Texas Will Have the Hardest Stuff to Ride on New Cross-Country Bike Route [Video]

Texas Tech photography professor Jerod Foster is serious about bicycles and adventure travel. Foster is so serious, in fact, that if you stop by the website for Austin-based bike maker Chumba Bikes and click on the Yaupon Titanium model designed for long-distance off-road cycling (“bikepacking,” in the sport’s parlance), what shows up is an image of the custom frame the company fabricated for him. So when Bikepacking Roots, a national group promoting the booming sport, wanted help mapping the Texas portion of the Great Plans Gravel Route, a new, roughly 3,600-mile border-to-border route from Mexico to Canada, they turned to Foster.

Texas comprises a full third of the route, about 1,200 miles. The ride has its southern terminus on the Rio Grande in Presidio, situated near Big Bend. The GPGR crosses the Chihuahuan Desert, which extends beyond the southern edge of the Great Plains, cutting north through the Llano Estacado before it hits …