Originally Posted by
indyfabz
I’m surprised it ran an unsupported NT that late.
I think there are a lot of factors at play, including an older population looking to rough it less. Time. We’re busier than ever and have less free time. Availability of leaders who can make themselves available for 3 straight months to lead a cross country trip. Expense for reasons you might not consider. On that front…1/3 of our 1999 NT group had either just finished school or were going to. (One was about to start her final year of college.) With the current expense of a higher education and the pressure to get a good job right out of school, how many young folks are willing to and able to make the financial commitment required for a long trip and then have to start a job search? Camping costs have also increased, even pre-pandemic. I just looked at a federal place in MT that I last stayed at in 2019. It’s $32/night now. Don’t remember what it was in 2019, but it wasn’t nearly that high. I remember seeing a notice about proposed fee increases at recreation area posted on a board. Some of the proposed new fees were double the existing fees. A lot a private places are also now very expensive, which I do attribute to the pandemic. I looked at a KOA in NY for a 2021 tour that I had used in 2018. The price had nearly tripled to over $100 for a night on a weekday. Hard pass. Went off route a few miles that included a big hill and still paid $45 with a cash discount. I was maybe one of 3 occupied sites. Nice site, though. Keep in mind that ACA needs to turn a “profit.”
I would also bet that the availability of on-line route planning tools has an effect. In 1998-99, I was one of a relative few at a large company that had Internet access. I had no home computer. And things like RWGP didn’t exist, as far as I know anyway. Did Google Maps even exist?
My friend that rode Northern Tier that year (2017) was getting his bike ready for the trip, and the rear brifter quit working. He asked me about bar end shifters, I let him try one of my bikes with bar ends, he had them installed on his bike before that trip. Later I heard that on that trip, the guide's bike had the same problem. A bike shop got her rear brifter to work again, it lasted for crossing a few state lines and died again. She finished the tour with a three speed bike, she had a triple crank for her three speeds. Self-supported can mean you have to keep with your itinerary, even if the mechanicals happen. When I did Glacier Waterton loop with ACA (self-supported) one rider had a front derailleur break, one bottom bracket crapped out. I fixed the derailleur with some bunge cord. But could do nothing for the bottom bracket, he rode with a bad bottom bracket for two days to get to a bike shop where the parts had been shipped to.
My Canada trip in 2019, I was paying two or three times as much for campsites as I paid in Iceland. In Iceland, they have a big open area and charge per person, but in Canada (like USA) you have to rent an entire campsite. The site below on my Canada trip was a KOA, cost a fortune even though it was tiny and did not have enough grassy area for me to put up my tent on grass. It quit raining long enough for me to get my tent up.
Internet and GPS has really changed things for bike touring. I bought my first GPS in 2001. It had no internal map or mapping capability, but having it meant that if I was kayaking towards an island on Lake Superior, I did not have to worry about paddling past the island in the fog. I manually put the lat and long coordinates for the campsites into the GPS from a nautical chart before my trip. In the photo below, that day I started out with a clear sky before the fog rolled in. This was on Lake Superior, and had no trouble navigating, was unusually calm for Lake Superior.
