Transit to Trails
A roundup of trips reaching nature without a car, from Wisconsin to California
Hosted Bike Trips Around Wisconsin
A roundup of the trips we've organized and hosted for friends and community around Madison
One of the best parts of solarpunk travel isn’t just doing it ourselves, it’s getting other people out there too. There’s a ceiling on how much good you can do just by quietly living your own values, biking instead of driving, camping instead of flying. The bigger multiplier is handing that knowledge off to someone who’s never done it before and watching them realize it wasn’t nearly as hard as they thought. Over our years in Madison we ended up hosting or co-hosting a handful of trips built around exactly that, so we wanted to round them all up in one place.
Scheidegger Forest, twice over
We hosted our first bike camping trip of the summer with a simple pitch, posted to whoever would listen: a 14 mile ride out to the campground at Scheidegger Forest county park starting at 3 in the afternoon, followed by a ride through the countryside to visit some local attractions, with a stop at Hop Garden along the way for anyone who wanted a beer. We made it a free event, but passed the hat for Freewheel Bikes, who were raising money at the time to move their shop into a new space. We also may have teased, with entirely too many question marks, that there could be a chance to see octopus along the route. We stand by that tease. A few people on that trip were heading out on their first bike overnight ever, and getting to watch that particular kind of nervous excitement in person, the same thing we felt years ago before any of this was normal to us, is honestly most of why we keep organizing these.
The trip itself, with Freewheel Bikes, was a ton of fun even with the heat and a few country hills, and on our rides, walking the hills is always a perfectly reasonable option, no shame in it whatsoever. What we billed as octopus turned out to be a scattering of Octopus Car Wash memorabilia someone along the route had apparently collected, honest to goodness Ozzie the Octopus decorations from the old Madison based car wash chain that used to have locations all over the Midwest before most of them got bought out and rebranded. There’s something very specifically Wisconsin about stumbling onto a stranger’s shrine to a defunct regional car wash mascot in the middle of the countryside, plus a flying saucer art car parked nearby for good measure, the kind of small absurd detail you only ever find by moving slowly enough through a place to actually notice it. The whole group made it back to Hop Garden Brewing in Paoli in time for a beer and dinner, tired in the specific, satisfied way you only get from a day spent entirely under your own power.
Teaching people to bike tour
We also co-hosted an event on how to actually get into bike touring, partnering with Madison Bikes and On Wisconsin Bicycle Touring as part of Madison Bike Week. We set up shop at Freewheel’s storefront on a Saturday morning and just talked, for as long as anyone wanted to stick around, about everything involved in getting into bike touring and bikepacking: what gear actually matters, what doesn’t, how to plan a first route that won’t scare you off the whole idea forever. It was aimed squarely at people who were curious but hadn’t taken the plunge yet, the same position we were in years ago before any of this became a lifestyle. There’s a particular kind of person who shows up to a talk like that, half convinced already, just looking for permission and a checklist, and it’s genuinely rewarding to be the one handing both of those over.
Not every trip happens
We also tried to put together a bike camping trip out to the Wormfarm Institute’s Farm/Art DTour, a Sauk County art trail with 40-plus installations spread across it that only exists for one weekend a year. We’d lined up a farm to camp on right along the route, planned to join the Saturday night festivities at Witwen for dinner, and only needed fifteen people to sign up to make it work. It never actually happened. Not enough people RSVPed, and we had to quietly let the date pass without ever getting on our bikes. It was a bit of a sobering reminder that bike camping is hard in a way that’s easy to forget once you’ve been doing it for years, and that a lot of people, reasonably, would rather just drive to a hotel than commit a whole weekend to an unfamiliar kind of discomfort. We’re still hoping to make an attempt at it work sometime, maybe with a shorter, gentler pitch next time.
Bringing friends along, again and again
Not every hosted trip needed a formal announcement or an RSVP link. We brought friends bike camping to Cave of the Mounds and Brigham County Park, and it was great watching them do their first bike camping trip ever, spreading the sustainable travel bug one weekend at a time instead of one blog post at a time. Cave of the Mounds had just finished installing solar panels covering about half its power needs when we visited, part of a statewide Travel Green Wisconsin certification, which felt like a nice bit of alignment for a trip built entirely around getting somewhere under our own power.
Blue Mounds State Park became something of a tradition of its own. It was one of the first places we visited when we moved to Madison, an easy 30 mile ride away, and by the time we hit our third year in the city we’d been back again and again, more and more often with friends in tow instead of just the two of us. There’s something satisfying about watching a single trailhead slowly turn into a running joke and then into a tradition, the kind of place where you stop needing directions and start just knowing the way.
Glacier National Park, the compromise trip
Not every hosted trip fits the car-free mold either, and we’ve mostly made peace with that. We really wanted to take the train out to Glacier National Park, but once we actually worked out the logistics for a group of four, connections, timing, everyone’s schedules lining up, driving out together in one car just made the most sense. It’s not the ideal we’re always chasing, and we felt a little sheepish admitting it even to ourselves. But hosting is sometimes about compromise, about picking the version of a trip that actually gets four people to a trailhead together instead of the purer version that gets nobody there at all, and it was so worth it to get to bring friends along for a place like that.
When the bikes needed a break
Even solarpunks sometimes need a car. After a surprisingly warm winter left our bikes sitting in rough shape, in for repairs longer than we would have liked, that didn’t mean we had to just stay in Madison and sulk about it. We rented a Zipcar for the night and drove out to Yellowstone Lake State Park, an unassuming little gem that we’d argue is the single most underrated park in Wisconsin, especially in spring when the ridge above the lake fills in with wildflowers. We caught the Aurora flashing overhead that night, green light rippling across the sky in a state park most people drive right past on their way somewhere else.
Our anniversary weekend became the perfect excuse for another Zipcar run, a backpacking overnight at Kickapoo Reserve, just 90 miles from Madison, after realizing the summer had gotten away from us without nearly enough camping in it. Carshare has made it genuinely easy to live car free in Madison and still get out to camp and hike whenever the mood strikes, without needing to own a car at all for the rare weekends we actually need one. It’s the kind of infrastructure that quietly makes the whole rest of this lifestyle possible.
Hosting trips always ended up being more rewarding than doing them solo, even the ones that fell apart before they started and even the ones where we caved and rented a car. Half the fun of figuring out how to get somewhere car-free is handing that knowledge off to somebody else and watching them decide, on their own terms, that they want to keep doing it too.
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