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Andrew Hopson
Transcontinental Cyclist |
The hot prairie sun
beat down on his back as Andrew Hopson pedaled southwest
through the flat cropland, crossing the Saskatchewan
border on his way back to the United States. In the
customs line, his bicycle’s odometer read 8,500
miles — it was July 25, 2004 and he was more
than half way though his 14,000-mile circumcontinental
navigation of North America. That night, on the handheld
computer he uses to record the experiences of his journey,
Hopson wrote:
I’ve been on my bike for five months,
and I’ll be on it for five to come. I know what
it feels like to drift off to sleep knowing there’s
150 fresh miles behind me. I know what it is to pour
out heart and soul, to leave everything I’ve
got on the road for a day.
Two years earlier, Hopson
had arrived in his hometown of Portland, Maine at
the end of a 2002 transcontinental cycling trip, where
he had crossed the U.S. from west to east. But the
only thing he desired was to turn the corner and
continue south. After seeing a Balance Bar advertisement
to sponsor passionate amateur athletes, Hopson realized
his dream to pedal farther could become a reality.
He spent the better part of a year preparing his
Balance Bar sponsorship application and in January
2004 received the grant. In addition to sponsorship
from State Farm Insurance Company, the Balance Bar
funding enabled the cyclist to make his 10-month expedition
possible.
For Hopson, this current journey is less
about cycling the lengthy 14,000-mile distance and
much more about exposure to the incredible cultural
diversity and variety of weather and terrain found
throughout North America. “Biking
makes you vulnerable to all that is outside,” says
Hopson. “It allows you to observe the subtleties
you wouldn’t notice otherwise.”
Hopson
has already cycled the Gulf Coast, the Atlantic
Coast up to Nova Scotia, through the plains of Canada
and the U.S., the Pacific Coast, and the length of
Baja, Mexico. He will continue on through mainland
Mexico and into Belize, ending his inspirational 10-month
journey sometime this November. “Culturally,
I have seen more diversity than I could have imagined
existed. North America is enormous and enormously complex
in both terrain and culture, and I have only seen a
small sample of what I know is out there,” said
Hopson in late September after eight months on the
road.
Growing up in rural New York, Hopson spent more
time outside than in. “Our television exploded
sometime before I turned ten, and we never replaced
it. My two sisters and I used to pal around together,
climbing trees, canoeing, and riding bikes all over
the place,” the cyclist says about his childhood.
Hopson began road cycling in high school, after purchasing
a good bicycle with summer work money. “I took
long day tours. I liked the speed and how smooth it
was. It was more interesting to me than mountain biking.”
After
high school, Hopson took leave from college to
attend a NOLS Rocky Mountain Semester in 1992. He was
barely nineteen, but still thinks about his NOLS experience — how
it impacted his life and affects his cycling goals. “Everything
I learned on my NOLS course stayed with me, and recently
those lessons have sprung up again,” says Hopson. “NOLS
gave me the foundation framework for risk management
that I definitely apply every day. I need to be careful
that anything I do today doesn’t compromise tomorrow.”
While
preparing for what he calls the “big bike ride,” Hopson
used the expedition planning skills that he gained
on his Rocky Mountain Semester. “My NOLS experience
made it possible for me to think about a journey this
long,” says the cyclist.
When he completes his
circum-navigational tour, Hopson hopes to write
a book about his experiences, and has started thinking
about another potential “big bike ride” around
Australia. “I try to be really open to people
and situations in my life…so for my next adventure
I am waiting to see what opportunities arise.”
-Susanna
Helm
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