By Brian Kevin
Photos by Garrick Hoffman
From our September 2024 issue
When a network of timber-company roads started spidering out across Maine’s north woods in the 1970s and ’80s, it was a game-changer for recreationists: millions of prohibitively remote acres were suddenly accessible for fishing, paddling, camping, and hunting. What you couldn’t do on those thousands of miles of gravel, however, was ride a bike. And not without good reason, since the roads were dominated by monstrous, speeding semis hauling hundreds of thousands of pounds of timber, fronting dust storms of their own making.
“Industrial owners just didn’t allow bikes on these roads,” says Steve Tatko, vice president of land, research, and trails at the Appalachian Mountain Club, which has spent the last couple of decades acquiring some 114,000 acres of timberlands in Maine’s 100 Mile Wilderness. Now, the AMC is bucking the tradition, actively promoting gravel biking on 330 miles of its old logging roads. “We’re opening up the landscape to a new recreation opportunity you just couldn’t do when I was growing up here,” Tatko says. “It’s now one of the very few places in the Maine north woods where you have access like this.”
Of late, sources like the exercise app Strava and the New York Times have hailed gravel cycling as one of the country’s fastest-growing outdoor pursuits. It’s exactly what it sounds like: off-pavement pedaling, with thicker tires than on a road bike, on friendlier terrain than the average mountain-biking trail. For gravel riders and bikepackers, AMC’s Maine Woods Initiative parcel all but beckons: its road network accesses copious campsites, ponds, and trailheads, along with AMC’s three wilderness lodges, which are popular with cross-country skiers but underutilized in summer. Timber harvesting is way less intensive than in the old Great Northern death-truck era, and Tatko says there’s been a “culture shift” among AMC’s forestry contractors, who today understand that they’re sharing the roads.
What’s more, AMC is putting real groundwork into signage, something Maine’s logging roads have sorely lacked. The work is ongoing, Tatko says — among other things, it involves actually naming formerly anonymous spurs — but major intersections are increasingly signed, with mile markers springing up in between. “We’re hoping to make sure all roads have names that appear on maps, whether that’s DeLorme or our maps,” Tatko says, “and I’d say we’re around halfway done.”
But there’s no need to rely on the Gazetteer alone, since AMC partnered with the Maine Office of Outdoor Recreation to bring in the Colorado-based publishers of the Gravel Adventure Field Guide series. This spring, the indie outfit put out an illustrated, 64-page pocket guide full of maps, route descriptions, GPS coordinates, and the human and natural history of the 100 Mile Wilderness. Some 14,000 copies came off the printer, now complimentary at bike shops around Maine and New England.
In a sense, the analog guidebook feels fitting for a pursuit that involves cruising Maine’s forest roads at 15 rather than 45 miles per hour. “That slower pace is what’s traditional here, where people accessed the landscape for thousands of years via the rivers,” Tatko says. “We’re supposed to take our time in a place like this.”
This month, AMC hosts gravel cyclists at its Medawisla Lodge and Cabins for a multi-day festival of group rides and clinics — on bike-packing, tubeless tires, roadside rescue, and more. Check outdoors.org/events for details.
