WANTED: Young skinny wiry fellows

For about a year and a half, from April 1860 to November 1861, young horsemen working for the Central Overland California & Pike's Peak Express Company — better known as the Pony Express — maintained communications between the East Coast and the West Coast by carrying the official mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. This means 2010 marks the 150th anniversary of the Pony Express National Historic Trail.

Young men on fast horses riding day and night (they'd change horses every 12 to 15 miles) managed to move the mail 1,800 miles from St. Joseph to Sacramento, or vice versa, in about ten days' time. However, the late October 1861 completion of the coast-to-coast telegraph lines put an end to this short-lived equestrian mode of moving the mail.

According to the National Park Service, most of the original Pony Express Trail no longer exists, as it's been obliterated by time and/or human activities; in many places, the actual route is a matter of speculation. In the western states, the majority of it has been converted to double track dirt roads. This includes portions of the trail shared with the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route in the Sweetwater corridor of central Wyoming's Great Divide Basin. Short segments of what are believed to be traces of the original trail can be seen only in Utah and California.

So, you ask, other than a brief mention of the Great Divide, what does this all have to do with bicycle travel? Answer: to help mark the sesquicentennial of the trail, a group based in Fernley, Nevada, is attempting to recruit 500 road cyclists and mountain bikers for a relay race next spring along the trail as it exists today. The organizers' ultimate goal, or hope, is that the army of cyclists can better the original Pony Express record time of around seven days and 16 hours.

Stay tuned. This could get interesting if they're successful in putting it together.

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BIKING WITHOUT BORDERS is posted every Monday by Michael McCoy, Adventure Cycling’s field editor, and highlights a little bit of this or a little bit of that—just about anything, as long as it’s related to traveling by bicycle.