J.V. Frederick, Ben Holladay, The Stagecoach King (1940) This book is something of a biography of Ben Holliday, who developed a virtual monopoly on stagecoaching in the 1860s west. He…
Yesterday (7/24/2020), I rode another short loop (20 miles) to compare the 2017 Centennial Route with the Pony Express Bikepacking Route between Pacific House and Pollock Pines (Miles 2122-2130). I…
Mary Lund Settle and Raymond W. Settle, Saddles and Spurs (1955) Saddles and Spurs is one of the seminal books on the Pony Express. Every later work I've read references…
Last Friday (7/17/20) I drove up to Placerville to scout the route between there and Pollock Pines. As before, I rode the PX Bikepacking Route on the eastbound leg (reverse…
Irene D. Paden, Prairie Schooner Detours (1949) This is a follow up book to Paden's The Wake of the Prairie Schooner. The first book stuck to the Oregon and California…
There are two places of interest on the Pony Express Bikepacking Route between Placerville and Folsom, California. One is the Duroc Station marker near Shingle Springs (Mile 2157). I stopped…
Today I went on a relatively long drive (50 miles) for a relatively short ride (26 miles). I wanted to scout the next section (to the east) from my…
My plan over the course of this summer is to pre-ride the PX Bikepacking Route from Echo Summit (above South Lake Tahoe) to Old Town Sacramento. That's about Mile 2072 to…
A couple of weeks ago I loaded up my bikepacking rig to do a shakedown ride. My plan was to ride from my house in Davis, CA (about 15 miles…
Henry Pickering Walker, The Wagonmasters (1966) This book is subtitled "High Plains Freighting from the Earliest Days of the Santa Fe Trail to 1880." It is a fairly thorough account of…
A key component of a 2,100-mile bike ride is, of course, the bike. I thought a lot about building a bike just for this ride. But in the end,…