Hey guys,
We are two best friends, fairly experienced with biking over distance (we did a New York- Toronto) trip a year ago, and a bunch of smaller adventures.
We are finally doing cross-country this year, after two years of putting it off.
We are going to be on the road for three months, because we have the time and we figure we might as well take it slow if we can :)
We are starting out in New York, with the idea of ending up somewhere around San Francisco on the West Coast.

Our main question is about Nevada and Utah. Would you recommend avoiding those two states entirely and going North through Oregon or is there some route that people already took that took them through Utah and Nevada in one piece. Because from what we can see it's a pretty desolate landscape with little in terms of water replenishing on the way.

We are planning to camp mostly in the wild/campgrounds, so motels,etc is not a problem for us. Water, on the other hand, is. Any suggestions?

-Marika

this is what our google map plan of the trip looks like, so you have some idea of the problems we are facing:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=112739460533999933193.000463d4c34cceea1c621&ll=39.88445,-83.001709&spn=3.987016,7.03125&z=7

- Marika

I honestly don't know enough about Utah & Nevada. When I BAA'ed, I went across AZ and NM, which wasn't as desolate. Detouring more to the north might be a good idea.

-Steve
www.ColoradoGuy.com

yeah. i think that's what we are going to end up doing, going through wyoming and oregon.

- M.

Hi,
check out the ''western express'' trail on the Adventure Cycling Associations page:
http://www.adventurecycling.org/routes/RouteNetwork.pdf
It goes pretty much where you were thinking of going and if you buy the maps, they come with all the info you were looking for (distance between watering holes, places to camp, eat, etc...)
Hope that helped.
Cheers

I somehow managed to completely blind-spot this particular map in the Adventure Cycling maps. I've looked it over, and it follows approximately the same route we mapped out, and highlights the problems we thought about.

We have, after some reflection, decided that we'd rather go north through wyoming, idaho and oregon because the extreme heat makes the trip a little too extreme for my taste. we haven't decided if we are following the Transatlantic maps yet (we have those, ordered a few years back) or just cut across through NJ, PA, Indiana, IL, Iowa, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon without following a pre-made route.