In 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set off from St. Louis to explore America's newest addition, the Louisiana Purchase, and cross the Continental Divide to what is now western Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Washington, reaching the Pacific Coast two years later.
This summer, Charles Scott, a travel writer and blogger, is covering a 1,300-mile portion of the Lewis and Clark trail by bike, with his 12-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter in tow.
Below are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Scott, speaking from the road in Lewistown, Mont., on tips for biking the trail with young children.
Q. How do you prepare for such a long-distance bike trip?
A. Plan your route in advance, because what roads you take can affect how dangerous the trip will be. And talk to locals to sanity-check your route. In North Dakota, where there's been an oil boom, we learned from locals that one of the routes has become completely unsafe, with truck after truck on it.
We are using maps from the Adventure Cycling Association, which does take us along country highways, some with cars going by at 70 miles per hour. On hills and curves, if there's no shoulder and a car's approaching, we pull over and wait.
Q. What sort of equipment do you bring?
A. One of the things you learn on these trips is to pack lightly. You don't need five pairs of jeans. You can get away with two and wash them every few days. I also bring a mix of repair equipment: spare tubes, patches, spokes. And a tent, sleeping bags and sleeping pads.
Q. Do you sleep in the tent every night?
A. Not every night. If there's a hotel with a swimming pool in the town where we end up, I'll splurge to give the kids a break. But in general I don't make hotel reservations along the way because that adds a lot of unhelpful pressure. There are a lot of variables: weather, how fast you're going that day, whether you changed your route. So it's best to play it by ear.
Q. What kind of bicycles do you use?
A. To carry all of this equipment, you need a sturdy bike. I ride a Trek 520, a reasonably light steel alloy, and my 12-year-old son rides a Trek 4 series mountain bike. My 6-year-old daughter uses a Burley Piccolo trailercycle, which is not like a tandem. She can stop pedaling whenever she wants, which is the secret to doing these long trips with kids. As long as you're confident your child can hold on, they'll be O.K.
Q. How do you know how much biking your son can handle?
A. At home in New York, my son and I commute to his school by bicycle, and we've done long weekend trips, so I became quite confident in his ability. If you go at a modest pace and take regular breaks, at least once an hour, the kids can go all day. We average about 40 miles a day, some days 60 miles, others as little as 12 miles. It all depends on the terrain. And we schedule rest days once a week. It sounds crazier and more challenging than it is.
Q. What have been some of your favorite sights of the trail?
A. The plants and animals, many of which Lewis and Clark documented in their journals. We look them up in a book called "Plants of the Lewis and Clark Expedition," by H. Wayne Phillips. We've passed prairie dogs, which were new to Lewis — he wasn't sure what to make of them — and all kinds of interesting plants: Osage orange fruit; the pawpaw; the prairie-blazing star, this beautiful purple flower. All of these plants and animals, they're still around but fewer in number.
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