The Yockatomac Trek   ™

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Planned Passages for 2008

To help you understand what is happening on the trail -- you might want to avoid busy times, for example -- we list the planned through-trips we know about. There is a Planned Passages Calendar showing the scheduled trips, and there are tables with more detail about each of the planned trips.

• Go directly to the calendar
• Go directly to the tables with more detail

One Yockatomac Trek^™ is not enough!

In the past the The Yockatomac Trek™ has been a one week ride, loosely affiliated with the Allegheny Trail Alliance.  With the completion of the trail to McKeesport, the Yockatomac Trek expands its scope to include several sections of various styles on different dates. Each section has its own organizer and shares the philosophy of the Trek, and they'll all share the sense of community in the trail and of accomplishment in completing the trip.

By becoming a section of the Yockatomac Trek you'll get a copy of the paper edition of Linking Up for the trip leader and a pin for everyone who completes the entire trip between McKeesport and Washington DC. We'll again have polo shirts and riding jerseys with the trip logo available at cost.-- see details on the Make Mine a Trek page.  If you would like to make your own trip a section of the Yockatomac Trek, send us the information on the Make Mine a Trek page.

Of course, not all through-trips are sections of the Yockatomac Trek

Now that the trail is finished to within shouting distance of Pittsburgh, it's pretty easy to set up a trip. There are already quite a few commercial trips scheduled for 2008, and we've heard about many more plans for private trips. So it's no longer a challenge to make your way from one end to another, and there are numerous opportunities to let other people do the planning. If you're planning your own trip, though, you may want to be a little careful about choosing dates so that you don't compete for the (relatively scarce) lodging with other groups.

To help you find trips and pick good dates, we have set up a Planned Passages Calendar so that people can announce their plans and other people can tell when the trail will be most busy.  In previous years we tried to keep track of planned private trips. To our great delight, in 2007 there were many more of these than we could keep track of.  So this year we're not going to maintain the table of private trips, but everyone is welcome to register their private trips on the calendar (to be sure that all the entries are trip-related, your entry won't actually appear until we look to be sure that it's on-topic).

Remember that if you start a couple of days before or after a big trip, you're not likely to encounter them for very long.  However, capacity of the hiker-biker sites is limited, so you may want to choose a starting time that won't have you competing for sites with others, and you should probably limit the number of tents to two (maybe three 2-person backpacking tents) in case you want to share a site with a group that's already set up.

In previous years we tried to keep track of planned private trips. To our great delight, in 2007 there were many more of these than we could keep track of.  So this year we're not going to maintain the table of private trips, but everyone is welcome to register their private trips on the calendar (to be sure that all the entries are trip-related, your entry won't actually appear until we look to be sure that it's on-topic). If possible, give us the web address (URL) of a description.  If you know of other trips, feel free to add them to the calendar. When you add an entry, you can send us a note at anothertrip@yockatomac.org and we'll try to ratify the entries quickly.

If you're looking for a trip or if you're looking for more people to join a trip you're planning, we encourage you to say so on the Great Allegheny Passage or C&O Canal Yahoo groups. 

List of Planned Passages

Here are the commercial trips and yockatomactrek sections that we know about for the 2008 season.  The link associated with the organizer takes you to additional information.  If the organizers have told us they have openings for more people, this is indicated under "status". Please contact the organizer directly, as we have no further information.

 Please contact the organizers of these trips directly for more information; all we know is in these tables.   Note that these are just the trips we know about, and we'll be happy to hear about others.

If you're interested in what happened in 2007, that page is still here. We know this doesn't list nearly all of the private trips.  But based on what we saw (plus what we hear from the taxi drivers who bought bike racks to shuttle people around Pittsburgh to the trail), traffic in 2007 was four to five times as heavy as it was in 2006.

Color Key

Here's the key to the colors that indicate the types of trips.  The calendar uses the same colors

Sections of the Yockatomac Trek

Commercial and benefit trips