Great Plains Project #GreatPlainsProject

A lot has happened since my last Great Plains Project post in 2019, in which I introduced the scope and purpose of creating the project. I’ve been fortunate to have ridden and bikepacked about half of the original route through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. It’s beautiful country, to be sure.

I’ve also incorporated it into immersive learning curriculum at Texas Tech University, wherein we led a small group of travel documentary students as they followed me riding between Stillwater, Oklahoma, to Pickstown, South Dakota. Post-production delays and other responsibilities had up to this point put a halt on getting this work out to the public, though.

That is, until now! The Great Plains Project is alive and well, and post-production is currently underway on a multi-part PBS docuseries on a 15-day-long adventure we just wrapped. Friend and collaborator, Brandon Weaver, and I just finished riding what will ultimately be an official gravel touring route from Mexico to Canada, exploring the Great Plains and meeting its peoples along the way.

How’d we do it in 15 days, you may ask? Not shirking the spirit of two-wheeled travel (but needing to travel more quickly than pedals would allow), we rode adventure motorcycles up the middle of the country, determining the viability of the route for cyclists, as well as other modes of travel.

But, enough here. If you want a taste of what it was like during our 15 days on the route, check out our new website for the project at www.thegreatplainsproject.com. There, you will find dispatches from each day we travelled north from Presidio, Texas, as well as additional information about the route we traversed and the upcoming television series!

A year and a half ago, I read Dan Flores’s American Serengeti, a book that discusses at length the natural history of several prominent, charismatic species that roamed North America’s Great Plains region. Not only does it highlight the wildlife, but in true Flores style, it dives deeper into the historical and changing ecosystem of the prairies, the impact of human presence on this vast ocean of grasses, as well as into the cultures of these peoples. I don’t assume the book is a page-turner for everyone, but I couldn’t put the book down. Flores had me hooked, and in a way, he was priming me for a deeper engagement with his text’s subject.

I’ve lived on the southern high plains, a relatively flat, elevated portion of the Great Plains stretching from the Texas Panhandle north into Nebraska and South Dakota, for seventeen years. It’s an expansive area iconically known as the Llano Estacado, translated as the staked plains, and although I call this place home and have spent a great deal of time photographically investing in the region, Dan Flores made me feel more unfamiliar with it than I’m comfortable. I know this area, have spent years and miles traveling over the flatlands, and enjoyed conversations with everyone from artists to farmers here. I’ve spent time enjoying the quietness at the edge of the Caprock Escarpment, and I’ve marveled at 1,000-feet-tall dust storms rolling over the land from the west. Yet, American Serengeti had me humbled and wanting to learn more about this impressive, intimidatingly large swatch of North America that lies between the notable Rockies and Appalachians. Simply put, I became infatuated with the Great Plains.

I’m a travel and conservation photographer. I’m also a cyclist. It’s something I picked up in earnest about six years ago for exercise, and I quickly developed an…obsession is the word my wife would use…for mountain biking and long rides on the dirt roads that checkerboard our part of the plains. Cycling is physically intense and rewarding, mentally therapeutic, fun as hell, and it’s a great way to see the country. It lends itself to move at a pace that both allows the rider to cover some ground and distance, but also be immersed in the environment. Over the years, I started carrying a camera with me occasionally on rides with my brother, especially bikepacking and dirt tour trips, and I began seeing the bike as a storytelling vehicle. I’ve traveled down paths and roads on a bike I never would have noticed in a vehicle, all along the way discovering for myself parts and characteristics of place that would otherwise go unnoticed, particularly here on the plains. I started to consider how I could continue to feed this desire to blend my photography with exploring on a bike. Shortly after reading American Serengeti, I had an idea.

The Great Plains Project is the working title for a large bike adventure that celebrates the Great Plains, its places and people, its history and current status, its wild ecology and its agricultural prominence. The project points a lens toward a fascinating region of the world, one of the most important in my opinion for the world, but one that is largely considered flyover country by many. Likewise, it does so via those veins of rural byways that thread the farms, ranches, grasslands and plains towns and cities together. Ultimately, the Great Plains Project will establish an off-pavement touring route (tentative route above) from Texas to Alberta for like-minded cyclists, as well as a documentary project produced from the bike. It’s a massive undertaking, but it’s one fueled by a passion for being active outdoors and using cycling as a way to better explore and understand place—this place—the Great Plains.

Moving forward, this portion of my website will be a repository for the experiences I and others will have both establishing and riding the route, and simply riding/documenting various areas of what was once known as the “Great American Desert.” I hope you follow along on this endeavor, share it with your friends and colleagues, and even come along for the ride. I’ll update the page with upcoming rides on the planned route, and if you’re ever on the South Plains, get in touch! I’d love to show you some local roads!

Follow #greatplainsproject on Instagram, as well as my own account (@jerodfoster), where you know you’ll see some of this action!