Unbound Gravel XL+, Part 1 – my thousand mile commute to the race

Last week, I finished a 4124 mile gravel / road / trail adventure that included the Unbound Gravel XL bike race in the middle. After biking 1000 miles from my home in Hoover, Alabama to the race in Emporia, Kansas, I finished 48th in the XL version of the race in particularly muddy conditions this year.

After the race, I headed north to the upper midwest where my wife was house-sitting for her sister in Minnesota outside the Twin Cities. I rested for about a full day before heading out again 28 hours after arriving (the next night) and riding across rural Wisconsin where I saw two black bears and countless deer and rabbits and across the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan to Sault Ste. Marie, Canada.

On my ride across the border, I got a chance to ride and chat with Lael Wilcox on her attempt to set a new overall world record for biking around the world. We rode for many miles before I had to say goodbye in Sault Ste. Marie where I was spending the night. The following day I caught up with a young woman who was riding all the way across Canada from Vancouver, British Columbia to Quebec City, Quebec who had also had a chance to ride with Lael briefly earlier in the day. We chatted a bit before I left to ride onto the island in Lake Huron where I’d be spending the night as she was much more heavily loaded with bikepacking gear and traveling a bit slower than I needed to go to stay on track for a 25 day finish. It was amazing to hear some of her stories from her trip such as the snow storm in late May in Saskatchewan where she had to wait it out in her tent for nearly 36 hours!

The next day I took a rather large ferry across the eastern edge of Lake Huron onto the Bruce Peninsula sailing and riding through quite a bit of fog. After two more days heading south, I made it around the bottom edge of Lake Huron and took a small ferry across the St Clair River separating the US and Canada. It was just me and two Canadians on the crossing with one border patrol agent receiving us and sending us on our way in less than five minutes total.

Traffic was immediately awful back in America as it was morning rush hour on the far, far outskirts of Detroit. I battled traffic for many miles until I got into the actual bike infrastructure of Detroit itself, which was great for many miles through the heart of the city. Eventually, I made it out of that infrastructure and battled traffic again nearly all the way to my stopping place for the night in Adrian, Michigan.

Summit fever set in the next day as I realized how little I had left to ride (only 750 more miles) to make it back home. I had an unexpected surprise spending the night at an AirBnB in Upland, Indiana at the former headquarters of “Wandering Wheels“, the nation’s first cross-country bicycle riding organization. My host used to work there back in the day, and he gave me a tour of the place where there were still many old bikes hanging on the walls and so many pictures from news stories and trips across the country over the years.

The following day was hard, so I kept it quite short checking into the hotel before 7am, which was a good decision because after a long hotel sleep during the day, I thoroughly enjoyed the final three nights (and days) through Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama to make it back down past Birmingham and back in the exact same door I had left from 25 days earlier!

Background and Motivation

I’ve always wanted to race the Dirty Kanza race, which was renamed a few years ago to Unbound Gravel — especially when I found out they had added an ultra version, the 350+ mile Unbound Gravel XL. The problem is you have to enter a lottery in December for a chance to register. And I can never remember to enter the lottery. But this year, I saw a friend’s facebook post that they had just entered the lottery so I figured “why not?” and put my name into the registration hat.

Plus, summer is where I am free from work and itching to go on a long distance biking adventure … here are my June/July/August adventures over the past decade:

• June 2025 – Canadian American data adventure
• July 2024 – The Rift Gravel race
• August 2023 – Paris Brest Paris
• June 2022 – The Tour Divide
• July 2021 – Ride 4 Gabe 5.0
• July 2019 – Ride 4 Gabe 4.0
• June 2017 – Ride 4 Gabe 3.0 (Race Across America)
• August 2016 – Ride 4 Gabe 2.0
• June 2015 – Race Across America (Nuevas Esperanzas)

With the Unbound XL race being held at the end of May, why not just ride to the start and then do a big loop across the middle of the country up into Canada as part of my commute to/from the race?! Hence the need for my passport, which I had with me during the entire Unbound XL race zipped into my backpack pocket.

Finally, my bicycle transportation and traffic research is at a very important point where I am now able to collect lateral passing data (i.e., how close a car/truck/motorcycle is when they pass me). So this trip had my full data collection equipment and setup. This post will only document the adventure, as I was save the data analysis for another post.

The Details

Day 1 – 256 miles from Hoover, Alabama to Batestville, MS
Sat, May 23rd @ 8:33pm to Sun, May 24th @ 4:32pm (19 hours, 59 min)
545 vehicles, 2.1/mi, 0.5/min, 36.0mph(avg)
https://www.mybiketraffic.com/rides/view/638244

Weather was a big factor for the entire trip, starting from Day 1. Some large storms with heavy rain came through Birmingham on the night I intended to leave (Saturday, May 23rd). I delayed my start by about 30 minutes, but it was still raining pretty good when I left my house.

By the time I made it to the top of the first climb (biggest climb of the trip) to the top of Vestavia Hills, it had stopped raining but the roads stayed wet and the humidity was very high all night and into the next day. I was constantly wet, and my glasses kept fogging up, and roads that I had routed myself on no longer existed or were closed. I was trying to ride as many new roads as possible since I’ve ridden all the major thoroughfares in Alabama already.

Still, the rain held off the entire next day, and it stayed mostly cloudy so I enjoyed relatively cool temps even if the humidity was very high all day. Twice, I found myself riding with no shirt because I had put on my rain jacket and then gotten quite hot as the rain either never materialized or stopped almost immediately. Rather than taking off only the jacket, for whatever reason, it just made sense to take off my jersey and my jacket. I think my primary thought process was to keep the jersey as dry as possible. Given all the humidity and threatening rain, shirtless I made my way across Alabama and Mississippi (or at least parts of both states)!

By leaving so early, I had given myself plenty of time to make it to Emporia, so I was only trying to maintain an average speed of about 14mph. On this first day, that proved just about doable, even with all the climbing. But by the end of the day, even after it had flattened out a bit, I ended with a 13.7mph rolling average speed because I just had too much stuff to roll any faster. My bike and equipment together weighed about 40 pounds, plus another 5-10 pounds in my backpack depending on how stocked I was with food and liquid. I was also using 2.2″ Terravail Sparwood gravel tires, which roll fairly well on pavement, but they are definitely not road bike tires.

I had booked a hotel in Batesville, MS and made it there just before 5pm after stopping to buy food for dinner as well as for my “breakfast” a few hours later and the next day’s riding. I also needed to plug in all my electronics and battery packs immediately to recharge everything as much as possible before setting out again in just a few hours. I, of course, also needed to shower and sleep.

Day 2 – 257 miles from Batesville, MS to Plainview, AR crossing the Mississippi River in Helena-West Helena, Arkansas
Sun, May 24th @ 11:55pm to Mon, May 25th @ 8:07pm (20 hours, 12 min)
318 vehicles, 1.2/mi, 0.3/min, 39.8mph(avg)
https://www.mybiketraffic.com/rides/view/639345

I woke up around 11pm, and was out the door just before midnight. The goal of the day was to beat the heat and afternoon storms. I was able to finish before storms moved in, but it did get quite hot in the afternoon.

I was riding on lots of backroads with a surprising number of hills before dropping down into the flat plains of the Mississippi River valley and crossing the Mississippi River on the narrow one lane each way bridge over the river into Arkansas at about 3am. I was passed by one truck and one car on the bridge itself, both going 50+mph. Still, even for a Monday morning, it was early enough that the roads were nearly entirely deserted.

The downtown part of Helena-West Helena is along the banks of the Mississippi River nestled into the base of the Crowley Ridge which runs pretty much the entire length of Central Arkansas from the northern border with Missouri down to Helena-West Helena. So after making my way through downtown, I had a Category 4 climb up and over the ridge. At the top I joined a “bicycle designated” route which was an old abandoned dirt road. It was good, rideable dirt though so I was flying along it until it turned into chunky gravel at which point I immediately left the dirt road and headed over on a different gravel road about 1/2 mile to make it over to US Highway 49. I’m pretty sure, the abandoned road was “Old Highway 49”.

I’ve already ridden in all the counties in Arkansas, and I started a big ride across the entire state in Helena-West Helena a couple years ago, so that stretch of US 49 I had already ridden. I turned off of it within a couple miles onto an official rails-to-trail bike path that intersected it. This was a crushed gravel type path, but with my wide tires on a gravel bike it was perfect alternative to the US highway, except it was heading due north when I needed to be heading due west. Still, I rode it for a few miles until it ended on a paved road right about sunrise.

I took that paved road over to AR-1, which was a major four lane highway heading up to the I-40 corridor heading to Memphis. I rode this for a few miles until I found a good paved road heading west to eventually intersect with my route I had abandoned when it turned to deep gravel.

Not too long after turning onto US-70 I came across a cyclist walking his heavily loaded bike east towards Memphis. I said hello and stopped briefly. He asked how far it was to the town I had just come through, and I told him about 5 miles (seemed about right). He told me that the rain had been messing up the timing on his route. And it was indeed quite dark in front of me in the direction that he was coming from, but I never did catch up to those storms. They drifted away and/or dissipated as I kept heading west.

I said good-bye and headed on where a few miles later I found myself admiring an abandoned railroad/road bridge over the White River. This lift bridge was epic. And we had watched the 2024 eclipse from a cliff overlooking the White River maybe 75 miles up river from where I was crossing it on this adventure. I had no idea where I was in relation to where we were b/c this part of Arkansas was extremely flat vs the mountains we were in closer to the source of the river for the eclipse.

I continued on US-70, which was busier than the deserted roads from before, but had a great shoulder that was rumble strip free and recently repaved. US-70 merged with I-40 close to Little Rock so I veered south on some suggested bicycling routes.

These roads took me over to the long greenway alongside the Arkansas River, which I rode for about 12 miles … the rare case of a greenway heading in the exact direction I was trying to go. Plus, the greenway itself is really well built and wide, so despite a lot of lunch time usage, I was able to ride at a pretty good clip of 13-15mph for the entire stretch.

My route left the bike path a few miles after the bridge and started climbing through several state parks. These climbs weren’t that bad, but I was over 200 miles into that day’s ride and close to 500 miles into the trip by that point on a heavily loaded bike. Thankfully, the roads were pretty quiet as I crawled my way up trying not to overexert myself or wear out my knees early in the trip by pushing too hard.

I passed by the start (I think) of the Ouachita National Recreation Trail and even rode on the first stretch which was on the paved old hwy 9 bridge, before merging briefly with hwy 9 and then back onto “old hwy 9”, which was one of my favorite sections of the course as I was fascinated by how I had climbed above the Arkansas River given the many miles of flat riding for the first 200+ miles of the day.

I still had about 50 miles to go and made my way past Lake Fourche LaFavre with huge ridges from the Ouatchita Mountains visible in the alpine glow near sunset.

I made it to Plainview a few miles later around 8pm shortly before sunset. This is a very small town with one single gas station / store, but it has a restored “downtown” section with buildings labeled as to what they were back in the 1800s when the town was first built.

My stop for the night was an AirBnB cabin in a campground right next to a washer/dryer. Unfortunately, I didn’t know for sure if they had laundry so I didn’t get change at the gas station, so I decided to hold off on laundry.

Laundry and saddle sores side note

As it turns out, I would end up riding the entire 1000 miles to Emporia without doing laundry in just one jersey and one bibs. The secret for this is in the first aid section at any drug store where you can buy a spray bottle of Dermaplast. I figured since this kills “99.999%” of bacteria, I could just spray it all over my bibs and jersey each night and keep stuff from growing on the dirty clothes.

This worked well as my saddle sores remained at bay for the most part. Still, on a trip like this, I inevitably get some saddle sores by about the third day, deal with them for a few days and they eventually settle down for the rest of the trip as long as I keep spraying the actual sores with dermaplast (which also has a numbing agent) at gas station stops a couple times each day. For particularly humid or rainy days/nights, I also make sure to coat the areas in Vitamin A&D ointment or Aquaphor, whatever I can find along the way.

The timing of this worked out pretty well because my saddle sores were at their most painful on the final day into Emporia, but the extended 24 hour rest before I needed to ride again helped perfectly, and I had no more major problems with saddle sores until the last couple days of the entire trip (about two weeks later). The important thing to note is that the saddle sores didn’t go away, it’s just that the pain became manageable / less noticeable compared to how everything else starts to hurt the farther you get into an extended bike trip.

Day 3 – 155 miles from Plainview, AR to Quinton, OK
Tues, May 26th @ 03:59am to Tues, May 26th @ 4:40pm (12 hours, 41 min)
338 vehicles, 2.2/mi, 0.5/min, 39.8mph(avg)
https://www.mybiketraffic.com/rides/view/640215

For this third day of my commute to Emporia, I headed west into Oklahoma to ride through counties missing in my nationwide county map. I didn’t start quite as early and ended up riding into a very hot afternoon.

Storms had moved through overnight and there was one more arm of “yellow” radar rain coming my way as I left my cabin. I wasn’t sure if I was going to intersect it or clear out ahead of it to the north before it got there. But it started to rain even before I left the campground. A mile or two later, I decided it was time to break out all the rain gear and shoe covers leading to the pic above after I picked my back up off the ground where I had laid it down to fetch the rain gear.

My route went through the Choctaw Native American reservation and was quite scenic. Highlight of the day was climbing through Robbers Cave state park in a curvy shaded road that eased the gradient compared to the adjacent state highway which climbed straight up the mountain. The storms had moved out, and the temperatures had ratched it up to pretty high levels so I was especially thankful for the shade.

Also, I stopped in the shade to put on suntan lotion next to the Wister Lake spillway and original water flow, which was just monumental in its size. For that spillway to be used, the flooding would have to be extraordinarily high.

When I finally made it to Quinton, I had several items to address: 1) my time trial bar pad had worn out so much that there was no padding left and my forearm was getting quite sore. 2) it was very hot. 3) I needed to stock up for an early departure when everything would be closed in Quinton and nothing open on my route for many miles. 4) I needed to find my “bus” where I was spending the night.

After the gas station and Dollar General, I plugged in the directions to the AirBnB, and my phone guided me to a dirt road climbing out of town up and over a very steep hill. I barely made it without walking. Over the top of the hill, I carefully made my way carrying all the stuff on my handlebars down a steep downhill to the campground where a passenger bus had been converted to an AirBnB. For $60, I got to spend the night in this awesome “bus” right next to the shower/bathroom building. It was perfect! The campground was catered to jeep and other 4×4 off-roading drivers with lots of information about nearby roads and trails open to 4×4 vehicles. Given that it was the middle of the week, I was the only one there in the entire campground.

Day 4 – 194 miles from Quinton, OK to Bartlesville, OK via Tulsa, OK
Wed, May 27th @ 1:17AM to Wed, May 27th @ 5:14PM (15 hours, 57 mins)
290 vehicles, 1.7/mi, 0.4/min, 34.0mph(avg)
https://www.mybiketraffic.com/rides/view/641321

Tulsa, Oklahoma is one of my favorite cycling towns. I’ve got lots of incredible memories from there starting with a family vacation while racing the Tulsa Tough criteriums in 2012 with the infamous Crybaby Hill. The races were great, but as far as general cycling goes, it was my warm-up for the races on the bike paths along the Arkansas River that really stood out to me. So much so, that when we were routing our 2019 Ride4Gabe from Hoover, Alabama to the top of Pikes Peak in Colorado, I made sure I routed us through Tulsa so I could share some of those bike path with my best friends. They were hilly with lots of swooping and things to discover around every corner it seemed.

I left my AirBNB “home” for the night shortly after 1AM to cover the long distance of the day and still make it into Bartlesville as early as possible to avoid riding in the head of the day, and more importantly, allow me to arrive in Emporia the following day in enough time to do everything I needed to do to check in for the race. This meant climbing back over the ridge and dropping back down the dirt road into Quinton in the dark, but that went well. It also meant many miles of night riding, but it was under a very bright moon so I got to see some pretty good lake moonlight vistas and quiet roads, except for of course the roads that were closed, which is the plague of point-to-point riding.

I was on some nice rural roads including some dirt roads and climbs all the way unitl I made it to the bikepaths in Tulsa. I had routed myself along the Arkansas River and then into the historic Greenwood district of Tulsa known as “Black Wallstreet”, remembering back to the injustices of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 due in at least part to white jealousy of the many successful businesses being run by black people in Tulsa.

After leaving downtown, I made my way onto the Osage Prairie Trail, a nice long rails-to-trail, that provided relief from traffic and the sun, since it had gotten quite hot again. Another thing that provided relief from the sun was thunderstorms rolling in as I made my way closer to Bartlesville. This clouded up the sky, but thankfully I was able to make a quick stop at a gas station to pick up dinner and then roll onto my next AirBnB, a room in a historic hotel that has been converted to apartment units in downtown Bartlesville.

Instagram live with Jeremiah Bishop, the Impossible Route

JB had reached out to me via Facebook to see if I wanted to hop on his Instagram live feed earlier in the day, so I had been coordinating with him my arrival time and when I could join. Shortly after arriving, I got all my electronics plugged in, took a quick shower, and then joined him for a fun short Q/A about the trip and the race.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Impossible Route ☠️💕 (@theimpossibleroute)

I was asleep within minutes of finishing our chat about the race and the adventure and my research with mybiketraffic.com

Day 5 – 148.6 miles from Bartlesville, OK to Emporia, KS
Thurs May 28th @ 1:38AM to Thurs May 28th @ 5:01PM (15 hours, 24 mins)
179 vehicles, 1.2/mi, 0.3/min, 33.3mph(avg)
https://www.mybiketraffic.com/rides/view/642470

Not a huge ride to finish off the commute to Kansas, but the challenge was making it there in time to get checked into the race and attend the XL rider meeting at 4:00pm. So I left the historic hotel in Bartlesville at 1:38AM … in the rain … and rode in the rain and wet roads for an hour or two before it stopped and dried out.

My original route had me on some dirt and gravel roads alongside the main US highway, but with all the rain I opted to stay on US-75 given that it was 1:30 in the morning, and there was no traffic at all. I crossed over into Kansas at well before sunrise and continued my way north.

As traffic started to pick up, I headed back onto the side roads, which were thankfully paved by this point. I didn’t want to arrive at the start of Unbound XL with all kinds of problems from mud and dirt and peanut butter mud even before the race began!

Since I was off my original route by quite a bit, I didn’t know where all the gas stations / resupply spots would be. Thankfully, I stopped at a vehicle repair shop in a small town called Toronto at the north end of a big state park / lake that I had bikes around to get to the town. The friendliest receptionist ever gladly gave me a bottle of water and said they charge a $1 for drivers but give them away for free to cyclists! This left me with two full bottles of water and about 35 miles to the Casey’s gas station I had set as my destination on Google Maps.

I was cutting off miles to try to get to Emporia as early as I could as I started to realize the check-in process and everything I needed to do might take a while. So when the state highway ended at the intersection of the Race Across America route on US-54 a few miles west of Yates Center, there was no way I was going to follow it into Yates Center since I would have to backtrack again adding on many miles.

So it was straight across the highway onto the first of many miles of gravel roads that served as a great warm-up for the Unbound Gravel race the next day. I knew that my route to Casey’s was going to be on some gravel roads so I had asked the receptionist what the condition of the gravel roads were given the rain. And the lone customer in the waiting area said, “what rain? we’ve barely had any and the ground just soaks it up immediately”. So that gave me some confidence heading into the gravel.

And it was awesome, as I also had a tailwind and the gravel roads were immaculate … many place completely free of gravel and just solid packed rock and dirt. I was riding considerably faster than I had been on the paved state highway battling the regular expansion cracks in the road and a nasty crosswind as I headed north.

Now that I was turning more west and had a tailwind at my back, I was flying on a series of gravel roads through two separate small towns that were completely gravel. Not a paved road in sight! I kept thinking since I could see the name of the town on a map that there would be pavement, but nope, it was all gravel roads including some streets setup like city blocks with houses, but all the streets were gravel! It truly felt like I was “Out West”.

Leaving one town, I had to ride through a LARGE pack of dogs. I’ve gotten pretty good over the years with being forceful and direct and fending off dogs by finding the lead one and pointing and staring at it intently. It is quite effective. You don’t have to say anything, just make sure you don’t look away. Just keep staring at the lead dog. A good “no” while pointing and staring will turn away even the bravest of dogs. But most of the dogs you can just point at and stare at intently and they will back off. This is a good trick when you see the dog(s) well ahead of you in the road or back up in a yard before they even start barking. Just start staring and pointing immediately. Most of the time the dogs will take off running the other way by the time you even get close. This works well with single dogs and small groups, but when there are a dozen dogs it’s kinda hard to figure out who the lead dog is.

The dark clouds in the direction of Eureka were actually moving away from me, and it was obvious b/c I could see other clouds and storms coming from behind me. The rain I had been riding in during the morning was probably in Nebraska by the time I took this screenshot. I thought I could make it to the Casey’s before the storms coming from the southeast caught up to me. But alas, it was only a few miles after the dog selfie that I felt the first big raindrops. I immediately stopped and put on my shoe covers and waterproof backpack cover but didn’t bother with rain jacket or rain pants because I knew I would be doing laundry. And it was still quite warm even with the rain. I didn’t want to deal with wet and muddy shoes, though.

I was very nervous as I rode in the downpour what would happen to the gravel road. But only one or two short sections felt a little “squishy”/soft and nothing was sticking to the tires. The first storm ended right about the time I turned onto a paved road. Then shortly after turning off that paved road onto another gravel road, the second storm caught up to me. This one had a bit of lightning and the rain was intenser, but the rainy part of the system only lasted a few minutes. The next bout of rain after that was about an hour later after I had made it to the Casey’s in Madison.

This had been the Casey’s that I had used Google Maps to route myself to, and as it turns out it was our first resupply stop during the race the next day! The clerk at the gas station asked me which race I was doing when I checked out. It’s funny b/c it was obvious I was there to do the race, but less obvious that I had just ridden 1000 miles to get there. I didn’t mention anything about that, and just told her that I was going to try my hand at the XL race and was nervous about the weather. She said something along the lines of “yeah, it’s going to be a mess”.

It was still raining after I checked out, and I was tired so I just went outside and sat on the pavement under some cover and ate some food and drank my “sports coffee” drink that they have at Casey’s, one of the reasons it’s my favorite gas station brand in the whole country.

The rain stopped as I left, but I was really concerned about mud, so I decided to stick with the quite busy state highway (KS-99) leading from US-54 up to Emporia. I got passed by many racers in their cars with gravel bikes as this would be on the drive for many racers to make it to Emporia. It would also be on the drive back from racers scouting out parts of the race course.

Check-in was slow, but it went smoothly. I bumped into friends from Alabama there to race the Unbound 200. I also ran into one of the athletes from the high school team I help coach there to race the Unbound 100. They had just finished registration, but thankfully the XL registration wasn’t quite as bad. Still, after about 30 minutes I was all checked into the race. It was fun to catch a first glimpse of a lot of the other crazy riders from all over the world tackling a 350 mile gravel race.

After getting checked in, I had a couple hours before the start of the XL rider meeting. I figured I could make the best use of that time by going to the laundromat and doing laundry for the first time on the trip (yes, that’s 1000+ miles in one kit and one jersey and several pairs of socks). I stopped there first and the kind lady took my laundry from me and did the self service machines for me and told me where I could get cash to pay her since they didn’t take card.

So I went to the grocery store to get cash back from my purchase of some cliff bars for the race which turned out to be important because I put them into my backpack and immediately forgot about them. When I made it to the first store during the race, which was slammed with racers, I didn’t need to go inside the store because I remembered those two cliff bars were in the top of my backpack, and figured they would be enough to get me the 40 miles to the next stop. Back to the laundromat, I paid her five dollars in cash and went to get an early dinner at “Do-B’s”, a well-known diner just down the street from the laundromat. By the time, I finished eating and made it back to the laundromat, the kind lady had finished running my clothes through the dryer and instead of me needing to give her more money, she ended up giving me a couple dollars back b/c she only charged me $2.50 for everything (wash and dry)!

People were nice like that all over the town. The check-out clerk at the grocery store wished me good luck at the race, and when I got cash back for the laundry she said a little prayer for me, it was really nice! Also, I ended up getting a $5 bill and five 1’s from her combined with a few 1’s that I had. It turned out that it was the exact amount of cash that I would need for the entire trip with me needing to do laundry on the next to last day and using the last of my cash. This included the $3 ferry ride across the border from Canada back into the US which was cash only. (Canada back into the US? I thought you were in Kansas? Yes, my friend, we have many miles ahead of us in this story!)

With a few minutes to spare, I made it to the Unbound XL racer meeting, which was held in the historic theater. It was awesome to see so many people. I ended up heading up to the balcony where I sat next to a pair of Canadians who knew Theo Kelsey whom I had met and ridden with across the border from Canada back into the USA during my Tour Divide 2022 11th place finish.

It was great background about the grasslands themselves and how the ranchers and farmers and government entities work together to preserve the grassland. I still can’t get over the amazing grassland hills a few hours into the race as the sun was setting…

Stay tuned for Part 2, but in the meantime read up on the Unbound XL race itself which is what happened next on this adventure!