By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Sports Editor
Most Sitkans who finish high school and move on to college travel by plane, car, ferry or some combination of motorized vehicles.
But recent Sitka High graduate Asa Dow packed his bags and headed for New Hampshire on his bicycle.
After more than two months of pedaling that took him from Skagway to the mountains of Alberta, across the Great Plains and through eastern forests, Dow reached Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, on August 9.
Flanked by friends and family, Asa Dow poses for a photo with his bag-laden bicycle at the Sitka ferry terminal, June 7. From there he sailed to Skagway and began his two-wheeled journey across the continent. (Sentinel photo)
With time and energy to spare until school begins, he’s started making side trips on his bike throughout New England.
On Wednesday, he was in Providence, Rhode Island, planning to continue his bike tour into Massachusetts and Maine before returning to Hanover by the time classes start August 31.
While he’s always been athletic and enjoyed the outdoors, Dow was inspired for the solo trans-continental cycling trek by his mother, Becca Poulson.
He learned he’d won admission to Dartmouth last December, “and I wanted to do something over the summer other than be in Sitka and work or whatever,” Dow told the Sentinel by phone from Providence. “I just wanted to do something a little bit crazy. And my mom and I were talking late at night and she brought up a trip she did when she was my age, with my uncle James... They went all around Europe, and it was just this ridiculous trip. And I kind of wanted to do something crazy like that where it’s just kind of a full send – just go for it.”
Dow graduated in May from Sitka High, where he competed on the cross country and track and field teams. Equipped with a fully-provisioned bike, he departed for Skagway June 7 on the Alaska Marine Highway.
At Skagway, his 4,700-mile bike trip began with the steep ascent up White Pass.
“It was pretty neat going to the Canadian border which is, I think, about 15 miles out of Skagway,” he said. “But that part of the trip is just awesome. Coming up over that pass.... There’s not a ton, but all the communities are really sweet and everybody’s just super nice.”
Thousands of miles east of Sitka, Dow smiles for a night time picture on Dartmouth’s campus in Hanover, New Hampshire on August 9. (Photo provided)
From there he headed into the Canadian interior, turning south to follow the course of the Canadian Rockies. Cumulatively, he has climbed more than 100,000 vertical feet on his adventure.
A scenic highlight of the trip was “definitely going through Banff and Jasper in Canada,” he said. “The national parks there are pretty incredible. I had one where I climbed up this mountain and camped on top and just the amount of insane mountains there and wildlife and everything,” Dow remembered. “It’s just incredible, and then I got a dirt route down from Banff, thanks to Brant (Brantman) and Cindy Edwards, who gave me a little map of this Great Divide route coming down where it’s all on gravel roads and single track and just in the middle of nowhere.”
From there he went south into Montana before he turned his handlebars east to cross the northern plains.
Along the route, his fully loaded bike drew attention.
“Everybody I talked to, like a lot of people along the way, I’ll take photos of everyone. I have a conversation, write down little bios about them.” The questions start, he said, “when I come along and park my monstrosity of bags – and now I’ve got like a horn and a skate board attached – just a bunch of stuff attached to a bike.”
All told, he said, he’s got about 70 pounds of gear strapped to his carbon fiber Cannondale. The bike has served him well over thousands of miles without major mechanical issues, he said.
“The bike’s a little bit overkill,” he admitted. “That’s part of the reason I did this trip, too, is because I wanted a new bike. I kind of wanted an excuse to get a new bike.”
When he tells people where he’s going on his bike, “The number one response is people say, ‘You know there’s planes, trains and automobiles, right?’ And I was like ‘OK,’ every time people say that.”
Strangers offered places to spend a night, or to pay for a motel room or a meal. But for the most part, Dow rides all day and, come dusk, finds a place to set up camp.
“I have camped most of the nights, probably three-quarters of them. A lot of the camping was probably half camping and half what they call stealth camping, or random camping, where you end up and find a good spot where you don’t think you’ll be in anyone’s way or on anyone’s property or be found, and you just camp,” he said.
While his trip has been mostly smooth, riding through cities can be a challenge, he said, especially since most urban areas aren’t designed to be friendly to travelers not in motor vehicles.
“It’s always hard to go through the cities,” Dow said. “There’s a lot of cities that just aren’t made for bikers.” He added that there haven’t been “any really close calls with cars.”
Instead of traveling along the south edge of the Great Lakes, Dow took a ferry across Lake Superior from Wisconsin to Michigan, and at Detroit headed back into Canada at the southern tip of Ontario. He crossed back into the United States at Niagara, and then began a long loop south through New York State and Vermont. On this part of his trip he was accompanied by a delegation of bike riders from Sitka, including his friend Kobi Weiland, headed for New London, Connecticut, and his second year at the Coast Guard Academy. Others were Kobi’s mom Erica Knox and his brother Annan, and Dow’s aunt Kristen Homer, who was already in New England visiting family.
While he biked around Sitka and oftentimes to and from school, Dow said he’d done only a few long rides before starting his big trip.
“I’ve been averaging like 70 miles a day, and I had only done one ride over 70 miles before I left,” he said. “I did a hundred-mile ride in town a few weeks before I left – which exhausted me but it was also a little different.”
With the cross-country miles behind him, Dow is finding time on his hands before starting back to New Hampshire.
“I got into a hostel in the middle of Providence and they have a guitar. And the guitar had a string that was broken, an E string. So I ran to a guitar store that was five miles away,” he said.
He plans to be at his college by the end of this month, ready to jump into classes.
“I plan to study engineering,” he said. “And the program at Dartmouth is pretty broad so it doesn’t have different (sub-topics) like electrical engineering, mechanical or whatever. You kind of do whatever suits what you want to get interested in. And what I’m most interested in, right now at least, is renewable energy engineering.”
