To all of you who pedaled south from Portland to the path of totality — welcome home!
Biking to the eclipse was a totality awesome experience
bike the eclipse
New ‘Bike To The Eclipse’ website offers routes, tips and inspiration
We’re just one week out from the total solar eclipse and many people are freaking out about potential traffic jams. If you believe the Oregon Department of Transportation and local newscasts, roads will be clogged from Portland to Ashland for days.
What if instead of carmageddon, the eclipse spurred the largest mass bike ride Oregon has ever seen?
After all, this is Oregon! We love bikes and the outdoors and we’re not afraid of a little adventure. What if thousands of people scrapped their awkward and inefficient automobiles and rode their bikes into the path of totality? Imagine bicycle riders streaming happily by on highway shoulders as people sit idling in bumper-to-bumper traffic. (It’s not hard that to imagine since the same phenomenon plays out twice a day during Portland rush-hours.)
A new website created by a Portland man aims to make biking to the eclipse more doable for more people. “Don’t become traffic. Join the movement” reads the top of BiketotheEclipse.com.
Guest post: Bike trip planning for the total solar eclipse
This post was written by BikePortland Subscriber Tom Howe.
The August 21 solar eclipse may be four months away, but now is the time to start planning if you want to experience it in the Path of Totality as part of a bike camping trip.
A few days ago Oregon State Parks released a thousand extra campsites which were all reserved in about an hour, and many of those sites are not even in the 70-mile wide path of the total solar eclipse where the sun’s corona will be visible. Eclipse expert Xavier Jubier has created a neat zoomable map showing the eclipse path. Clicking anywhere in the path of totality on this map will give that spot’s length of the total eclipse, which in Oregon tops out at just over 2 minutes as the moon’s shadow races across the state.
But camping is still available at private sites outside the state park system. One notable location about 40 miles from central Portland and well within the path of totality is the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm near Woodburn. Here is a zoomable map that shows a rural bike route down to the tulip farm from Portland.