Riding the Great Divide solo is hard. Riding it with twenty-five people who'd never ridden together, on a fixed schedule, meeting a guy who'd already been pedaling across an entire continent for weeks before any of us touched dirt — that's not hard, that's supposed to be impossible. The logistics were uncertain. The timing was uncertain. The bikes, the terrain, whether we'd even catch Ryan where and when we said we would — all of it was up in the air right up until it wasn't. We pulled it off. Here's how. The Great Divide Mountain Bike Route is a bucket-list ride for a reason: 2,700 miles of dirt and gravel tracing the Continental Divide from Canada to Mexico, mapped and maintained by the Adventure Cycling Association — the same organization celebrating fifty years of getting people onto routes exactly like it. A few numbers before we get into it: • 2,700 miles — the full Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, Canada to Mexico • 550 miles — Section 5 alone, Salida, CO to Grants, NM • 8 days — the fixed window we had to cover it • 25 riders — selected out of more than 150 applications • 1 guy riding the whole thing solo, who we had to actually catch up to It all started with Ryan Van Duzer (@duzer) mentioning, at the end of summer 2025, that he was partnering with the Adventure Cycling Association for their 50th anniversary, and that the Priority Bicycles team — plus some friends, and some friends yet to be made — should join. This lined up perfectly with ACA's Drop-In Rides programming: a season-long invitation to get out on one of three legendary ACA routes — the TransAmerica Trail, the Golden Gravel Trail, or the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. You could ride any section, any distance, any time between May and September. No pressure, no gatekeeping — just ACA handing back some of the spirit of Bikecentennial, the ride that started the whole organization fifty years ago. Ryan signed on as the Great Divide's ambassador for the summer, which meant riding the entire thing, solo, starting in Jasper on the summer solstice. His trips are usually the opposite of a group ride — unsupported, technical, built around seeing how far one person and one bike can get. So when Priority Bicycles decided to open up a chunk of his route to anyone who wanted to join him, we picked the one section that made the most sense to turn into something bigger: Section 5, Salida, Colorado to Grants, New Mexico. Roughly 550 miles, eight riding days, straight through some of the most exposed high country and high desert on the entire Divide. We put the bat signal up and waited to see who would sign up. After going through 150 applications, twenty-five riders were selected. Route use The nice thing about riding a section of the Great Divide is that you're not inventing anything. ACA has been mapping and maintaining this route for decades, and Section 5 comes as a known quantity — GPX files, elevation profiles, water sources, resupply towns, all of it already worked out by people who've been doing this since before I was born. Our job wasn't to plan a route. It was to take a route that had already been planned for a solo, self-supported rider and figure out how to run 25 people through it without anyone getting hurt, hungry, or left behind. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A route built for one rider assumes one rider's pace, one rider's risk tolerance, and one rider's ability to make a judgment call at 6pm about whether to push another 12 miles or camp early. Multiply that by 25 and you don't just get logistics problems, you get the same terrain asking a completely different question: not “can this person finish,” but “can this group finish together.” We spent weeks with the ACA maps open next to a spreadsheet, walking every climb, every water stop, every stretch where cell service disappeared, trying to figure out where the route's natural rhythm and a 25-person group's natural rhythm were going to fight each other. Spoiler: more often than we wanted. How do you plan for what will happen, when you're really planning for what if it doesn't? Here's the thing about planning to meet someone who is, at that exact moment, riding a bicycle across a continent by himself: you can't just check his calendar. We got a preview of exactly how little of this we could control before Ryan had even left. Days before his solstice start in Jasper, it turned out his bike wasn't ready — a logistics failure that came close to derailing the whole send-off before a single one of us had booked a flight. He and his team scrambled and got him rolling from the northern border on schedule anyway, but it was the first real proof of something we already suspected going in: if the plan could come apart before Ryan had ridden a single mile, it could come apart anywhere. From there, Ryan left Jasper with an itinerary and zero obligation to stick to it. Weather, mechanicals, a town he decided to stay in an extra night — any of it could shift his timeline by days. Meanwhile, we had 25 people who needed to book flights, request time off work, and show up in Denver to then be bused with their assembled bicycles to Salida on a specific date, weeks in advance, before Ryan had ridden a single mile of the route he'd eventually be on. We were essentially trying to schedule a rendezvous with a moving target somewhere in the middle of Colorado, based on a plan he hadn't started yet. To make that work, we set a fixed meet date in Salida and built slack around it — enough that Ryan could decide when and where he could afford to stop comfortably, or push harder to close the gap, without either choice blowing up our end of the plan. We handled transportation from Denver to Salida ourselves so that piece, at least, wasn't left to chance, and we stayed in close enough contact with Ryan — and stalked his dot — that if his pace shifted meaningfully, we'd know before our riders were already in the air. It's a strange kind of planning: you're not solving for “what will happen,” you're solving for “what do we do when it doesn't go the way we planned,” because with someone riding solo and unsupported for a month, something always shifts. We got lucky. I remember standing in the parking lot in Salida, still in my street clothes, watching for Ryan to come around the corner and doing the math on how many contingency plans I'd built for nothing — he rolled in on time. How do you break up a hard ride, with fixed dates, and a big group? Section 5 is roughly 550 miles over eight days, and for 25 riders, that window was fixed in a way Ryan's own schedule never had to be. Half the group had flights out already booked before we'd ridden a mile. The slack we'd built into meeting Ryan in Salida didn't carry over to what happened after — once we rolled out, the itinerary was the itinerary. We broke the route into eight days that balanced mileage against what the terrain would actually let 25 loaded bikes do in a day: longer, exposed days early while everyone was fresh, and days scheduled around the climbs we knew would eat the group's energy no matter how strong anyone felt at breakfast. Roughly, it looked like this: • Day 1: Out of Salida and straight into the first real climbing of the trip • Day 2: The high point of the route, above treeline for hours • Day 3: A long, exposed stretch with limited water • Day 4: The psychological midpoint — the day most people said broke them a little • Day 5: A shorter day, built in on purpose to let the group reset • Day 6: Back into the climbing, crossing into New Mexico • Day 7: The day the terrain finally starts to ease up • Day 8: Into Grants, and the finish (For the actual cue sheets and elevation profiles, ACA sells the official Section 5 maps — we rode the same ones.) There was no room to slide a bad day into the next one. If someone was cooked on day three, day four still started on schedule. That rigidity is exactly what we'd been trying to protect against since the moment we set a meeting time with a guy riding solo across a continent — and it's the reason we ended up making a call that some people had opinions about. The challenges of changing a solo ride into a supported one The hardest reframe of the whole project was this: Duzer doesn't ride supported. That's not a preference, it's basically the point of what he does. So when we told him we wanted to bring 25 people onto his route, we weren't just adding riders, we were quietly changing the nature of the ride itself, and we needed to do it without losing what made it worth doing in the first place. Twenty-five riders is a real logistical animal. It's fitness levels ranging from “does this every weekend” to “signed up on a whim and started training in April.” It's bikes that needed to be dialed in before day one, because a mechanical on Section 5 isn't a quick fix — it's you, standing in the high desert, a long way from a bike shop. It's food and water for a group that size across resupply towns that were never built with 25 hungry cyclists in mind. It's making sure that if someone got hurt or bonked hard on day four, there was an actual plan for getting them out, not just a hope that someone else in the group had a satellite communicator. We ended up building something in between: still true to the self-supported ethos ACA asks riders to bring to the Drop-In Rides, but with the guardrails a group that size actually needs — a support vehicle running the resupply towns each day, a shared understanding of pace groups, a communication plan for when cell service dropped out (which, on Section 5, is often), and a shakedown process before anyone left home so that “is my bike ready for this” wasn't a question anyone was answering for the first time in New Mexico. None of it shows up in a route file. All of it is the difference between 25 strangers finishing a ride together and 25 strangers finding out the hard way what a fixed itinerary means on a fully loaded bike. The support vehicle is the one call I know people had opinions about, and I understand why. Duzer's rides are unsupported by design, and running a van through the resupply towns each day is a real departure from that — a few people following along online called it out for exactly that reason, and they're not wrong that it changed the character of the ride. But with an eight-day window and zero flexibility to absorb a bad day, that van wasn't a comfort upgrade. It was the difference between one rider's rough day staying that rider's problem, and it becoming the whole group's problem to finish on schedule. The one mechanical I didn't have to worry about This bike didn't start with Section 5. In 2020, we worked with Duzer to build a bicycle around the specific demands of riding the full GDMBR — his brief covered riding style, gear capacity, and the terrain itself, shaped by his own attempts at the route in 2020 and again in 2024. Six years and two of his own Divide attempts later, Duzer, Thomas Gathman — the long-distance thru-hiker known as The Real Hiking Viking, who racked up more than 25,000 miles on foot before switching to bikepacking — and the whole Priority Bicycles team rode out of Salida on Priority's 600ADX: the exact bike this route was built to prove out. No chain to lube, drop, or replace after eight days of high-desert grit; the Gates belt drive just sat there, gears sealed, through rain storms and washboard gravel that would've had a derailleur begging for an adjustment by day three. No exposed drivetrain catching dust on the climbs out of Salida, no mid-ride chain snap in a stretch with no cell service. It's a small thing not to think about, until you're the person who also has to think about twenty-four other people's bikes — at which point “one less mechanical system to babysit” stops being a nice-to-have and starts being real bandwidth back. Riding it alongside Eddie Meek, Priority's head of product, was its own kind of validation. He'd understood the GDMBR's demands secondhand for years, through Duzer's briefs and feedback — this time he got the terrain, the washboard, and the climbs firsthand, which meant a different kind of pressure to perform. That pressure came with its own payoff: the whole team covered the distance, and we came home with on-trail insight about the bike that no spec sheet or secondhand report was ever going to surface. With 25 bikes on the route, I'd spent months of planning energy on the assumption that something, somewhere, was going to break. What I hadn't planned on was how little of that worry ended up being about my own. What we didn't plan for I could tell you the planning process was clean. It wasn't. We revised the resupply plan more than once. We had conversations about cutoff times and what happens if someone falls behind them that we didn't fully resolve until we were already on the ground in Salida. The honest version of this story is that you can spend months staring at an ACA elevation profile and still not know what Section 5 is actually going to ask of 25 different bodies until you're all standing at the start line together, bikes loaded, watching for Ryan to roll in. That uncertainty is, I think, the actual takeaway. ACA didn't build the Drop-In Rides to be tidy — they built them to get people back on these routes the way riders did fifty years ago, messiness included. Riding with Duzer for a week didn't change how he rides. It changed, for eight days, who got to be part of it, and that only worked because the planning happened mostly in the unglamorous stuff: the spreadsheets, the maps, the slack I built into a schedule for a guy who was, by design, unscheduled. I found out how well all of that planning actually held up the same way everyone else on the trip did — one pedal stroke at a time, starting the next morning in Salida. That's a different story, and I'll tell it separately. But I can tell you this much now: the version of me who built the spreadsheet and the version of me who was still riding it on day seven had very different opinions about how “aggressive” an itinerary should be. Ride the Great Divide yourself You don't need an invitation from Ryan Van Duzer to do this. ACA's Drop-In Rides are open through September, on any section of the Great Divide, TransAmerica, or Golden Gravel routes you want to take on, solo or with your own group. But the Drop-In Rides are really just this year's excuse to use a network that's existed for decades. Adventure Cycling Association has been mapping and stewarding cycling routes across North America since 1976, when Bikecentennial brought thousands of riders across the country for the U.S. bicentennial and the organization grew out of that momentum. Today ACA maintains more than 57,000 miles of mapped routes nationwide — the Great Divide is only one of them — along with GPX files, elevation profiles, and resupply information for anyone planning a trip, whether that's a weekend out-and-back or a summer-long crossing. Membership gets you access to Companions Wanted, ACA's network for finding other riders to plan a trip with, plus their Adventure Cyclist magazine and a discount on their guided and van-supported tours for people who want someone else handling the logistics we handled ourselves. None of it requires a Drop-In Ride, a 25-person roster, or a guy named Duzer. It just requires deciding you're going to go. Check out the Drop-In Rides program and start with the same maps we did.