Published: April/May 2009

The world’s longest mountain bike route zigzags 2,490 miles along the Continental Divide from the Canadian border near Eureka, Montana, to the Mexican border at Antelope Wells, New Mexico. In the process, it climbs 200,000 feet (that’s seven Everests) and ascends passes two miles high. Naturally, the first nation-spanning fat tire route encompasses the best of our Rocky Mountain spine: alpine wilderness, undulant grasslands, scrub desert, solitude that frays the edges of your brain, and a sense of what the country would look like if wilderness were the rule, not the exception. Yet the signature of the Great Divide Route is its doability. It was purposefully scouted and mapped over a decade ago by Adventure Cycling to intersect civilization virtually every day. That eliminates the need to schlep a heavy larder or to arrange complicated food drops. Most of the ride is on doubletrack forest roads, with rare technical bits and a smattering of asphalt. While zealots race it unsupported in just over two weeks, anyone with true grit, good gear, and a Suze Orman–approved budget can do it in just over two months. Or riders can select a single state and call it a dream vacation: Montana is 20 days and 695 miles (the majority surprisingly easy) from the wild alpine country near Glacier National Park to the big grassy basins in the south.

Need to Know: For maps and trip planning advice, visit the Adventure Cycling Association online (adventurecycling.org). Located about as far from any roadway as it’s possible to get in the lower 48, the Thorofare region of Yellowstone is the most remote and spectacular feature of America’s first national park. It’s here that the Yellowstone River feeds into Yellowstone Lake through a reedy delta of interwoven canals, forming an American version of Africa’s Okavango Delta. All the key players are on hand: bison, grizzlies, wolves, elk, moose, bald eagles, ospreys, sandhill cranes, trumpeter swans, and cutthroat trout. Amazingly, Yellowstone’s animal surplus wasn’t even the deciding factor in designating this chunk of the northern Rockies as parkland in 1872. Geothermal displays were the cause célèbre. But as the frontier vanished, and with it the megafauna, Yellowstone’s intact ecosystem has come to the fore. Witnessing this wild kingdom requires stealth. For best results, glide into the Yellowstone River off of Yellowstone Lake’s Southeast Arm at dawn or dusk in a sea kayak. From a quiet eddy, with the snowcapped Absaroka Range reflected on the glassy surface, the margins between land, sky, and water disappear. To reach the Promontory in the Southeast Arm—the start of the lake’s "no motors" section—arrange a shuttle at Bridge Bay Marina. You’ll save several days of paddling and avoid open-water crossings. High-elevation Lake Yellowstone is notorious for changeable weather that can swamp a sea kayaker in frigid waters, so stick close to shore. Same as the animals do.

Need to Know: Wilderness paddlers must register with Yellowstone National Park (nps.gov/yell). The most stunning river in the nation demands an American original: the human-powered wooden dory. Stern, graceful, and guaranteed to deliver a visceral, feel-the-river-in-your-bones thrill, the dory has been a canyon icon since John Wesley Powell captained a proto-version down the Colorado River in 1869. No disrespect to reliable, bouncy rafts, but when you hit any of the Colorado’s 47 major sets of rapids in a dory, its rigid, narrow prow rides the froth like a spooked bronc under the steady control of an expert oarsman (a dory rower will apprentice for nearly a decade, longer than any other guide in the canyon). Happily, the boats are also extraordinarily maneuverable, which may explain why pioneering river rat Martin Litton still paddles one. Even better: A trip on a dory is the slowest and longest of Grand Canyon river journeys, 15 to 18 days. That means time to debark and hike to places like Vasey’s Paradise, a ferny oasis where a waterfall tumbles into the canyon; rest in solitude inside Red Wall Cavern; climb to Anasazi granaries 1,500 feet above the river. You leave all sense of ordinary time behind, and life is reduced to the basics: Float. Eat. Drink. Gape. And hold on!

Need to Know: The Grand Canyon River Outfitters Association has an up-to-date list of dory guides (gcroa.org). Mount Rainier won’t be taken lightly. Four other mountains in the lower 48 exceed it in height, yet each can be summited in what amounts to a long day hike while wearing trail shoes. Rainier, with a vertical prominence greater than K2’s, is an entirely different beast, and the list of climbers who started their careers here reads like a Who’s Who of American climbing: Lou and Jim Whittaker, Pete Athans, Ed Viesturs, Phil Ershler. Heavily glaciated, avalanche prone, and battered by intense storms, the 14,410-foot peak never lets down its guard. Roughly half of Rainier climbers are turned back, due mostly to severe weather and fatigue. Commercial outfitters simplify the process enormously, but in the end you climb your own mountain. The peak can be approached from any angle, and 42 official routes lead to the summit, but the vast majority of the 9,000 who attempt it every year funnel up two routes, Ingraham Glacier–Disappointment Cleaver on the south side and Emmons Glacier on the east. To experience less crowding and more excitement, try the Kautz Glacier route. The key difference between Kautz and the standard paths is that climbers actually climb. The route’s crux, a steep chute sidestepping an ice cliff, demands that mountaineers belay and front-point their way upward for two pitches. It’s exhilarating and nerve-racking, and you’ve got another 3,000 vertical feet still to go.

Need to Know: Mount Rainier National Park issues climbing permits (nps.gov/mora). The uniquely American notion of wilderness protection took root in these black-water streams and humpbacked mountains in the 19th century, when New York State set aside large swaths of the Adirondacks as "forever wild." It turns out, "forever" is a mighty long time—and the wilderness is in constant need of tending. But thanks to recent efforts by conservation groups and the state, Adirondack Park is experiencing boom times. Nearly one million acres have changed hands from private to public in the past ten years, including vital acquisitions that unlocked a grand flat-water paddling circuit nestled between the park’s marquee High Peaks and Five Ponds wildernesses. So new is this route that it has no official name and several of the portages, or "carries," are merely flagged with tape. With polished navigational skills and determination, paddlers enter a remote sanctuary where moose are staging a remarkable comeback, ferret-like fishers lope along lakeshores, and oversize coyotes, possibly crossbred with wolves, howl in the night. Put in at the north end of island-studded Little Tupper Lake and proceed south to paddle the circuit clockwise. This gets the stiffest carries out of the way early. The route will take at least four days. Using marshy outflows, numerous ponds, and meandering brooks, you’ll string together Rock Pond, Lake Lila, languid Bog River, and Round Lake to return to Little Tupper. All of it, forever wild.

Need to Know: The Adirondack Paddler’s Guide and Map, by Dave Cilley (Paddle Sport Press, $45), is essential reading. North America’s most impressive (and most politicized) wildlife spectacle occurs each June in the continent’s northernmost no-man’s-land. That’s when and where the 200,000 caribou of the Porcupine herd culminate their 400-mile annual march from the Yukon to the coastal plains of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. You might stand beside the Kongakut River and watch a procession of caribou crossing nonstop for a day, two days—maybe tens of thousands in the course of three days or more. It’s a tableau filled with all the drama of Shakespeare: mothers bellowing as calves are swept away, grizzly bears taking chase, eagles swooping in on the hapless young, families reuniting amid the chaos. The stage is the silty blue Kongakut, which spreads out in braids across the 20-mile-wide plain between the 9,000-foot summits of the Brooks Range and the shores of the Beaufort Sea. Outfitters offer float trips on the Kongakut and other ANWR rivers, but the best way to witness the migration is on foot. Listen carefully as you walk and you just might hear a distant chorus of "drill, baby, drill," adding an elegiac note to the theater of it all.

Need to Know: The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge maintains an up-to-date list of guide services (arctic.fws.gov). To the uninitiated, spending a week riding your bike across Iowa may hardly seem like an adventure. But RAGBRAI, the Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, is a big deal in every way that counts for road cyclists—and it doesn’t get any more red, white, and blue than this. Each year on the third Sunday in July, 10,000 riders start on the state’s western border (the route changes yearly) and proceed en masse, rolling east in seven stages in a traveling juggernaut that celebrates everything that’s good about the heartland. It’s a long queue of spinning spokes and endorphin-charged folks wheeling over farm-to-market roads that normally see maybe a tractor and a couple of cars a day. They ride into dot-on-the-map towns that welcome everyone with Fourth of July fanfare—bands oompah-ing, flags waving, and every school, church group, and Kiwanis Club in support. Throughout the week RAGBRAI riders supplement PowerBars and Gatorade with three-inch-thick pork chops, corn every which way, and the race’s true lifeblood: homemade pies. There are as many as eight refueling stops each day, and cyclists put them to good use. Forget velodrome-flat rides: Some RAGBRAI weeks total more than 25,000 feet of climbing. (We did say this was an adventure.) Riders might camp in sorghum fields and shower in swine barns, but Hawkeye hospitality is guaranteed.

Need to Know: Register for RAGBRAI and view this year’s route online (ragbrai.org). Somewhere along the 80 miles of glorious northern California wilderness coastline between Fort Bragg and Eureka is a secret surf break as perfect in form as in setting. The Lost Coast wave is the stuff of American legend: a big, consistent, year-round swell that washes onto a rocky shore with high energy and perfect curvature—fast, clean, with long, long sweeps. But here’s the real secret of the Lost Coast: The hidden wave is actually many. The coast is long, the breaks are numerous, and only a handful of surfers are there to engage them. Between sets, the lucky few look inland at sheer cliffs crowned with coast redwoods and the sudden rise of the King Range, while offshore stretches a wild oceanscape punctuated by sea stacks and the spouts of migrating gray whales.To access it all, drive to the end of Shelter Cove Road, the only route that reaches the little fishing village of Shelter Cove (stake out a campsite), then walk south from the boat ramp. The first break, Foster’s, is probably chest high. Fun. Or keep walking south a quarter mile to Deadman’s, a bigger wave but very surfable. Another mile down is McKees, a jut of rock that acts like a true point break. If Deadman’s is chest high, it’s head or head and a half here. Whether or not it’s the Lost Coast wave is something you’ll have to ask the local surfers. Pack a five-millimeter suit for 48º to 52º water. Watch for sharks.

Need to Know: For Lost Coast logistics, visit sheltercove-lostcoast.com. If the Sierra’s original pathbreaker and solitude lover, John Muir, were alive today, it’s a fair bet he’d hike the Sierra High Route instead of the trail that bears his name. The High Route, arguably the best kept wilderness secret in the lower 48, shadows the John Muir Trail as the two traverse the remarkable kingdom of granite that lies between Kings Canyon and Yosemite National Parks. But whatever the JMT does, the High Route does it higher, harder, and more spectacularly. The route is the brainchild of mountaineer Steve Roper, who sought an alternative to the heavily pounded JMT. With a taste for glacier-polished slab (or what he calls "Sierra sidewalk"), wind-warped whitebark pine, and lonely lake basins encircled by shark-toothed peaks, Roper pioneered a route that hews as closely as possible to the 10,000-foot contour in the narrow zone between timberline and talus summit. A portion of its 195 miles piggybacks on existing trail, but mostly the High Route sends hikers off trail to pick their way up jumbled passes and across high-mountain streams. No paint blazes and few cairns mark the way. Don’t have the month required to hike the whole thing? Then spend a week on Roper’s favorite section between Merriam Lake (accessed via Paiute Trailhead west of Bishop) and Duck Lake, just south of Mammoth Lakes. As you clamber down from lonesome 12,400-foot Italy Pass, look west. Way down below you might catch a glimpse of the JMT.

Need to Know: Sierra High Route, by Steve Roper, is a must-read for off-trail hikers (The Mountaineers Books, $17). No other country has an expanse of fresh water like the Great Lakes, nor such treacherous shipping conditions. Tempests roaring in off the grasslands to the north can whip up 25-foot waves in a matter of hours on the shallow-bottomed lakes. In the days before satellites, hundreds of giant ships met tragic ends in these furies. Like an obsessive maritime archivist, Lake Superior snatched ten ships from the surface waters surrounding Isle Royale National Park during the 19th and early 20th centuries. What distinguishes the Isle Royale wrecks is their frozen-in-time quality. Unlike ships in warm salt water, which quickly become encrusted with corals and sponges—or, in the case of wooden boats, decompose completely—Isle Royale’s ghost ships remain pristine. And national park rules protect them from souvenir hunters. On the corpse of the 250-foot freighter Kamloops, sent to the bottom in 1927, the cargo hold contains wooden crates filled with small silver cylinders bearing a familiar label: Life Savers candy. The wrecks’ tight interiors and Lake Superior’s 34º to 38º water temperatures make diving at Isle Royale an affair for intermediate or expert divers only. Full wetsuits or dry suits are mandatory, and a live-aboard vessel is necessary given the island’s remote location. On a four-day bunk ‘n’ dive trip with Blackdog Diving out of Grand Portage, Minnesota, days are devoted to exploring haunted hulls, while evenings are spent anchored in a wild cove on the island’s north shore admiring the sunset as the steaks grill.

Need to Know: Isle Royale National Park maintains a list of registered dive boats (nps.gov/isro).