Rockwood to Cumberland section of Great Allegheny Passage guide is now available on Everytrail.

Section #3 of the GAP trail is now available for download to your smartphone. This is the section that runs from Rockwood Pennsylvania to Cumberland Maryland. It includes some of the following trail attractions:

Great Allegheny Passage trail

- the Bollman Iron Bridge
- the Eastern Continental Divide
- the Big Savage Tunnel
- the Mason Dixon Line
- the Borden Mill Tunnel
- the Brush Tunnel
- the Cumberland Bone Cave
- the Western Maryland Railroad Bridge
- the towns of Cumberland, Frostburg, Meyersdale, Garrett, and Rockwood


It is a 44 mile section of the 130 mile Great Allegheny Passage trail; you would be hard-pressed to find any 44 mile segment of trail anywhere in the world that has that many feature attractions, both historical and scenic.


If you haven't had a chance to download one of these smart guides, now's the time to give them a try. It is amazing how much they can pack into one little app. It's like having an interactive guidebook to carry around in your phone.

Rockwood to Cumberland section of Great Allegheny Passage guide is now available on Everytrail.

Great Allegheny Passage Business Network

It's nice that we have non-profits like the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.
It's vital that we get a certain level of government support for building trails.
It's important that individuals just like you and me get involved in the purchase and preservation of trail lands.

But it's also essential that we get help from businesses from the mom & pop grocery store all the way up to the mega corporations. And it seems like that's one of the goals of the Great Allegheny Passage Sustainable Business Network. It's like a group of businesses banding together to support a local trail.

Great Allegheny Passage trail

It makes perfect sense. The GAP trail is good for business and business is good for the GAP trail. The trail brings customers to bed & breakfasts, hotels, stores, restaurants, bike shops, and so on. And when those businesses band together to support the trail, it's a perfect symbiotic relationship.

I hope to see other great rail trails adopt this same model of support, encouragement, and cooperation. It's good for trails and the people who use them.

Great Allegheny Passage Business Network

Connecting Rail Trails to make Super Rail-Trails

Super Rail-Trails

Rail trails are fantastic. But how do you turn an ordinary, every-day rail trail (if such a thing exists) into SUPER TRAIL!!!
 It's really quite simple; you just connect two good trails and you get one great trail.  Here are some examples:

C & O Canal trail connects to the
  GAP trail, the Western Maryland Rail Trail,
and the Mount Vernon Trail.

• Silver Comet Trail + Chief Ladiga Trail = Super Trail
• New Santa Fe Trail + Pikes Peak Greenway Trail = Megatrail
• GAP trail + C & O Canal Towpath trail = Mighty Trail

So the next time you're looking for a great rail trail; one you can plan a vacation around...

Check out which trails can be connected to make a super trail.

Connecting Rail Trails to make Super Rail-Trails

Adventure Cycling catalogue

I just received my Adventure Cycling catalogue (or is it catalog?) of 2011 tours. And I'm drooling.

Most of them are road bike tours, and that's why I haven't shown a lot of interest in Adventure Cycling in the past. Even their headquarters of Montana, my home state, hasn't enticed me to sign up with them.

But now, it appears they also have trail trips including the GAP trail and the C & O Canal trail that I just finished riding. In fact, that's what sparked my interest in Adventure Cycling again. While I was staying at the Little Orleans Lodge in Maryland, the proprietor was telling me about AC groups that had stayed at his lodge while doing their trail tour.

So now, I'm in the process of checking out their tour of the Katy Trail in Missouri. If I can work out transportation logistics to get myself and my bike to the tour staging area, I'm thinking about taking the plunge and signing up for the trip. It'll be my first guided tour. Usually, I just do these bike trips on my own. It would be nice to forget about packing all my stuff with me and let someone else carry everything.

Usually it takes me a couple weeks to recover from one trip before I start planning another, but I think I'm already to start the wheels rollin' again.

If any of my readers/subscribers has ever done an Adventure Cycling tour, I'd love to hear about your experience. For that matter, I'd love to hear more about the Katy Trail in MO. Drop me a line. In case you didn't read yesterday's post, I now have a much easier email subscription system, so be sure to sign up to receive blog updates as I post them. To leave me a comment, just click on the link below.

Adventure Cycling catalogue