The Tour de Wyoming - Introduction

The Tour de Wyoming, or just “the Tour” for short, is an annual 6-day bike ride in Wyoming. The route changes yearly, and it isn’t strictly limited to Wyoming; routes often dip into neighboring states. It averages somewhere around 300 miles, meaning that it’s basically five or six 50 mile rides. Some days are shorter than others, but what those days lack in distance they make up for in elevation.

I’d heard about the Tour for years but didn’t get serious until last summer, when I began thinking about some sort of extended bike tour. Cheyenne to St. Louis seemed (and still seems) eminently feasible, but it would take too many weeks out of my precious summer. During the course of researching that route, I stumbled across the Tour website, and I was hooked immediately. It was local, it was only six days, and heck, the pictures showed people having fun. I began researching the Tour in earnest.

Now, the Tour has been steadily growing in popularity since its official inception 15 years ago. I believe the Tour’s organizer, a very cool Laramie woman named Amber Travsky, did some unofficial, personal tours on her own before creating an organized ride. As legend has it, what started as a small group of friends eventually grew to one of the best-kept bicycle secrets in the nation. It’s now to the point where participants are chosen by lottery, and Tour veterans seems to resent its popularity. Hell, I feel guilty just writing about it on a blog that no one reads.

The lottery was held in February and I wasn’t selected. A Lander friend and Tour veteran, however, let me in on a secret that won’t be revealed here. It was all above-board with no strings pulled, and it got me in. At that point, I was committed.

A note here about commitment. Anyone can commit to something like the Tour in February; you’ll be huddled around a pitcher with a group of friends in the Lander Bar, commiserating about winter, dreaming up summer schemes. Suddenly a friend will say something like, “You can totally do the Tour. I’ve done it a few times and it’s really not that bad.” Having no frame of reference for what your friend considers “not that bad,” you say to yourself, “Yes. Yes. I’ll successfully ride the Tour de Wyoming.” And thus you commit to something that may, in fact, be way the hell out of your league.