1976 Coast-to-Coast Bike Trek
Posted on September 1, 2016 by bob in Features
“Are we there yet?” Anyone who has traveled with kids knows this utterance well.
(1976) Author John Peck (R) and his brother plan their cross-country bike route.
On a mega-road trip out West this summer, it was me – the Dad – who impatiently pondered our arrival.
We were driving to California to retrace the route of a coast-to-coast bicycle trip my brother and I took as teenagers.
The year of the bike journey was 1976. I was just 17 and my brother, Carl, was 15. My sons are now the age we were when we rode a Greyhound bus to California to bike across the U.S. The age parallel seemed the perfect time to revisit our route and reconnect with some of the memorable people we’d encountered. Carl and his wife accompanied us, towing their camper as well.
We left as soon as school was out on what would be a 23-day, 6,655-mile road trip. I worked hard to balance it as part vacation, part nostalgic shadowing of the bike route.
I don’t know what my parents were thinking when they turned us loose like that to bike across America. This was before smart phones and GPS. They showed remarkable faith we would make wise choices in camping spots, healthy eating, sharing highways and dealing with wild weather and potentially wild strangers. Both confessed they worried more about the trouble we would get into at home in the neighborhood.
(2016) John Peck’s sons retrace the 1976 journey.
They didn’t know we would:
— Spend a night in jail (by invitation of a cop to spare us from the heat)
— Ride over a 6-foot striking rattlesnake, camp amid wild coyotes and encounter a bear in Yellowstone
— Bathe in coin-operated car washes, in motel pools and under outdoor store faucets
— Dodge lumber trucks in the Pacific northwest
— Camp atop fire towers, baseball dugouts, a homeless shelter and myriad other free places
— Fight heat exhaustion in the high desert and near frostbite in the Cascades
— Bike illegally on an interstate segment and through the manic streets of Manhattan
— Get a residual shock by a lightning bolt that careened one of us into the side of a passing semi-truck
My sons were not that thrilled about missing half their summer “just so Dad and Uncle Carl can re-live their glory days,” the younger one griped. They relented upon learning we’d upped their data plans on their smart phones and reactivated satellite radio for the long drive. We also agreed to take the dog since we were hauling our trailer and would camp every night.
When my brother and I planned our bike trip as teenagers we frequented the library and penciled a proposed route on a duplicate set of maps. Our
Reunion with police chief Dan Parker.
parents hung one set by their phone and marked our position with a pin each time we called (collect, of course) every 4-5 days.
Mapping out this summer’s RV trip was done mostly online. Detailed journal entries from the bike trip helped me track down key folks we would revisit with our families. Our first reunion was with Police Chief Dan Parker in Mountain Grove, Missouri.
Dan was a rookie cop in 1976 when he stumbled across us pitching our tent beside a country church on the edge of town. Quietly suspecting we were runaways, he offered Carl and me an empty jail cell that night to escape the steamy July heat. Our parents later revealed his phone call to verify that our bike tour story was legit.
Meeting Chief Parker again at the old rock jail building was a highlight for us and our families. His greeting party included the local historian, a town alderman, and dispatcher, who gave us all Mountain Grove P.D. t-shirts and other memorabilia. Chief Parker is retiring this year after four decades in law enforcement.
Brothers John (L) and Carl Peck commemorate their 1976 cross country bike ride at the spot where it began near Eureka, CA.
Our next reunion was in Junction City, Kansas with Tom and Mary Burnham, whom we’d met at a giant Bicentennial July 4 celebration at nearby Milford Lake. The Burnhams showed incredible trust allowing two unknown teenage boys overnight at their house with three daughters in the home. During our revisit, Tom smiled when reminding us they had a pet Doberman at the time. The Burnhams remembered well our hearty appetites and our mother sending them a nice thank you letter for taking care of us.The remaining drive to California followed the bike route through southern Nebraska, northern Colorado and parts of Wyoming, before veering off course for that incredibly long stretch across Utah and Nevada. Carl revisited the casino in Nevada where he’d won a whopping $38 in a slot machine playing illegally at age 15. He didn’t try his luck this time.
Our families enjoyed a fabulous four days in Lake Tahoe (not on the ‘76 bike route) before making our way to Eureka, California where the cycling trip
began. The wives accompanied us to Clam Beach on the northern outskirts of Eureka. That’s where we dipped our back wheels in the Pacific 40 years ago to christen the start of our 28-state, 5,200-mile tour spanning 77 days.
It was an emotional moment for me, reflecting how the bike trip molded me in so many ways. Biking two hours back to our campground along U.S. 101, my brother and I were like kids again reliving that epic bike journey. On a stretch through the countryside, we had the added pleasure of pedaling past a farm with cows. One of our favorite pastimes while cycling across the boring Plains was to yell at cows to get them to stampede. This herd did not disappoint.
Our RV trip followed the bike route through the Redwoods in northern California, Crater Lake National Park in the Cascades, and across the desolate stretches of eastern Oregon and Idaho. Those hundreds of miles of nothingness left us — and the boys — marveling at how we biked it.
(1976) Riding into an ominous wall of clouds in Idaho.
The same Idaho road, 2016, silos and building intact.
In Ashton, Idaho, we had a lovely reunion with Ellen Laux. She and her late husband hosted Carl and me in their home after a challenging day pedaling
(1976) John and Carl in Idaho soon after the Teton Dam collapse.
through flood-damaged eastern Idaho. The 1976 Teton Dam collapse (just a week earlier) destroyed several towns, killing 11 people and 13,000 cattle, and washing out roads and bridges. We were detoured miles on unmarked, debris-filled roads which made the Lauxs’ hospitality all the more welcomed on that confusing, depressing day.
We followed the bike route through Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons and Rocky Mountains. One day horrendous crosswinds rocked our campers as we motored down the highway. It was a déjà vus experience to the 50 mph headwinds Carl and I fought in Wyoming on our bike tour. The winds were so fierce then, we even had to pedal downhill.
Our RV trip only traced the California-to-Alabama segment of our bike tour. We didn’t have time to continue to the Atlantic, up to New York City and make the return back home to Alabama.
(1976) Celebrating with a fellow biker holding their homemade altitude sign.
Friends often ask, would I let our sons bike across the U.S. at their age? That’s a tough one. Contrary to popular belief, the country is actually safer today than 40 years ago in terms of violent crime. The per capita crime rate for assaults, robbery, murder, rape and other violent categories was far worse in 1976 than in 2014 (the latest figures available by the FBI’s UCS Crime Report). In some cases, the raw number of incidents are fewer today even with 100 million more people in the U.S. It’s just that we hear about such crimes more with our smart phones and lightning fast internet.
Our younger son has been biking around town a lot since we got home. The older one seems quicker to share the bike tour stories to anyone. Both these things validate the notion that the road trip was well worth all the windshield time and the early whining. And it already has me thinking about us mirroring the bike route to the Atlantic.
John Peck is a former reporter/editor for The Huntsville Times, now working in communications for Madison City Schools. For more information about John and his planned book about the epic cycling journey, visit his website at www.johnpeck.net. (John and his wife, Emily Roane Peck, a former reporter/producer for Alabama Public Television, met in Montgomery when both covered the Alabama Statehouse for their respective news organizations.)
