Scott Alumbaugh is the author of On the Pony Express Trail: One Man’s Journey to Discover History From a Different Kind of Saddle. His works also include a novela, Will Kill for Food, and short fiction published in StoryQuarterly, Kestrel, Hunger Mountain Review, Black Fork Review, and Meat for Tea. His stories have been read onstage by professional actors at Stories on Stage Davis and Stories on Stage Sacramento. Alumbaugh is an avid cyclist who has ridden numerous ultra-distance events. He was so taken with the Pony Express that at age 62 he bikepacked 1,400 miles of the trail from St. Joseph, Missouri to Salt Lake City, Utah. His journey took five weeks on a route that was mostly off-road. Scott formerly practiced business litigation in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.
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“One evening I stumbled across an item reporting that a cyclist had mapped a bikepacking route along the Pony Express Trail. The route was two thousand miles long, ran across seven states from Missouri to California, and as it followed the trail as closely as possible, was eighty-five percent off-road. I knew right then I had to ride it. What I didn’t know was why. . . . I had no bikepacking equipment. I owned a full-suspension mountain bike, which could not carry all the equipment and food I’d need. I owned no camping gear, and in fact had not camped in decades—my partner and our teenage son both refuse to camp on principle. Even if I started planning and training and buying equipment like a madman right then, I would still need a year to gather the gear, test it, and train. By then I’d be 62 years old, not the ideal age to start a five-week solo ride across some of the most remote areas of the American West. And yet, there it was: someone had laid out a Pony Express bikepacking route and I knew I had to ride it or regret missing the opportunity the rest of my life. Even if it killed me.”
