This story originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Adventure Cyclist magazine. Join today to get yours.
The breakfast bell cut through the sound of rain on the cabin’s metal roof. My wife, Chrissy, snoozing next to me, stirred quietly.
“Oh jeez, we slept in,” I mumbled. “It’s eight o’clock. Breakfast is ready.”
We’d ignored the diffuse white light slipping through the cabin’s thin curtains for well over an hour, content to stay nestled beneath the thick down comforter. The morning-after-effects of too-much-fun-by-the-campfire may have slowed us, but breakfast called, literally, and with it, coffee.
We pulled on yesterday’s clothes and headed into the damp October morning for the short walk to the lodge where nourishment waited. As we made our way up the hill, Long Pond stretched out behind us. A tapestry of fall colors reflected abstractly in the rain-rippled water.
We’d arrived after dark the night before, so this was our first opportunity to check out the scene. The complex, called the Gorman Chairback Lodge & Cabins, is owned by the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC), and it includes close to a dozen huts which spilled down the hill from the communal lodge to the water’s edge. Smoke wafted from a couple of them only to disappear into the misty morning air.
My brother, Chris, had already found a seat inside, but judging by his full plate, he hadn’t risen much earlier than us. His wife, Jen, wasn’t here yet. As I settled in opposite him — plate full of eggs, pancakes, and veggie sausage — we exchanged sympathetic glances. The prior night’s campfire conviviality hadn’t done him any favors this morning either.
“The rain seems to be stopping,” I said before sending my loaded fork to its destination.
“Yeah! I think we’re gonna be good to go. Did you figure out a route?” Chris asked.
“Not yet,” I said, a little embarrassed that I didn’t have more of a plan ready. “Let me onboard some more coffee and food, and we’ll sort it out.”
We were here to ride after all. More than 400 miles of gravel roads spilled out from where we sat. Maine’s legendary fall colors were peaking, our bikes waited outside, and a little drizzle, a mild hangover, and a lack of planning weren’t going to stop us from getting after it.
I gulped some more caffeine, scored some seconds, and once Jen joined us, we planned out the day’s adventure. We’d drive to the Katahdin Ironworks checkpoint gate and ride a 24-mile, out-and-back route called the Caribou Bog Tour. Plan made, we grabbed the brown bag lunches the staff had set out for each guest and headed to our cabins to pack our panniers.
After parking in the muddy lot, we checked in with the gate attendants. The North Maine Woods, a sprawling, 3.5-million-plus-acre region in the state’s northwest, is mostly owned by large timber companies. While forests are typically public lands out West, in Maine, they’re mostly private, and access is discretionary. So our check-in wasn’t just good etiquette. It was mandatory. Visitors must share their itinerary, pay for road or campsite access, and then check out when they’re done. It’s both a revenue stream and a way to ensure folks are safe and accounted for.
Administrative duties completed, we rolled over the West Branch Pleasant River and onto Caribou Bog Road. In moments, we were completely alone. No tire tracks cut through the gravel, no road-side litter caught our eye, no anthropogenic sound aside from our breathing and the squish of rolling rubber cut the air.
We rode along moose tracks set in the rain-softened gravel and past tannin-stained streams. At one point, we skirted an impressive, and remarkably fresh, pile of bear scat in the middle of the road.
Here and there, the view opened. Mountains clad in muted evergreens and vibrant deciduous trees swept down to wetland-choked river bottoms. But mostly we rode through the woods. Golden beech and birch. Dark green hemlock and spruce. Scarlet maples. Each lent its magic to the scene. Above us, the indecisive sky showed patches of blue. Then it filled in misty white only to become dark and ominous a few minutes later.
Though we climbed steadily, most of the route was gradual enough for conversation. Chris, ever the leader, rode ahead, and we’d find him waiting patiently at the top of particularly steep climbs before he mashed off again past the next bend. Jen and Chrissy chatted while I alternately dashed forward and waited behind, doing my best to capture the technicolor display with my camera. It was perfect. No one felt rushed. No one felt bored. No one felt scared. No traffic zoomed by, no rocky single-track pushed us outside our comfort zones, and no climb required super-human lungs.
A dilapidated bridge on the edge of Caribou Bog served as our lunch spot. On one side of the bridge, the bog stretched out for a few hundred yards. Dusky yellow grasses, sedges, and shrubs flanked small pools that reflected the moody sky. On the other side, a small stream meandered into the bog only to disappear behind stunted spruce trees. Drizzle soon had us donning rain jackets and shoving the last bites of chocolate-chip cookie into our mouths. As we mounted our bikes, I reflected on how this ride wouldn’t have been possible a couple decades ago.
Months earlier, in the humid haze that is July in southern Maine, I wandered into my local bike shop in search of a new tire. And as so often happens at local bike shops, my chat with the guys soon drifted from tires to cycling opportunities. I shared that Chrissy and I had an upcoming trip to Moosehead Lake, on the southwestern edge of the North Maine Woods.
“Man, it’s a shame you can’t ride all those roads up there,” I lamented. While the timber companies who own most of that region allow public access, they’d long restricted bicycles from their sprawling network of logging roads. Hunting? Sure. Paddling? Absolutely. Hiking, camping, backpacking? You bet. Cycling? Too dangerous with the logging trucks. Or so I thought.
“Oh, you gotta check this out.” A small red booklet soon appeared: the Maine Gravel Adventure Field Guide. “It just came out like a month ago.”
My attitude shifted like a brand new derailer as I thumbed through the pages. First Roach Rove. Shaw Mountain Circuit. Medawisla to Gorman Traverse. Greenville & Brownville Passage. Tour de AMC. The names were mysterious and seductive. I wanted to leave immediately and pack the truck for an impromptu trip up north.
In the weeks that followed, I read the entire guide and then read it again. It turned out that all the routes were within an hour or two of the state park campsite we’d booked on Moosehead’s eastern shore. Not only could we ride gravel, we could also choose from a curated selection of routes complete with turn-by-turn directions through Ride with GPS. And we’d have confidence that we weren’t breaking any rules.
The Field Guide — specifically, the Gravel Adventure Field Guide: Appalachian Mountain Club / Maine Woods; Moosehead Lake Region — wasn’t the first of its kind I’d seen. In January 2023, Chrissy and I spent a few wonderous days exploring Patagonia, Arizona. The same folks who put out the Maine booklet had published one for that southern Arizona town’s iconic gravel scene.
After scoring one at a local bike shop/beer bar/gathering spot, we embarked on one of the most memorable rides we’ve done.
That Maine now had one, that it had only been published a month before a copy found its way into my hands, and that it highlighted hundreds of miles of recently opened routes in a corner of the state where cycling had been prohibited for decades seemed like some sort of cosmic reward I probably didn’t deserve. But I couldn’t help wondering what had changed up in the North Maine Woods. Why open private logging roads to biking all of the sudden, and why publish a slick, well-produced guide advertising the opportunity to ride them?
Prior to colonization, Maine’s western mountains were home to the Penobscot Nation, part of the Wabanaki Confederacy. The Penobscot plied the region’s waterways in birchbark canoes and stewarded the abundant game, fish, and other natural resources that would later draw Europeans to the area. Penobscot guides took people like Henry David Thoreau into these forests in the mid-1800s. Soon after, sporting camps began luring hunters and anglers from New England’s southern cities north to Maine.
Thoreau’s forays and those pioneering pastimes helped build a legitimate outdoor recreation industry, but timber was always the region’s primary economic driver. For centuries, trees were felled in winter, piled along riverbanks, and floated downstream each spring to waiting sawmills. So dominant was the industry that river-based log drives lasted until 1974, when the practice was finally prohibited and replaced by the forest roads that had long banned bicycles.
This unique tradition of leniency toward recreational intrusion held for centuries: Timber companies owned the land and harvested the trees but never shut out the public.
In the 1990s, corporate consolidation and competition squeezed timber profits, and many of the largest companies began shifting their business models from selling trees to selling real estate. Mainers became more and more concerned over individuals, not corporations, buying up tens of thousands of acres and barring public access. And they had reason to be. New, wealthy, and typically out-of-state owners had little obligation to adhere to past precedent. Nor did they need to log the land, making locals who relied on the timber industry very worried about their futures.
In the early 2000s, International Paper, the multi-national timber company that owned the land surrounding what’s known as the 100-Mile Wilderness, announced it had plans to sell. The region gets its name from the remote stretch of the Appalachian Trail that runs through it, and while the National Park Service manages a small corridor abutting the trail, the tens of thousands of acres surrounding this narrow ribbon have always been privately owned.
Conservationists, recreationists, hook and bullet clubs, loggers, and locals fretted over the land’s future. If it was sold off in chunks, fenced off , or otherwise fragmented, there was slim hope that access, logging jobs, or the ecosystem would benefit. So the Appalachian Mountain Club stepped in and stepped up.
The 149-year-old Massachusetts-based organization has long advocated for public lands in the eastern U.S. The club made its first purchase in the 100-Mile Wilderness in 2003, acquiring 37,000 acres from International Paper that included the Little Lyford Lodge & Cabins, an off-grid camp on land that prior operators had leased from timber companies for more than a century. It was, by far, the largest parcel AMC had ever acquired.
“AMC has always felt that if we get people out on the land, there’s a good chance they’ll become conservationists,” says Steve Tatko, AMC’s vice president of land, research, and trails. “This was an opportunity to do that on a big scale.”
Over the ensuing years, AMC purchased more and more land in the 100-Mile Wilderness, including two other sporting camps which the club set about restoring. It also built hiking trails and a system of lodge-to-lodge cross-country ski routes. But recreation wasn’t its only focus.
In 2004, AMC partnered with Maine-based Huber Resources Corp, a forest management company, to craft and implement a long-term conservation plan with multiple objectives: incorporate recreation, restore mixed-age and species-diverse forests, improve water quality and aquatic habitat for trout and salmon, and provide a steady, sustainable supply of timber for local processors and sawmills — a critical move that helped garner support.
“Now we’re a major contributor to the local economy,” Tatko says. “We hire local companies to sustainably harvest trees, help rebuild and maintain roads, replace outdated culverts with fish passages, and build our trails.”
Today, a little more than 20 years after its first purchase, AMC owns 114,000 acres of the North Maine Woods and is working to purchase another 14,000 acres. The club calls the project the Maine Woods Initiative and bills it as the “largest conservation project AMC has ever undertaken.”
Then, around 2010, the conversation shifted gears.
As Elizabeth Ehrenfeld, a former AMC board chair and avid Maine-based cyclist, tells it, AMC had initially focused on hardening the lodge-to-lodge cross-country ski trails so they could double as mountain bike routes in the summer. But as the club talked with locals in Greenville and the Maine Bicycle Coalition, it realized that any mountain bike trails it might build would have to be geared toward beginners and intermediates. The area was too remote and far from medical help to make serious off-roading safe. At the same time, AMC staff and board members like Ehrenfeld were out riding gravel bikes.
“It took a few years, but we had this light bulb moment,” Ehrenfeld says. “Gravel riding was really starting to take off , we have all these roads that are already there, they didn’t need much more than some signs, and they would provide a much more accessible cycling opportunity than mountain biking could.”
The club began working with other large landowners to build support for gravel riding. It took some time, but the long-held notion that bikes and logging trucks were incompatible waned. As staff and board members scouted and solidified routes, AMC added signage and mile markers so guests could safely sample the opportunities.
When the Colorado-based publishers of the Gravel Adventure Field Guides approached the Maine Office of Outdoor Recreation in December 2022 to explore a partnership that would produce the company’s North Woods guide, it was as if all the dots were finally connected, according to Carolann Ouellette, director of the Maine Office of Tourism, which oversees the Office of Outdoor Recreation.
“Timing is everything,” Ouellette says. “We seized on the opportunity to be the first state in New England to work with Field Guides on this type of project.”
We beat the breakfast bell on Day Two. Tired from the ride to Caribou Bog and stuffed from a hearty dinner, we’d all crashed early, though not before trying to glimpse another of the region’s main draws: a night sky bursting with stars. AMC’s Maine Woods Initiative was recently added to the growing network of Dark Sky Sanctuaries, and our trip coincided with AMC’s annual See the Dark Festival.
Alas, the clouds that had dogged us all day did not fully dissipate, and we only caught brief moments of the celestial show.
Our second day’s ride, an out-and-back from Gorman Chairback Lodge to Little Lyford Lodge, felt closer to civilization than our previous adventure, but it was no less picturesque. As we pedaled through the soft light, I considered how special this area was and how unique the cycling opportunities were.
Chrissy and I had fallen in love with gravel riding while we lived in Missoula, Montana.
A vast network of Forest Service roads spiderwebbed from town, and they delivered a blend of adventure and safety that resonated in both of us. We’d invested in gravel bikes during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves tackling multi-day bikepacking rides. Our move to Maine in July 2023 was great for a lot of reasons, but not for gravel riding. Aside from Acadia National Park’s buffed out carriage roads and the lovely but not-very-adventurous Eastern Trail that ran near our house in Saco, we hadn’t found many opportunities.
But here, just three hours north, sat a network of well-signed, well-maintained roads carved through a stunning, wildlife-rich setting that echoed the Western landscapes we’d come to cherish. I thought about bringing friends up for a weekend like the one we were experiencing and how we could ride for a few hours, come back to the lodge to swim, read, relax, paddle, or even take a wood-fired sauna session. Chris and Jen, who were stoked to join us for the trip despite not having gravel bikes, seemed to be enjoying the riding, too.
Mostly though, I fantasized about a longer trip. Between them, AMC and the timber companies maintain more than 50 campsites that could be easily linked for an epic, multiday journey through some of the wildest parts of New England. Baxter State Park and the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument lie just east and offer opportunities for extending dirt-road tours from AMC’s network. It all felt vast and wild and far from civilization.
When we turned onto the access road to Little Lyford, Jen said it was like riding through an autumnal snow globe. Above us, a canopy of gleaming birch and beech leaves nearly blocked out the sky. Trunks arched from the ground, dark against the diffuse blonde haze that permeated the air. The tapestry of fallen leaves that carpeted the narrow dirt road rustled as we rolled over it. We all pedaled slowly, absorbing the scene. That is, except for Chris who was already at the lodge, lunch unpacked, ready to refuel and get back on his bike.
“That was way more fun than I thought,” he admitted with a wide smile. “Way more fun.”
Nuts & Bolts
Getting There
Unless you live in Maine (and even if you do), getting to AMC’s lodges takes some effort. Greenville, the closest town, is about two-and-a-half hours from Portland, Maine’s largest city, and an hour-and-a-half from Bangor, the state’s third largest. Both have airports with ample daily flights. Amtrak’s Downeaster travels from Boston to Portland five times a day and accommodates bikes for a modest fee.
Gorman Chairback and Little Lyford lodges are roughly 45 minutes from Greenville, mostly over dirt roads suitable for passenger cars with good tires and capable drivers. Medawisla Lodge & Cabins is a bit farther, but still accessible from points south. The roads are well signed, making it pretty easy to navigate, even in the dark.
Supplies
Greenville has a post office, a grocery store, and an outdoor sports shop called Northwoods Outfitters that rents and sells cycling equipment. It also rents camping gear for those interested in a more earthy adventure. With prior arrangements, the store will also shuttle your luggage for a lodge-to-lodge cycling adventure.
Where to Stay
AMC makes it easy to book its lodges and build a custom itinerary. Each accommodation is unique and offers slightly different amenities. Meals are generally included, though Medawisla Lodge has some cabins with kitchenettes for those who prefer to cook their own food. Some of the cabins at Medawisla also have private bathrooms. Currently, only Medawisla has a basic bike maintenance station, but AMC is hoping to install more at the other lodges.
All lodges have private cabins, and Little Lyford has a bunkhouse where beds are a bit cheaper. Bring your own sleeping bag for a stay there though — it’s the only spot where neither the cabins nor the bunkhouse supply linens.
Most of the cabins are off-grid (Medawisla has two ADA-accessible cabins that have electricity), but the lodges have power. The cabins we stayed in had propane lights and wood stoves. Leave work behind as cell service is unreliable and Wi-Fi non-existent. Visit outdoors.org for more information.
Campsites are managed by the Ki Jo-Mary Multiple Use Management Forest, a timber company partnership. Check out to learn more.
Greenville offers plenty of lodging options, including a state park on the shores of Moosehead Lake, Maine’s largest and a destination in its own right. Riders need to bring cash to pass through the gates, which don’t accept credit cards, but the access fee is included if you stay with AMC.
The camps are more popular in winter and fall than in summer. That said, AMC is hopeful cycling will increase summer reservations, so book early to ensure you get the dates you want, especially if you’re hoping to catch Maine’s fall colors.
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