.
The REI funds will support on-going mapping and production work for the Association's newest route—the Sierra Cascades Bicycle Route. A 2,400-mile road-based journey, the route will stretch from Sumas, Washington, at the Canadian-Washington State border, through the Cascade Range into Oregon, southward through the Sierra Nevada Range in California and Nevada, to the Tehachapi and San Bernardino Mountains in Southern California, ending in Tecate, California, at the Mexican border. To date, REI has provided $30,000 in support of the Sierra Cascades Route.
The Sierra Cascades route and maps—scheduled for publication in early 2010—will bring the entire Adventure Cycling Route Network to more than 40,000 miles, the equivalent of riding around the planet more than one-and-a-half times. Adventure Cycling's network, which was launched in 1976 with publication of the 4,262-mile TransAmerica Trail, is the largest mapped cycling route system in the world.
Paralleling the Pacific Crest, the route will pass around and through many of North America's mountain gems, including the North Cascades National Park, Mount St. Helens and Mount Adams, Mount Hood, Mount Bachelor and Diamond Peak Wilderness, Crater Lake National Park, Mount Shasta and Lassen Volcanic National Park, Lake Tahoe, Mono Lake, Yosemite National Park, Kings Canyon National Park, Sequoia National Park, San Gorgonio Peak and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. This extraordinary route will guide traveling cyclists through terrain as varied as thick evergreen forests, apple orchards, wide and narrow river canyons, grasslands, glaciated high Sierra canyons, volcanic cones and high desert.
Adventure Cycling chose this route because of its closeness to many major population centers, numerous requests from cyclists across America for such a route, its amazing scenic vistas made popular by writers like John Muir and photographers like Ansel Adams and Galen Rowell, its extraordinary history from the rich heritage of Native Americans to the Gold Rush to the birth of modern environmentalism, and of course, the exhilarating challenge of the terrain for the bicycle traveler. In addition, the combination of the Adventure Cycling's very popular Pacific Coast Route and the new paved route near the Pacific Crest will create an epic loop and many shorter loop options between the two.
