ABT061. The Original Bikepackers and the Improbable Bikecentennial (Part 1)

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Bikecentennial ’76, this two-part series tells the extraordinary story of four bicycle pioneers – Greg and June Siple, Dan and Lys Burden – who took a circuitous path from a shared dream to successfully staging a massive bicentennial event. Ultimately, more than 4,000 cyclists would ride their newly hand-mapped, 4,200-mile Transamerica Bicycle Trail. Before Bikecentennial, the four were active members of the Columbus, Ohio, chapter of the American Youth Hostels. It was during these early years that Greg Siple and his father founded the Tour of the Scioto River Valley (TOSRV), an event that eventually grew to attract thousands of riders and established the logistical blueprint for modern, multi-day supported bicycle rides. Eager to extend their horizons, the two couples embarked in 1972 on the audacious Hemistour, a historic expedition to cycle from Alaska to Argentina. The first leg of this monumental journey earned them a feature in the May 1973 issue of National Geographic. Titled “Bikepacking Across Alaska and Canada,” the article is widely recognized for introducing what may be the earliest use of the word "bikepacking" in print. Part 1 explores the origins of the group’s ambitions, the creation of TOSRV, and their grueling months riding together on Hemistour from Anchorage, Alaska, to Salina Cruz, Mexico. Part 2 will cover their lives after the group parted ways. While the Siples pressed onward to Ushuaia, Argentina – making June Siple the first woman to bicycle the entire length of the Americas – the Burdens returned to the United States to begin the monumental work of organizing the improbable Bikecentennial ’76.

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Transcript

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*On the 4th of July, 2026, as the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, we are casting our minds back 50 years. In the summer of 1976, while the nation was busy celebrating its bicentennial with grand parades, tall ships, and fireworks, a quiet revolution was unfolding on two wheels. Picture more than 4,000 riders, supported by dozens of staff members, hundreds of trained leaders, and countless local volunteers. They were packing heavy steel-frame 10-speeds with canvas panniers and sleeping bags. These weren't professional athletes or seasoned racers. They were dreamers. They set out to ride either a segment or the entirety of a newly hand- mapped, 4,200-mile ribbon of backroads called the Transamerica Bicycle Trail, connecting the foggy coast of Reedsport, Oregon, with Yorktown, Virginia. The event was called Bikecentennial '76, and it remains one of the most significant bicycling events in American history. This year marks the 50th anniversary of that monumental milestone. Over the last five decades, the magic of that single transformative summer blossomed into the Adventure Cycling Association, establishing a legacy of bicycle travel that has mapped tens of thousands of miles across North America. But in this episode, and the next, we are turning back the clock even further. Long before Bikecentennial soared like a red, white, and blue kite at the end of a very long, nearly invisible thread, had any one of a dozen events in the 1960s and early '70s gone differently. That thread would have been broken, and the kite would have fallen to the ground.#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. *Hello Hemistour enthusiasts! Welcome to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. Today, we're diving into what might be our most ambitious story yet. At its core, this is the tale of four young people from Columbus, Ohio, who - sometimes by design, and sometimes accidentally - sparked a national movement. In alphabetical order by family birth name, they are Lys Brant, Dan Burden, June Jenkins, and Greg Siple. Back in the late 1960s, most adults in America viewed bicycles as toys, not serious transportation. But these four saw them differently. From an early age, Dan wanted to experience the world on two wheels. Greg lived for the challenge of long days in the saddle, seeking out new roads and riding partners wherever he could. Lys and June shared a passion for the outdoors and cycling at a time when society often expected young women to stay closer to home. In 1968, when the very concept of bicycle touring was virtually unheard of in the United States, these four friends made an audacious pact to ride together from Alaska to Argentina, an expedition they called Hemistour. Prior to their departure from Anchorage in 1972, Greg married June and Dan married Lys, and so they set out as the Siples and the Burdens. In this episode, Part One, we will explore their early days with the American Youth Hostels (AYH), the founding of the Tour of the Scioto River Valley (TOSRV), and their months riding together on Hemistour from Anchorage, Alaska to Salina Cruz, Mexico. It was a journey of immense physical hardship, extreme challenges, and conflicting personal goals. Because decades have passed since they finished that journey, and because memory is a subjective thing, their recollections differ, sometimes on minor details and sometimes on deeply personal experiences. Let's begin our journey with the Burdens. Dan and Lys Burden, thank you for being guests on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist Podcast. [We're pleased to be with you. ]Yep!*Great! I think it's safe to say that Bikecentennial '76 was the culmination of a long series of improbable, fortuitous, and perhaps even accidental events. Let's rewind to many years earlier, 1959. Dan, you were a sophomore in high school that year. Can you give some context about the state of bicycle travel in the United States at that time? [At that time, all the bicycles were basically Schwinn bicycles, heavy, single-speed bikes. There were some three-speed bikes that'd been introduced to the market, but hardly any other visions for what a bicycle was. The derailleur, the modern way to have multiple gears, was years off. And if there was a good bike in the country, it was only because someone had imported a racing machine. That was where we were with bicycling, and virtually all bicyclists were children. Very few people that were adults wanted to be seen on a bike. My dad was one, and I could probably name two or three others in my childhood that I recall, but that was about it. *So given that fairly dismal landscape for bicycles, how did you come up with this idea to travel by bicycle in 1959? [Well, I was already in love with a bicycle. It was a Christmas gift that I got, oh, maybe when I was nine years old, something like that. I was always given the freedom to travel away from my block or even a mile. I could go five, six miles on a bike when I was just eight or nine or 10 years old, and did, got out in the countryside. And I just envisioned from that very early years that someday I wanted to bike the world, but it wasn't until it was in 10th grade that I had enough wisdom about what it would take and read a few books that inspired me about round-the-world bicyclists. So I decided I'm going to do that in 10th grade. *Sure. ]I was gifted a bicycle when I was 10 years old, and I was allowed to ride in the neighborhood at first, but then I think when I was in sixth grade, we could ride three miles to the library. So again, it was a one-speed bike, and it was just really children or teenagers riding bikes. *Yeah, I was going to ask Lys how you got started.]Yeah. *You beat me to it already. And what part of the country were you? ]In Ohio. We were in the edges of Columbus, Ohio, right in the center of the state. I lived on the north end, and he lived on the west end. We didn't meet each other until we were high school. I was late high school, he was out of high school. *And how did you meet?]Oh, actually it was a cave thing. So there are a lot of caves in Kentucky, just south of Ohio, and I had gone to a Girl Scout camp that offered spelunking. And I was so excited. We saw this group. It was a hostelling group in Columbus that sponsored caving trips. So June and I put our names on the list to go on a trip. And so we did. We went to Batcave. *So wait a minute now. You said June. ]Siple.*June Siple. ]Yeah. *That's going to be the other pair of the story here. But you're making it sound like you met June before you met Dan. ]I did.*Wow. ]We were in the same high school class of about 300 people, but we had that wanderlust. I think we were in Scouts. So we went on a caving trip, but then they also had a fleet of bicycles with gears and dropped bars. This was really amazing. I mean, we'd never ridden or seen anything like that. This was about 1965 when we first rode on a dropbar geared bicycle. And I want Dan to tell his part when he discovered a ten-speed bicycle. [Well, I discovered a three-speed first. That was my first real bike after growing up with my sister's step- through frame bike. Three-speed took me everywhere. Just getting out of high school, I got my first ten- speed. A Raleigh Grand Prix, I believe. And then, it wasn't much later - maybe a year later - I got a Super Mondia, an imported Swiss bike that was just everything you'd ever dream of. The double-butted tubing and the best of the best, right? And I paid $110 for that with racks and all the frills. And it just took me everywhere. It was a wonderful adventure. I would bike alone or with one friend that also was into biking for a while. And then I realized I wanted to ride with more people. And that's when I was in college looking at a bulletin board. And I sold this thing for the American Youth Hostels. So I went to their meeting. It was a bunch of, oh, mostly college professors and young people in their 20s and 30s. And no youth. And so I became embroiled in this organization. And through really heavy marketing and everything, I put together early bike trips, canoeing trips, all the various trips. And it grew. And it grew. And it grew. And that's what eventually led to June and Lys discovering what this organization was eventually. And Greg will probably tell this story. He and his father bicycling to Portsmouth, Ohio and back. And then he took that event and grew it and grew it. And then I got involved in it and really bolstered it. And then we brought in this guy named Charlie Pace. *What was the name of this bicycle ride? ]Oh, the tour of the Scioto River Valley or TOSRV. So we'd call it Tosrov. [And it became truly one of the biggest bike rides in America. I think at its peak, there were maybe nine or 10,000 that would register. Many others who wouldn't. And that became a model for other big bike rides. And that's what attracted the National Geographic to cover bicycling. Before then, there was no interest. But they saw how big this was becoming. *Yeah, when National Geographic steps in, that's going to be super interesting. But I also want to know, that dream of going around the world. How had it evolved from the first time you had the idea to now the kind of mid and late 1960s? ]It was definitely Dan's idea.[Yeah, I was in the Navy and the idea was evolving. And I reaLysed how many languages I'd have to bump into if I went around the world. And I was terrible at language. I still am. I said, well, wait a minute, all this land connects. And it's actually a little bit longer than going around the world, if we do it the way we were going to do it. And so it became the vision to do Alaska to Argentina. Yeah, that was pretty cool making that switch. I thought, okay, I need somebody to go with me.*Somebody. [Yeah, somebody. I don't want to do this alone. I wrote to Greg a letter saying what I was going to do. And within a week, he wrote back and says, "I'm coming with you." We were already really good friends and we had done a lot of bike rides together. So he knew what he was getting into. But then a few weeks later, the girls, June and Lys, decided they were going to go off and bicycle the Middle East. And then Greg and I wrote back and said, "That's not safe. Let's invite them to come on our ride." And we kind of knew at that point we'd have to get married. That was the years where you just didn't go off with someone unless you were married. And so we got married. Now there were four of us. ]So we didn't really know we were going to get married.*Okay. [Your mom's figured that one out. ]We figured it out. *So is this the accidental marriage? Is that what this is? ]Yeah, kind of. *Okay, Dan is nodding. ]Both couples were married before the trip. But I was married under duress. I wasn't sure I wanted to marry this guy. But my mother said,"No, you are not going anywhere with a fellow until you're married." I did find him really intriguing and kind of fun to be around. So, uh-huh. Yeah.*Well, I'm glad, because obviously this is more than 50 years since that time, so... ]Yeah. *That's great. So then let's talk a little bit about what became known as the Hemistour, because you look at it on the map and you say, well, this would be fun. Now there's just one thing about it. Nobody had ever done this before, as far as we could tell. So how do you go about planning it and getting the gear and everything at this time? [Well, Lys was the planner. So I'll let her talk through what it took. ]Well, we looked at the route in the North Country. In fact, we were living in Missoula, Montana, married by this time.*Missoula is obviously going to be a very important place. Could you tell why you ended up in Missoula of all places?[Huh. Well, when I was still in the Navy, I knew I wanted to go back to college. And so I applied to a half-dozen western colleges. And Missoula just happened to be the first one to approve me. I wasn't a bright student, or I certainly wasn't a committed student. To have a school pick me up was a pretty good deal. *Sorry, I don't know which colleges are in which town in Montana.]University. *That's the University of Montana. ]Yeah.*Okay. [So the accidental college.*I'm seeing a pattern. ]And we actually drove up in a van. Our housemates, several of them came with us. And we drove all the way up to Alaska and back on the Alcan Highway. And we realized that we were going to have to pack a lot of food. By this time, we were leaders, group leaders in AYH. We'd bicycled a lot of short rides. And I had actually ridden from Columbus, Ohio to Glacier National Park. I started out by myself, but I met people, planned, along the way that wanted to ride with me. So we had a total of five girls by the time we hit the eastern side of the Glacier Park. So we knew that we were going to have to pack a lot of food. And the only food available along the route was canned, basically. You just can't carry cans in a pack for a week's ride. So we got back to Missoula and we really didn't have any dehydrators or anything. So we started figuring out how to make a wooden box with a light bulb and get some oven shelves. And we started just getting frozen food and dehydrating it that late fall and winter before we started. And so we made a lot of our food. We did have a little bit of canned food. We did spam. But we did a lot of quick cooking rice and macaroni and things like that. for the week from seven to eight days. We were going to do about 50 miles a day, we figured. And so we kind of figured more major cities along the route where we could send these things. By the spring of 1972, we had a ton of these big boxes full of dehydrated food, all organized to pick up. And we sent the first one off and it got stopped at the border. So all our boxes through Canada, we realized that we weren't going to get them in the mail until we drove them across the border. So on our way to start the ride from Missoula, we drove across the border and we shipped all that stuff to post offices with a cover letter that said,"Postmaster, please save this for us. We are pedaling down this route and we need our food." And they did, and they watched for us. *Amazing. ]Yeah, it was really fun. [One set of post offices were so far apart, two weeks apart, that we actually had to arrange a flight to have an airdrop and a pilot came down, dipped his wings when he recognized us and then dropped the food, which was well packaged, on the highway and we went and picked it up. ]And the other thing that happened was one of thebpost offices burned down. *Oh no! ]But the postmaster ran and got those boxes, I guess, through the flames. *Forget the letters. Forget the letters. I need the dehydrated food. Amazing. ]So he took it on to the post office one to the south. Yeah, that was amazing too. Dan had to go get that in a special run. [Oh yeah. I did a side trip, about 150 miles round trip to pick it up.]Yeah. *Yeah, well, that was your food. ]Yeah. *And then what about the bicycles? Because with bicycle touring not really being a thing at that time in the United States, you were probably forced to come up with a lot of innovations.[And we did. It's amazing. There were probably 10 people in the whole country that were creative enough that they could have built the bicycles for us. It happened to be Sam Braxton in Missoula, Montana. He was a railroader during the day. He would, at night, run his bike shop. And he was amazing. For example, our brakes, just alone, were made up of three different manufacturers. Mafac, Weinemann, and whatever the third one is. Because no brake was good enough, he built brand new ones. He was the first one to apply a long- range derailleur. Spence Wolf in California had been building them. ]In Cupertino, California, there was this bike shop. And the derailleurs from Europe didn't have a long enough arm to take a large sprocket. And so they had to take what looked like Erector Set and lengthen that arm with the two wheels of the derailleur. [Sam found out about these derailleurs. So we had the first wide-range gears. ]Yeah. So we had to create some of the parts to accommodate what we wanted to do. [Adding to your pattern here, the accidental bicycle manufacturer, right? Sam Braxton. Everything was accidental. *He happens to be in Missoula. Again, of all places. [Yep. ]Yeah. He fell in love with bicycling. He's one of those characters. And Montanans just loved to go adventuring and hiking. And I don't know how Sam discovered bicycling, but he did. He had ten-speeds, but again, they were racing bikes. You know, they were made for racing and not touring. So that's why he became well aware, because there are a lot of mountain climbs on roads to do in Montana. [We did 1 3/8ths- inch Regina rims and tires. Before the ever was a dream of mountain bikes or hybrids, we had the first hybrids. *And with this hybrid bike, what was the advantage of the tires that you ended up getting? [Very rugged. Your really high-proficient tires wouldn't he'll hold up. *Right.[Well, the first 1,800 miles were gravel, right? *Right. So these are wide tires and they're 26-inch tires? 26-inch by one-and-three-eighths. ]And it had a bead that was copacetic with Europe, because when we get into Mexico, they had the European sizes. So we didn't go with the American sizes. *So this is the 650A size? ]Yeah, I think that was it. It was 50 years ago.*Lesser known than the 650B. I mean, tire naming, that's a whole other topic. ]It was a kind of a fat tire, not real fat, but fat enough that it gave us that traction on the gravel and on the sand roads that we rode. *This is the precursor of the gravel bike. You need something wider on gravel, otherwise you have no chance. Right. You definitely encountered a lot of crazy road conditions on your ride. Finally, the big day arrives, where your trip gets started. I've read June's writings in The Adventure Cyclist magazine about your ride. So I know a few of the things that happened, but I was just shocked to find out how the tour began. There were a couple of things that were really crazy. So can you tell about that? ]Well, first of all, we were so busy with college and everything else that we hadn't done any preparation physically. We were people off the street, man. And so we started out slow, but we were doing okay on the gravel roads of Alaska. And we were increasing our mileage. We knew we had to do that to meet our food stops. So we did. But at first it was a little rugged, but we did kind of firm up and get into a very... almost routine. It was like we were going to work. Breakfast, break camp, take the mileage down, and pedal. We would string out. So a lot of times we were riding onesies or twosies. We didn't ride in a constant group because we all had different paces or different interests too. You want to stop and take a look at this thing or something. We would always prepare our lunches in the morning so we'd have them with us. We'd try and meet for lunch and then of course get together toward dusk. But of course that's like 8 p.m., 9 p.m. in the North Country. [But also on the first day out we were burglarized. We had put our food packs up on the roof for reasons of staying away from bears. Somebody seeing them from the road and in the middle of the night found out what they were and they stole them. So half of all our panniers were gone and they're the ones that also had our tools. So a reporter came out from Anchorage and covered the story and it ran a big article. Not only did we find the worst of the people but as we rode people would stop and give us tools. They said, "My husband said, 'When these guys come along give them any tool they need.'" So we found the worst of humanity and the best of humanity in the first day.*Yeah that was the event I was referring to. It's an incredible stroke of bad luck. Then as you said the response of people all around to yeah either give you tools or people sent in money or helped you out in any way possible.]They'd invite us to dinner. Yeah it was really really great. So we called up our manufacturer of our panniers and said we need four on the left side.*Oh gosh. ]He expressed them up. Because we were close to Anchorage there were a few more towns. It wasn't really getting out in the wilderness yet and we were going slow. We pretty much found food and car- ried it haphazzardly until the packs came and were delivered. I forget where they came in, but it was up the road. *Yeah. so that was one surprising thing and then I have to mention, usually it takes some time for a group dynamics to set in but she openly described disagreements that the Burdens had with the Siples, even at the very beginning of your ride. ]I think we enjoyed each other's company but the two couples had a slightly different concept of what an expedition like this would be. And for June and Greg, they had to bicycle every inch of the road. And we didn't figure this out until we did a side trip to Denali and then we came back and the bus left us off on the other side of the road and those two walked across the highway and started riding from where they got on the bus. At first we didn't know what they were doing. Why are they going across here? Anyway. *Yeah. [But they faulted Lys and I for not riding every inch of the road. But I think another big difference, and I don't know if this is something June pointed out, is that our reason for riding was experience to come to feel and see the planet the people and for them it was a goal. It was this every inch of the way and that was never my dream. In fact I would say on that whole portion of the ride because I was heftily the photographer I would ride up and back and up and back and I went off a hundred and some miles to get more food. So we rode all the distance and beyond that they did it's just that it was the experience that I was after and I think it was more the quest of doing something that was driving both of them. So that was a difference. ]And I very much was oriented toward connecting with the environment. I would be a little slow because I'd get off and explore a little bit.[Yeah. ]But I would catch up but yes and just being outside and living outside for a year and a half gives you lots of insight and connection. [But I think something important here is being discussed and that is two groups very different different goals or different values in mind can actually get along. You think of the average married couple, they're going to be together a few hours a day or whatever, but we were in this journey a solid four years, right? More than any marriage could endure, and so obviously you're going to have group dynamics but somehow this ongoing quest and the freshness and the adventure side keeps people together in a way that some lesser journey wouldn't do. You had to stay together and you knew that you had to stay together. There was no reason that you would want to go off on your own. *Yeah and in fact sometimes the group faces a particularly stressful situation, whether it be bad weather or maybe... ]Terrain.*Any kind of setback. Terrain, yes. And that brings the group together because that's a shared experience. [It does.*That you all had to suffer this crazy terrain or through this storm. [Yeah. Indeed it was during the 11 days riding through the rainforest, where it never stopped raining, that I think our group became most secure with one another. We were pushing through something that we had never done before and very few people do and I think as a group we felt it. I certainly felt closer to everyone in the group when we were in that rainforest. ]Yeah, that was British Columbia.[British Columbia. *This is maybe a good time to bring up the National Geographic again because this is also important and also one of the legacies of the trip, actually. The Hemistour trip. So you mentioned that National Geographic finally started to show interest in bicycling after this Toxpert. [Tosrov. ]Tosrov.*I'm curious to find out what steps and what interaction did you then have with National Geographic to have them at the very least do an article but maybe even, it might be customary for them to support financially part or all of the tours. So that's a crazy leap, from this initial interest to there's the article in people's hands. [Right. About three years before we started this journey I was already reaching out to National Geographic but just finding it luke warm. I even went and visited, sat down with them and they gave me some guidelines. I was already studying photography while I was in the Navy. I had a great friend who was a photographer's mate, so I was learning the skill even more so than I had earlier. And then when I got out of the Navy I had three different assignments for photography. Yearbook and the newspaper for the college and drama department. So I was getting good at but it still wasn't something that would pique their interest. It was after they realized they were going to do a full story on bicycling, independent of what we were doing, that they started to take an interest. They said, "Well, we'll give you free film, we'll process it, and give you a little guidance." but they had no interest in backing our whole expedition. But when they saw the photography and the story, they fell in love with it and they were going to kill the other story on bicycling and just cover ours. And then they came back and said, "No, we're going to do both, but we'll cut each one in half. But here's the other accidental story. When I was in Anchorage, I called Alaska magazine, just to see if they wanted to do some coverage, and the guy who just happened to pick up the phone, just accidentally picked up the phone, turned out to be the publisher/editor, and when he found out what we were about to do, he said, "Look, if you come and give a presentation to my Rotarian group, I'll teach you how to shoot for National Geographic." So we jumped on that. True to his word, after I did the presentation, he had opened 12 different National Geographics, and he taught us. He said every article - they don't know this - but every article they do always has exotica... ]It's a formula. [It always has erotica, it has S curves... ]Opening panoramas. [All these things, and when it got to the erotica one day Lys and I were hiking in the woods well into our British Columbia portion we were on Beauty Creek and I said, "Lys, strip down and go sit down there in the creek." So she became the first Caucasian nude in National Geographic. ]Well, the place looked like a bathtub. It was just kind of in the wall of the valley, and it was a perfect spot to be bathing, except that it was meltwater from the glacier. [Cold. ]So I could barely get into it. But yeah, it was a very tasteful back shot. But there were a whole bunch of other kinds of pictures that you need to take. One of them is called points. Little points of detail that are unusual to life. And so the picture that made it into National Geographic was the shoes all around the campfire, because we had been riding through rain. So that kind of thing. *It's also worth mentioning, in terms of firsts, that the title of the article ends up being called"Bikepacking Across Alaska and Canada," and this is one of the first known uses of the term"bikepacking." And of course, ironically, you had very conventional touring setups with the racks and the panniers. It's not what's called bikepacking today, in terms of your setup, but it's still amazing that that's another first from your trip.]And that was coined by our editor, Noel Grove, who actually came out and rode his bicycle with us for a whole week. National Geographic, you know, editor. Was amazing. And it was truly amazing that we got the article. But within National Geographic they have a group of governors that decide on what stories they're going to run, and so they had sent us as a trial 80 rolls of film and so the guys, Greg did a little bit and Dan did a ton of using up that film. The editor that goes through the pictures did this show for the governors that decide what's going in, and they were blown away. Again accidental. Accidental that you know there was a bicycle article in the hopper. They just sent us 80 rolls of film and said, "Maybe they'll get two or three pictures." Yeah!*Yeah, the article came out in May 1973. The early '70s were a time period where the attitudes towards bicycles were finally changing, and there was really a big boom in bicycle sales, and maybe adults could ride them too. [And indeed it was this National Geographic set of two articles that really created the boom. I mean the boom was happening but it needed to be coverage. Hundreds of thousands of people needed to realize that's something they might be able to do. So it was our ride, paired with the broader article on bicycling, that I think turned a lot of people around. In fact, I don't think our Bikecentennial could have happened without this article having been released. Everything was in sequence and had this not happened, then this likely would not have happened, or certainly wouldn't have happened at the scale. *Right. And now is a great time to talk about the origin of the Bikecentennial idea because it occurred on the Hemistour ride.[Correct. You know, when you're riding a bike, you're pumping more oxygen into your brain, and so your ideas become a little crazy. This is not an idea that you would sit around a desk and dream up. It was Greg that came up with the idea, but the two of us talked it through, and that gelled all the way from San Francisco clear down to Chocolate, Mexico, to where the idea further blossomed. And it's amazing that that sequence had to occur. You know, we had to have talked about it first but then it needed time to morph into something a little bigger and then Chocolate occurred. ]Yeah, the group had to cogitate on it as we were riding. That very same day we were riding through sand roads in Chihuahua, Mexico into the little town of Chocolate. We were talking about this idea of this ride and we were lovers of the Tosrov you know, and so we envisioned this big group riding across the country, and it wasn't until we got to Ohio when our mentors said, "You guys are crazy. They're going to get sick of each other. You're going to be like a herd of locusts. You need to break this thing up. So you see, that was another piece of wisdom that was really important. *So the original idea was, let's just ride. Let's go!]Yeah, right. 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. Because it was supposed to be impromptu, and a solo thing is what Dan and Greg were envisioning but we put that layer of organizing on it. *But it really wasn't feasible to organize it while you were on the Hemistour. [No. *You just can't do both at the same time.[Ah. Then Greg and I went into - I think it was Mexico City - I had written something and Greg had illustrated the "two wheels, two centuries," and we mailed it out to everyone we knew in bicycling, and at the time it was in the hundreds. But then, and this I think is the other accidental, Bikecentennial never would have happened had I not come down with hepatitis. So that knocked me out of the tour, so Lys and I both went back to Ohio. I recovered and then we moved into action. Had we not gotten... me gotten sick then there was no way we would have organized this big event. It was another accidental, illness in this case, that brought together Bikecentennial.*That was the perspective of Dan and Lys Burden, but what about the other half of the expedition? Let's turn now to the Siples. Greg and June Siple, thank you both for being guests on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. {Our pleasure. }This will be fun.*Greg, let's get started with your story. How did you get into bicycling at this time when we already know bicycling was considered a sport for kids?{My father had developed an interest in serious bicycling in the 1930s, when he was living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and he attended a six-day bicycle race that was in downtown Pittsburgh. And he was just enthralled with what he saw, and then luckily he ran into an individual who had a bike like they had in the six- day race, unlike the kids bikes that he knew. This fellow had such a bike and it turned out there was a small group called the Pittsburgh Wheelman, and they had the bikes and they were, you know, doing some real riding, so my father was drawn into this. He began riding with them and doing some serious rides. He rode once from Pittsburgh to Washington D.C. and back, for example, and when the war came he signed up and became a sailor on a heavy cruiser and he was in the Navy for the duration of the war. And when he got out after the war, I was born and then my brothers came along. And he's just struggling like a lot of young servicemen to make a life. He didn't think about bicycling at all, and then oddly enough, when I became a teenager, I had been looking at his scrapbooks. He had these wonderful scrapbooks. Most kids my age at that time, where you think when I turn 16 I'm gonna get into a car and this bicycle I'm giving to my little sister. I just was fascinated by his stories and his scrapbook pictures and he saw my interest and it kind of brought him back and he got his first 10-speed bicycle from Europe, you know, had to do a mail order. He and I began riding. I just thought it was wonderful. I began to meet young (mostly) guys that were riding 10-speed bicycles. }There weren't very many of them, though. {No. *We've talked to the Burdens and they were growing up in Ohio. You were also growing up in Ohio. Out of the four of you, I've learned that it was actually June and Lys that first met. June, how did that happen and how old were you? }In high school we were best friends, at least for like the last two years of high school. But we were also involved in the Girl Scouts of America. We joined in second grade, I think. Well, we kept going after high school. We were still members for several years after high school, so we were almost on the track of being professional Girl Scouts.*Wow! }We were going to an international festival. Mostly, it was concentrating on food and things like that. Foreign customs. And it was at a time when not many Americans traveled abroad. We saw this canoe sticking into the aisle so we stopped to look at the canoe and this was a youth hosteling organization and they had a little self- propelled slideshow without anyone being there, so we watched the slideshow and there was a sign-up sheet so we signed up to get the newsletters. Our first trip - Lys and I - was on Dan Burden's trip, which was a spelunking, cave-exploring trip in West Virginia. And after that we became leaders. Greg, Lys, and I all took the national leadership training course with AYH. *So wait, where does Greg come in? So far we've had the two of you and then Dan was in AYH. }Yes, and then previous to our trip with Dan, cave exploring, Greg and Dan had already met, I think on a trip that Dan was leading. {Yeah. I just seen a notice that was a AYH newsletter hanging up in a bike shop and it said there was going to be this bike trip and I was just hungry for anything to do with bicycles. You know, we went to the appointed location and time and uh and that's where I met Dan. *The Burdens also mentioned this very important moment, which was Greg, you and your dad went on this bike ride that grew into something much bigger. So can you tell us about that? {As I mentioned, my father was drawn back into bicycling and he proposed this idea that we ride from Columbus, Ohio, which is in the center of the state, south to the Ohio River, to Portsmouth, Ohio and it would be a distance of 105 miles on a Saturday. And then, Sunday we would return. I just thought this was a wonderful thing. We made our ride and my father, he struggled a bit. I think it had been over 20 years since he'd done any real serious bicycling and I think he was still thinking of himself as this young man who could just hop on a bike and ride 100 miles. But I was 16 and I just ate it up. We stayed in a hotel overnight and ate in restaurants along the way, and and when I got home I just, wow, that was great. So the next year, I thought it'd be nice to repeat that ride, and my father wasn't so interested doing it again. *It nearly killed him!{Right, although he continued to ride. Our little informal group was getting together. I persuaded three guys to make the ride with me. And the next year there were six of us. And then the next year there were 15, including Dan Burden was at the starting line. }We wrote a book about the TOSRV. *Oh! }And this is, 25 years of history.{Tour of the Scioto River Valley. I kind of came up with the acronym. Actually, I was going to art school and majoring in advertising design. I saw some benefit to having this acronym, TOSRV. It was kind of mysterious to people. I even ran a couple little ads in the bike magazine says,"TOSRV is coming." Well, what's that? *Wow. }Here's a little interesting document. This is my trip card. I led a trip, and back then if you led a bike trip you might get five people, six people, and I had 15 people on my trip and this is really I think the first time that Greg and Dan and Lys and I were together, was on this trip. Their names are on this list.*Oh wow, okay. That is amazing.{That's actually the day I met June and Lys. }We didn't like each other very much. *You did not like each other very much?}No, no. Greg was a bike racer so he was in his kit, you know. Racing jersey, everything racing, and his friend Pete Fromm was with him and they were very anxious to get going and one person had a crash on the way to my house. I just told people to meet at my house, and we would leave from there. So a big tall guy fell down and he had road rash from his ankle to his hip. *Oh. }He wrecked a bike and I had just rented at my ten-speed from the youth hostel people and I gave him my bike so he could continue to ride, and in the meantime I was dressing his wounds in the house and these bike racers were fit to be tied. They just didn't like that. They just felt like that guy, he's out. Never mind about him. *We can't wait for this. }I was not very impressed with Greg. {She's the leader. Why isn't she out leading? And of course on a youth hostel trip the leader is at the back. You know, you're taking care of problems and so on and she was in cut-offs. The level of cycling that these people had just didn't match it.*Do you have there the date that the four of you did this event? Is that written on this document? }Yes, it's October 17, 1965. *Were they already dating at that point, Dan and Lys? }Oh no, oh no. *And you guys certainly were not dating, because June was not impressed with you, Greg. }No, I actually dated Dan first. *What? Ok. }We went to see Doctor Zhivago and he was very standoffish, so I just figured well he doesn't really like me that much. Never mind. *Okay. }And then, Lys dated Greg. *No! All right. Well, that, that had not come up earlier with the Burdens. }I think it was 6 months. {Something like that.}About 6 months. {Then meanwhile June and I began to spend more time together. }We dated for about three years on bicycles. And I lived 20 miles from Greg and he would bicycle to my house. And then we'd go on a ride and then he'd ride home. Or we'd bicycle to his house and then ride somewhere else, and then I would ride home. And one night we decided that I should just stay at his house, so he put me on the floor of the living room without his parents knowing, and his father came in in the middle of the night and was quite shocked to find a young woman on the floor in the living room. {But the tour just continued to grow. It ultimately reached 6,000 riders and one of the things it did it was kind of a showcase because people would come down from Chicago and ride this ride and they say, well, we could start something like that here in Chicago and it really had a big effect on the way that adult bicycling developed in the United States. This idea that you could get a lot of people together and you'd go on in some significant distance together and you'd have food stops set up and sometimes you'd have first aid stations and, you know, it was just a whole new way of looking at bicycling.*That was the blueprint for what became supported bicycle rides. {A blueprint, exactly. And it was also a turning point, for example, for women because when TOSRV was beginning they didn't even allow women to run in the Boston Marathon. Here we had an event where there was no restriction or a special accommodation of women. We were all in it together, and we had old people, young people, and people on balloon-tire banana bikes, as they called them, and people on beautiful handmade ten-speeds. It was just a wonderful event and it's still going on. *Very cool. And so June, did you take the starting line at the TOSRV at some point? }In 1966, yes. That was the first year that women rode. *Nice! {And it was the success of TOSRV that made us think, well, you know, what else could we do to kind of present this to the American public? what you can do with bicycling and that's where the idea of Hemistour came up, where you ride long distances and into foreign countries. It had a lot to do with TOSRV in the way to develop the kind of giving us this confidence. It was like a springboard for what we could do. }And we learned about organizing through TOSRV so it was a really important element in the formation of Hemistour and then Bike- centennial beyond that. We knew how to do these things so we just kept going. In 1968, Dan and Greg invited Lys and I to go on Hemistour, so that was like right after TOSRV, we're all tired, sitting around on somebody's porch and they said,"We'd like you to come on the ride." Previous to that, Lys and I were starting to feel a little upset that we had not been invited, so we decided,"Okay, we're going to ride the length of Africa, so there." *Take that! }And I think that sort of stimulated the guys into thinking, oh yeah, maybe we should invite them to go with us. And at the time there was no romantic interest at all. We were just bicycle buddies. Lys and I started to wonder, what kind of proposal was this anyway?*Dan was the one who from an early age had dreamed about bicycling around the world.{When I first met Dan, he had this yearning for travel, like a lot of young people do, and he was planning what I remember was not a bicycle trip but a van trip. }Yeah. {With his old high school buddy. A week or so ago we went visited, and he confirmed a lot of this. But Bill, his friend, he has something that he called Mission 66 or... }Project 66. {Project 66. And where you you're going to go off in his his van, you know. He was more of an adventurer, and the two were planning this thing, and it wasn't really particularly a bicycle trip. And when I met Dan and where bicycling was, you know, such an emphasis, I think somehow it was during that period in the late '60s the idea that this journey would be on bicycles and it would be from Alaska to Argentina. }Dan wanted to travel, he wanted to do stuff with bicycling, but it didn't become a reality until he met Greg Siple, who was a serious cyclist who could do 100-mile days, and like I didn't know anybody like that. Dan came up with a concept and Greg named it "Hemistour." {We couldn't initiate it right away, because in 1966 Dan joined the Navy, and that was a four-year hitch. So we had to wait four years, which is okay. We weren't ready to go. And about the time that he got out of the Navy, now there was more of romance as a part of our relationships and Dan and Lys married and June and I married, but still we weren't quite ready to go on Hemistour because I had an obligation, because it was during the Vietnam War, and I became a conscientious objector. So instead of doing two years of service in the military, I did two years of service at a home for crippled children. June and I were married and we went off to Pittsburgh to do my two years of service. Meanwhile Dan and Lys came out here to Missoula to go to school. *Right. {But all along, we knew we were going to do this trip and when my two years was over, June and I hitchhiked to Missoula, and Missoula became the staging area for Hemistour. }We just came west with not much money and so it was a backpack and a thumb to get to Missoula. *Great. Let's talk a little bit about the preparations for the Hemistour, in terms of route planning, the gear. I mean, it's not like today, where you can just find many, many descriptions online and you have all kinds of specialized gear. You had very little to work with at that time. }Right. Road maps. All the oil companies, they all had their maps, so like for Ohio there might be three maps for the whole state and as a bicyclist, you just lay out that map and look for the secondary roads and plan your trip like that. Dan and Lys, they liked a super-plan trips, and for Hemistour they put a group of people together, seven or eight people in two different vehicles, and they drove from Missoula to Alaska and back. This is like 6,000 miles to research the Hemistour route, which was funny to us because there are very few roads up in Alaska. It's not like you have a secondary road. It's just, that's the road. And then when they got to Alaska on Hemistour with us there were things that they had already done that they didn't want to do again because they had been there by car. For example, they had been to Circle, Alaska, with this group. We wanted to go as far north as we could, as far south as we could, and we were basically defeated from going as far north as we could, because of that situation. Also we got a late start. We were about two weeks late on the road in Alaska. I found their research trip strange because here we were, we wanted to plunge into this adventure where you take your bicycle and then you go into the unknown. }And why would you plan the heck out of it? {Yeah, why would you want to go there first in a motor vehicle? }So that was one of our first clashes, and then they would have spent a lot of money going to Alaska and coming back to Missoula that should have really gone towards a trip. *And you had pooled your resources together, so it was the group funds that were used for this? }Group funds. Because we were really on a shoestring budget. When Greg and I were in Pittsburgh, there was a local outfitter just for like hiking, backpacking, and things like that. They offered us a discount, so we went and looked at their things. They had lederhosen on the rack. Lederhosen. We were trying to come up with different ideas for equipment, because you also could not buy bicycle touring equipment, because it wasn't even a recognized sport in the United States at the time. So Greg and I chose lederhosen to start out on Hemistour, and they were great. *Really? }Yeah. They tend to come apart too fast, so you're on the trip and you're sewing up your shorts all the time. They're very tough. You just can't wear them out. *Well, and if there was an Oktoberfest along the route you could just stop in in your lederhosen. }Yes, we'd be all ready. {One important thing was the bicycles at the time bicycles, for the most part the 10-speeds available in the United States had 27 by 1 1/4-inch wheels, which were narrow especially in comparison with the balloon tire bikes that were sold to kids. }And we knew we'd be riding a lot of gravel. {Yeah, so we consulted with a fellow named Fred DeLong, and he was a bicycle engineer, and he worked with bike companies and he was very in tune with what was going on in Europe. And he said, you want to ride 26 by 1 3/8-inch wheels, which are heavier. }And stronger. {The key was that he said, because of the British, the Raleigh bicycle industry, were selling bikes all over the world, that was the standard wheel size and he said, "You'll be able to find tires anywhere." And it was true. Not only were these tires hardy, just perfect on gravel, but we could go to any hole-in- the-wall bike shop anywhere in South America and we could buy a tire. And that made a tremendous difference, because otherwise you have to have things sent to you, and it was very cumbersome. There was the expense and there was a lot of bureaucracy. }And you had to pay duty. {Duties, or just might not show up at all. That simple thing made a big difference for us. }Yeah, we didn't really start the mountain bike movement, but there are a lot of people riding that size rim these days. And when I was in Europe in 1969, I started to promote Hemistour. I was in England. There was a article done by one of the London newspapers about me and our trip coming up. Reached out to Raleigh Bicycles in England. I think there was one other manufacturer that we reached out to. We were looking for bicycles, specifically, because we didn't have expedition bikes. In the United States you could not buy a touring bike off the rack. We got turned down, and leading up to the early 1972, we didn't have any bikes. We were within a few months of leaving. Greg and Dan had this huge correspondence. They were writing to each other almost every other day. Dan writes us this letter from Missoula, Montana, this little town in Montana. We really didn't know anything about it. He said, "I found the guy who's willing to build the bikes for us right here in Missoula, Montana." We laughed our heads off because we thought, how can that be that a Montana mechanic could do anything for us? {Sam Braxton. }Sam Braxton.*Yeah, right. Sam Braxton is the railroad man turned bicycle making genius. }Yeah. It turned out he was an exceptional, exceptional guy, and the only thing we had troubles convincing him were the 26 x 1 3/8-inch wheels. He was very skeptical of that, so he built himself a pair of wheels and started riding gravel. There's a lot of gravel roads here. And he was convinced, totally convinced. Sam wanted to teach Greg and Dan how to maintain a bicycle, how to take a bike apart completely, top to bottom, end to end, and put it back together again like you would have to do on the road. And neither Greg nor Dan had the time, so Lys than I did it. *Oh wow. }And women in particular were not involved as outdoor sports. Lys than I were very unusual in that respect. *Yeah, pioneers for sure. {And this would have been May of 1972, so the four of us were, we had our bikes and our equipment and off we went to Anchorage to begin the trip. }Yeah, I volunteered to pack the U-Haul trailer that we're going to tow to the West Coast. So we drove over with a little pickup truck pulling a trailer.{So, you know, we did make it to the coast, and we got on a ferry, took us to Juneau, and then we flew from there to Anchorage, so finally we were set to go. *You're set to go after this long journey, and then the journey begins in a crazy way, with a robbery. }Yes'{You know, you have problems with animals and bears and such, so each of us had one half of our panniers devoted to this food that we would carry along. }Food and pots and pans that would smell like food. {You know, you're supposed to hang things in trees. Well, there were no trees in this campground, but we saw there was a shelter house there. So we managed to throw those food bags up on the roof of the shelter house. And in the morning, when we woke up, they were gone. Our first day on really on the road and we lost our food in half of our packs.}And no breakfast. *Right. }Because the food was gone. *Yeah. {No food at all, so we had to ride until we could get to a store. *And now an interesting thing, just to mention, is there was a fifth person, like the fifth Beatle. We should mention this person, because that person has not come up and actually is overlooked in a lot of articles and things. {Well, you know we made a general invitation to have people join us, and we got this one fellow responded and his name was John Likins, and he was from Boston. }Yeah.{Massachusetts, and he was a cyclist, he'd done some fair amount of riding and we told him what equipment, especially, you know, the wheels. He equipped himself and showed up.}So here he is, he's like a bachelor and he's with two married couples. I just sort of felt sorry for him. He missed his girlfriend and he ended up leaving Hemistour before he had planned to. So he went as far as Jasper up in Alberta. That's where he took off, riding due east. *Oh, wow. He actually biked back to Boston?}No, he went partway then he got more anxious and I think he took a train or something. *Okay.}He was stronger than us. He was always in the lead. He had calves like pistons. I swear, they're that big around. Super fit guy. {So you know, as you say, what did we do to prepare? Well, we had to take care of this food situation, and we had to have bikes, and we had warm clothing, but one thing that we didn't do was take the time to do some proper training. But on the trip so long well, you know, the first month can be your training. But once we were on the road and we recovered from the theft, it was glorious. And I never really been west before, and here we were riding in these endless vistas and long days where the sun wasn't setting and it was just grand. It was so grand. And there was one particular stretch, we we were able to leave the Alcan Highway which we thought we were going to use when we found some alternate roads and the notable one was a 363-mile stretch of road on which there was nothing. There were no guardrails, telephone poles, houses. It was just a 360-mile stretch of long gravel road. *Was this in the Yukon Territory? }Yes. {There were only I think 40,000 residents in all of the Yukon at the time, so lots of open space. *This is maybe a good time to talk about the National Geographic article. {Oh yes. I was just about to bring that up, because we were doing this ride not only for our own gratification, the adventure, we still had this idea that we wanted to showcase bicycling in this new way. And we decided, and it was mostly Dan's idea, is that we should get an article in National Geographic magazine. And at the time, National Geographic magazine was one of the most popular magazines in the country, and if you wanted to reach a lot of people, that would be the place to do it. So we set out with the idea that we would try to get an article in National Geographic. June and I were leading an an AYH trip on the East Coast that happened to end in Washington, D.C. the year before our departure on Hemistour. And we arranged to go into the National Geographic office to make our pitch. }And we had the letter with us that they confirmed our appointment. We walk in, this beautiful place with giant photographs on the wall, just awe-inspiring, and we show the letter to the receptionist and she says, "Well you're a month late. You were supposed to be here last month." And we were just horrified, absolutely horrified. *Yeah.}Because the head of photography, Gilka, we were supposed to meet with him, but he was not available. He was in a meeting, but the assistant photography person. {Scherschel.}Scherschel, he was available. He very cheerfully said, "I'll talk to them." He invited us into his office. It's just kind of a spare room with a big desk, and he's got this big waste basket right next to him and while we're talking - and we went there for the purpose of trying to find out what elements should we include in a proposal - he's sitting there while we're talking to each other and he's looking at slides and throwing them in the garbage can. And we're just like, oh my gosh, that's something else. But he was very generous with his time. He gave us very good advice. Greg ended up writing the proposal for National Geographic, based on what he told us. Quite an experience from being horrified to really probably talking to the best person there. {And so we mailed in the proposal and then we didn't really hear anything back, really you know. }For several months. {Yeah, and in the meanwhile, we come out here to Missoula. Well, they didn't say no, yes, we're going to do an article. You know, it wasn't anything... }Yeah, they didn't commit to anything like that. Dan just wouldn't have it. I think it was in January of '72, he calls him. Cold call to National Geographic. Can you imagine? I've forgotten who he talked to. I think he talked to Gilka, who was in charge of the department. He says, "Well, you know let us think about it. We might be willing to give you some film, you guys can shoot some pictures, and we'll see what we get. And that's kind of the way it turned out. Dan calls again because he hadn't heard back from him and they go, "Oh yeah. We're going to send you 60 rolls of film and we'll pay for the processing and after the film is shot and we've made our selects(pictures that we want to keep) you guys can have all of the rest, processing included for free. We had this gorgeous yellow-orange box that they send film in, National Geographic colors. {They weren't committing to an article. }No.{Instead, we're going to send you some film and I think their intent was, we're going to do an article about bicycling and maybe these kids out here can get us a picture.*One picture. {We're going to send the guy out to shoot urban cycling in Miami, and we're going to have somebody over here covering some little bicycle tour, and we'll have these kids they'll maybe get us a picture about this kind of riding. So we go up to Anchorage, just head out, and we're shooting these pictures and we had these special little boxes mailers to send the film back. }Greg and Dan are like shooting pictures, shooting pictures, shooting pictures. We're not hearing anything from National Geographic. And so every mail stop is like will there be a telegram? That's how they communicate, by telegram. I think we went through three mail stops and Dan, who's normally just a really even guy, doesn't get upset, he was fretting. He was nervous and fretting about it, so we finally got an answer in Prince George in British Columbia. They sent a little note asking for a certain type of photograph. {Yeah. }Contact with local people photographs. And fortunately, Dan had just mailed off film with enough of that that satisfied National Geographic. We didn't hear from them for a long time. Then we didn't hear from them again so we got to Missoula and there was a telegram that said, "Call National Geographic." {When we got into Missoula, we had about a hundred dollars between the four of us. It's in the fall and we're thinking, well, we're gonna have to get jobs, and over the winter and keep going. You know, that was the quest. We got to keep going, and then we get this telegram and Dan calls them and they say they wanted Dan and I to fly to Washington, D.C. }"Why don't you boys fly out here?" {It was an amazing visit for us. They got a separate hotel rooms, you know which is like what? *Luxury.{Well, they had beds in the rooms too, which was... *Oh wow. That's a bonus, a bed in the room. {Yeah and in the morning we went into the National Geographic office and we met our photo editor and they're telling us, "Well, we really like which you've shot here." So we surprised them. They thought they'd get a picture out of us and they got and article. And they said,"Well, we're going to pay your expenses on the road. We're going to give you as much film as you need, and after it's shot you know, we'll process it. It'll be your film. We'll lend you any equipment you need}Camera equipment. {Yeah, and we are going to pay $300 a color page for the article and we're going to pay you$2,000 if you try to write a story. Otherwise if you leave it to us, will still pay you$1,000. }And that's what Hemistour was like. Up and down, up and down, up and down. Mood, money, everything. {Yeah. *A roller coaster. }That is adven- ture, high adventure. {It was adventure. And so Dan and I fly back to Missoula and you know we have this incredible package of things, and we've got to get on the road but here it is getting late and we had to get out of here before we got wintered in. }It was October.{Yes, October. }I think Greg and left Missoula on the 23rd of October, and between us and the coast is like 500 miles of passes, mountain passes, all kinds of terrain, high desert.{We left Missoula and at the same time people were joining us, and by the time we reached the coast we were a group of nine people. And when we were the last big pass there was a lot of snow on the ground and then we plummeted, this long wonderful descent to the coast.}Yeah. {We were safe, away from winter. }Made it to Eugene, Oregon. {The ride down the coast was a joy and, you know, we were this large group, and we had all this support and we weren't worried about money anymore. }This is a funny story. National Geographic sent us a check in California. It was made out to Dan Burden and we were at Disneyland. And there's a bank. {And it set up as a period bank. You know, it's like an old-timey bank with a funny telephone and you know, and the bank employees maybe were dressed in a certain way. It was... }Yesteryear, something like that, yeah. So here's Dan, and by then both Dan and Greg had beards. Dan's very tall. He was wearing short pants that came to the knee and knee socks. {Knee socks. }Looking scruffy. His hair is long. He's got this big beard, trying to cash a check at this bank, and the bank gets on the phone to National Geographic. {Yeah, they didn't believe this... }They didn't believe that we could be these people cashing this check from National Geographic.*They're trying to forge checks!}Yeah, total scam. {Yeah, it's a scam. }So the bank manager, I think, is on the phone with National Geographic and National Geographic is describing to him what Dan Burden looks like. The guy's nodding, "Yes, yes, yes. Okay, we'll cash the check." {I think he was talking maybe with Noel Grove. *We need to introduce Noel Grove now. That's important. {So Noel Grove was a writer for National Geographic. }Staff writer. {Staff writer. And he's the one who's going to work on this bicycling article.}"Bicycles are back and booming."{Yeah. }That one. {And in the meanwhile, when they decide to do our article, which was going to shrink his article some, he kind of presented us in a way.}Oh, those guys. {Yeah, but then he was assigned to you know work with us, and he actually came out to the west coast and bicycled with us in Oregon as part of his research, because he'd be doing the story. *The article and the photographs are credited only to Dan Burden in the end. {Yeah, I took some of the photos and a couple full-page pictures in there, and there was even a third photographer who took one picture. *The third photographer was Dan Tiffany, who took the group picture in the article. The photo used for the cover art in these episodes, the group riding together in Alberta, Canada in 1972, is courtesy of Dan Tiffany and used with his permission. }Dan took 64 percent of the pictures that appeared in National Geographic, and Greg was like 29 percent, and the other photographer was like seven percent. So yeah, it was a group effort and the way they did it, at the beginning of the article it says "story and photos by Dan Burden," but then when you go through you can see the individual pictures that other people took are credited that way. {In five-point type. *Okay. }National Geographic, they have a team of photographers, there might have been 20 at the time, they could assign to a story, and they would go and shoot the pictures. So they might jump in and out depending on what kind of project it is then. There's like a team of writers and these are staff people. A lot of photographers are freelance. And National Geographic decided to assign our story to Peter Benchley. He said, and I'm paraphrasing, "Actually, I'm writing a book about a fish." and of course it was Jaws, which was released the same year that Greg and I returned from Hemistour. At the time there, Jaws was being shown on college campuses in swimming pools. Everybody's in the water and they get shocked by the idea that there might be a shark in the water. *Okay, so people actually were in the pool while watching this movie.}Yeah, and this happened here in Missoula when we came back. {So just think, if Peter Benchley had decided to take us on, maybe Jaws never would have been written. *Another "what if?" moment. }Yeah. So then Noel Grove was assigned to take over. I know Dan and Lys say that he was an editor, but he wasn't. He was a staff writer and National Geographic, like any big organization, is very stratified. People do certain things they don't move into other people's territories. Like, writers don't edit, editors don't write. Noel Grove wrote 13 articles for National Geographic. I interviewed him for the piece that I wrote about the National Geographic and relationship and how the magazine boosted Bikecentennial.*All right. I want to then go back to another key moment in the development, which is that Greg, you were in San Francisco, and that's when you had this idea. {One of the great moments on Hemistour, I remember riding along Golden Gate Park, which comes right up on the coast. We were leaving on a sunny day after having been delayed in San Francisco and it was just this great feeling and I... }Greg and I were riding alone. {It was just this image in the back of my mind of this, what a wonderful place that was right on the coast. And I'm thinking in the back of my mind, meanwhile or you know later, about this kind of what do we do next, after TOSRV and Hemistour. Well, what could we do next? And I just began to think, well this bicentennial thing's coming up, whatever that's going to be, and that might be a something to hook something to, and of course I thought, well a bike ride across the country would be a wonderful thing to tie into the bicentennial. }And Greg is in the meantime, he's not telling any of us about this going, through his head. He's like hatching this idea. And we're in Mexico. Chocolate, Mexico, in northern Mexico. And Greg and I and another bike rider, Tom Robson from Canada, we break camp last and we head out, and Greg starts talking about this idea of, let's organize a ride from coast to coast for the bicentennial. And then we catch up to Dan and Lys who have stopped at a cafe, and Greg starts again telling his idea to the rest of us, explaining what he's thinking, and what he's thinking is, okay everybody is going to meet in Golden Gate Park on a certain time on a certain day and we're all going to ride across the country together. {June 1st, 9 a.m., Golden Gate Park. *Be there! {That's the connection with Golden Gate Park. It was just stuck in my mind is this wonderful starting point. }And we're going to end up in Philadelphia. {Yes, Philadelphia.}So Greg mentions this idea to the whole group at that point and we just immediately start digging into the idea and saying, well, this is practical, this is not practical and by the end of that day I came up with a name, Bikecentennial '76. Greg was keeping that journal at the time, just kind of a bare bones, you know, not much background information but just like where we started, where we ended, the mileage and maybe the couple highlights of the day. And that's the only written record I found. He just says, "Bikecentennial that June names." And that was all he said but from then on we're all starting to plan, plan, plan and that's how it started and that was April 3rd, 1973. {And it was on that porch of the little cafe. That's when we committed to the idea. Yes, we should do this. }I've announced to the group that this name, Bikecentennial '76, is what we should call it, and everybody just, yes, that's, that's great, that's a great name. So I went over to look at my cyclometer, which I did every evening and I would tell Greg the mileage. He would write it in his journal. I bend over to look at the cyclometer and it says"1776.2." *That's amazing! }I tell the group and somebody says,"Two wheels. Two centuries." It was just like instantaneous brainstorming that was going on, and I knew that people would never believe me, so I took a photograph of it. {It was like an omen of sorts, like wow. And see, the cyclometer had been put on in... }California.{California. You know, it wasn't put on from Alaska. *Right, because otherwise your story wouldn't check out. It's like wait a minute. }Yeah, people say wait a minute. {Yeah, but of course it became clear, I think even you know when we're riding along and talking about this idea of how, what it will take to make this happen, is that well by the time we finish Hemistour, how much time will there be to organize something this big? We sent our flyer out to a lot of the people we knew. }Abbout a hundred copies. {Yeah, the influential people in bicycling at the time, and about this time we decide that we need to pause and that we should go back to the United States to talk to National Geographic because they didn't seem so engaged with us with the idea of a second article. June meanwhile decided that she'd go down to Guatemala to go to a Spanish immersion school. }They were going to take a break in the States and I was going to study Spanish. They are flown by National Geographic back to the States. And so I'm in Guatemala by myself and I'm not hearing from anybody. And all of a sudden I get like three letters in one day, all talking about Dan not being well. Something's going on with Dan. He's mysteriously losing weight. Everybody's concerned, nobody knows what's going on. I became really alarmed. I called Greg, who was at his parents place, and learned that Dan was in the hospital, actually, and that he had hepatitis. So there I am in Guatemala with no money, and I can't fly home because National Geographic has pulled that option. So they're starting to cut us off from funding, and I had to get my own way home. My parents lent me some money to fly back.{It was good news, bad news. Like it was bad that the dream of continuing Hemistour for them was over, but it meant that now there would be time to organize Bikecentennial. }Yeah.*What emotions did you experience as you parted ways with the Burdens? }There's a Canadian youth hostel chain up there in Alberta, and we were given free access to the hostels by the Canadian Youth Hostels Association. So every day we'd be in a different hostel for free. And there was an incident in one hostel that we were just so disgusted by Dan and Lys, I cried. I was just so upset with them. We left the hostel, went outside and we decided, okay, we shook hands, Greg and I. {We shook hands.}We're a married couple, we're shaking hands, and declaring that we don't care about the Burdens. Whether they make it or not, we are gonna make it. And from that moment on we had very steely spines. *That's pretty early in the trip. }Yeah.{But we still had to function and get along. And Dan and I didn't... because we were sharing the photography and we went to Washington together, you know, there wasn't... }They weren't clashing. Lys in parti- cular, and Dan went along with her, they were just trying to negate me in a way. Lys was practicing something we call shunning, like people who are part of the Amish community, if they leave the Amish community and come back and the community's not happy with having them back, they will shun them. That means you don't talk to them, you don't look at them, you don't acknowledge them. It's very demeaning and difficult to take. And Lys and I had this grand friendship for quite a few years, through high school and in Girl Scouting. I couldn't figure out why I was being treated the way I was being treated which was like a non-person. In the end what Lys did is, I just think she wanted to get rid of me. She wanted me to quit and she did everything she could to get me to quit. She basically threw our friendship away. It's super hard I'll always regret it. I don't understand it, why this happened. I still don't understand. I never will understand. It's a loss. {It's always troubling. As I grow older I become more affected by it. You know, it's just one of those hard, terrible things that was a part of something that was wonderful and grand.*After speaking with June and Greg, I went back to Lys and Dan to ask about some of the differences in how they remembered those years. One key point of discussion was the authorship of the landmark National Geographic article about their trip. Regarding how the writing came together, Dan Burden shared this recollection. "We welcomed Noel Grove to join us for nearly a week of riding and learned much from him, and he from us. We became lifelong friends with Noel, and later Lys and I helped him rebuild a cabin. Based on Noel's insights, I set out to a mountain cabin for a week of writing. This gave him the content he needed to build a constructive National Geographic-style article, which I reviewed and tweaked." When asked about the difficult group dynamics, specifically June's recollection of feeling socially isolated or shunned by Lys from the early stages of the trip, the Burdens chose not to comment. If there's one thing everybody can agree on, it is that the definitive book on the groundbreaking Hemistour has yet to be published. When National Geographic decided not to produce follow-up articles, the public was left only with a partial account the first leg, from Anchorage to Missoula, captured in the article"Bikepacking across Alaska and Canada." June Siple, perhaps the most natural voice to chronicle the entirety of the journey, has written several articles about Hemistour over the years, including pieces for Adventure Cyclist magazine. Yet more than 50 years after the conclusion of the tour, she has found it difficult to write at length about the challenging group dynamics experienced from Alaska into Mexico. Furthermore, the lack of a publisher to support the writing of the book post-Hemistour has been an enormous and discouraging factor. Still, it is my hope that someday a comprehensive book on one of history's most significant bicycle expeditions will find its way to print. Next time, in Part Two, we will follow the cycles on the second half of their journey, all the way to Ushuaia, Argentina, where June would become the first woman to bicycle the entire length of the Americas at the same time we will follow the Burdens as they map the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail and work against all odds to bring Bikecentennial '76 to life.#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.*That is definitely a record number of bicycle bells!