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The Great Plains Project

By Texas Tech University

November 3^rd, 2025

I slowly open my eyes and stare at my tent’s ceiling. It’s 3 a.m. at the Elk Horn Campground in North Dakota’s Little Missouri Grasslands. I have a pounding headache, and I’m freezing. I roll over and stretch my legs. Bad idea! My hamstrings cramp, and it feels like a gorilla just punched me in the back of the legs. I need to get out of this tent and stretch. Now.

I frantically unzip my sleeping bag, tent and its rainfly. I make it to the vestibule with my head outside and my legs still under the rainfly. The pain is so intense I can’t stand. I place my palms on the ground behind me, press into my heels, and raise my torso to a night sky drenched in stars. It is beautiful. I let the pain wash over my body as I gaze at a million, billion, trillion orbs of faraway light. As I press into my muscles, the cramps become tolerable. I stand and hobble from my habitat and walk a few laps around a nearby picnic table. My locked hamstrings start to release, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I collapse back into my tent for a fitful night of sleep.

Madison Walker Martin and Gemma Folsom rise with the sun and descend the ladder from the Toyota Tundra’s rooftop tent. It’s early October in North Dakota, and the temperature is in the 30s. Madison snugs a purple camp comforter around her. They sit down at the picnic table next to my tent and make coffee. I crawl from my polypropylene shelter, feeling all my 53 years. I shuffle and groan as I make my way to the picnic table.

“Are you ok?” Madison asks.

“My head is pounding,” I lament as I rub my calf muscle. “And I somehow injured myself while sleeping.”

Madison smiles. “I think you’re dehydrated,” she says and hands me a packet of Liquid IV.

I mix the electrolyte recovery powder in my Nalgene and gulp it down. My headache becomes tolerable, but my body still aches. I’m knackered.

I’ve been on the road for 14 days with a Texas Tech student film crew. We have covered over 3,327 miles and camped in tents every night. The production crew is in perpetual motion as it conducts on-the-fly interviews and shoots B-roll of the towns, people, landscapes, roads, rivers and everything else we pass. They’re following me and Jerod Foster as we ride motorcycles up the middle of America.

My name is Brandon Weaver, and I’m a freelance adventure writer. I’ve been working with Jerod since 2018, when we partnered on an assignment for Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine – me writing and him photographing. We became fast friends, and he invited me to join the 2019 Adventure Media bikepacking trip as an embedded journalist. Students spent the week of spring break camping, living and working off their bicycles, and ultimately produced a series of short documentaries about the journey. It was life-changing for all those involved. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with Jerod’s classes about being a working writer and to join other Texas Tech field-based courses like the Junction Field Photography Maymester Program. Along the way, I’ve met some exceptional students.

This trip is the next foray into our partnership. This is Creative Media Industries 4301: Special Topics in Travel Documentary. The class is led by Jerod, a CMI professor of practice, and Journalism and CMI adjunct professor Simon Parmley. We are filming “The Great Plains Project,” a six-part docuseries for Texas Tech Public Media about a new cycling tourism route, developed by Jerod, that navigates dirt, gravel and paved backroads along the Great Plains.

This path up America’s heartland is a passion project for Jerod. Since 2018, he has poured over satellite maps, scouted remote roads on his bicycle and collaborated with gravel cyclists in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota to connect a vast network of bike-friendly roads. Together, they have created the Great Plains Gravel Route, a 3,500-mile bicycle route from Mexico to Canada. (The complete route was released in April 2025 on bikepackingroots.com). It has been a monumental task and, to check its viability, Jerod and I are riding it on adventure motorcycles. If we did it on bicycles, it would take two months. We don’t have that kind of time. The motorcycle is the most efficient way to put tires on the ground and make sure all these backroad byways connect. Our production schedule is 15 days to scout and capture the journey for our docuseries.

Our production crew is led by two directors, Simon and Madison. Both Madison and Gemma are mass communications master’s students at Texas Tech and producers on the docuseries. They operate out of a white Toyota Tundra pickup packed with video equipment. The truck serves double duty as a mobile camp kitchen, feeding the whole crew. Simon drives the main production vehicle, a heavily modified Jeep Wrangler (on loan to us from Red River Rigs) packed with battery chargers, camera equipment and enough portable hard drives to back up 0.1 petabytes of data – that’s 100 terabytes, or 100,000 gigabytes. Each chase vehicle can listen to the two-way radios inside our helmets. Jerod and I are talent – autonomous from the crew. It maintains the integrity of the docuseries, and that we are on our own self-contained adventure. We carry everything we need on our motorcycles and cook for ourselves. Our crew comprises of Texas Tech undergrad students, serving as interns in this production company. They capture video, still images and audio, and manage the terabytes of data on the hard drives inside Simon’s Jeep.

Fifteen days ago, five of these students departed Lubbock in our production vehicles and drove to the trip’s starting point: Presidio, Texas. There are 10 students in Creative Media Industries 4301, but to minimize their time away from other classes, they were split into teams of five. Team A joined us for the first half of the trip and were then replaced by Team B in Blue Springs, Nebraska.

Adele Clarke rode in the Jeep with Simon and two classmates, Hud Morrison and Kenneth Andrews. Hannah Hudgens and Angelyna Gonzalez were in the Tundra with Madi and Gemma. Adele Clarke is a CMI major, a third-year senior who ran on the Texas Tech cross country team. Not only did she take on the vast workload of The Great Plains Project production schedule, but she also maintained her run training as we traveled from Texas to Nebraska. Adele grew up in Celina, Texas, north of Dallas, and was drawn to Texas Tech by the camaraderie of the track team and the CMI program. She has a passion for sports documentaries, so The Great Plains Project felt like a great opportunity to get real-world experience.

Texas: 1,149 miles

Three Sleeps

Day one, we traveled from the Rio Grande River in Presidio, Texas, to the Pecos River at Pandale, Texas. In between were Marfa, Alpine and Marathon, the great desert towns of West Texas. We covered 289 miles as we dodged thunderstorms in the arid Chihuahuan Desert. We camped along the banks of the Pecos River at the Pandale Crossing River Resort.

Don’t let the word resort fool you. It was rustic and remote.

This was Adele’s second time to ever sleep in a tent. Luckily her tentmate was Hannah, an experienced outdoorswoman and a veteran of these types of Texas Tech field courses. Hannah quickly showed her the ropes of camp setup and what to expect over the next eight days. The next morning, Adele rose at 5 a.m. and laced up her running shoes for an eight-mile run. She jogged down a lonely and foreign gravel road.

It was still dark, and the rocks felt awkward underneath the soles of her running flats. Shadows along the ditch played tricks on her mind, and she had this eerie feeling that any moment she might run into a wild animal. Adele got a little freaked out when she made a wrong turn down a road and stumbled across a dead animal. “I didn’t come this way,” she told herself. Adele got her bearings, figured out which road she was supposed to be on, and sprinted back to camp. A rock caught her toe, and she found herself careening toward the ground.

Back at camp, the sun warmed our riverside spot. The sound of water cascading over rocks permeated the air as the crew milled about, cooking breakfast and packing up tents. I was taking in the moment when suddenly Adele appeared. Her thigh was covered in caliche dust and blood trickled down her knee. Gemma bolted into action, retrieved the first aid kit and cleaned the cut. Despite the sting of the alcohol wipe, Adele never flinched. She changed her clothes and started her day with a smile. It was grit defined, and it set the standard for the rest of the trip.

We had three days to cover nearly 1,200 miles in Texas alone. Day two brought breakfast burritos in Ozona, rhythmic pavement to Sonora, and scenic gravel roads through live oaks. We passed the well-preserved ruins of Fort McCavett near Menard. Simon, Adlele, Hud and Kenneth followed in the Jeep. We stopped for fuel and exotic beef jerky in Eden. Kenneth and Adele went to work. Our helmets have a camera on the chin and wireless microphone inside. Every word Jerod and I speak in our helmets is recorded. Adele retrieved the GoPros to replenish the batteries. Kenneth pulled the RODE Wireless Pro microphones from our helmets and plugged the little squares into a battery bank inside the Jeep. Before we departed, the cashier at the Short Stop convenience store warned us about deer on the road at dusk. We proceeded with caution.

We camped at Lake Colorado City State Park, where I slept a mere four hours – the same amount of sleep I got the night before. I’m writing daily dispatches and recording them to air on the Texas Tech PBS radio station. I fallasleep while writing in my tent.

Adele woke up before dawn and ran eight “easy” miles. We stopped at a Stripes convenience store in Coahoma, so I could finish writing the dispatch while the crew got breakfast. Adele mingled with the crewmembers from Madison’s Tundra. They were all feeling worn down, and we were only two days in. I was dead tired.

Back on the road, Adele was in the passenger seat of the Jeep. Jerod and I struggled with our heavy machines on a sandy road north of Big Spring, Texas. The motorcycles we ride are Honda Africa Twins. They are extremely capable with the ability to navigate rock-strewn roads and still cruise down pavement at highway speeds. Loaded with everything we need for 15 days, the bikes weigh nearly 600 pounds. They do not behave in sand. To avoid heavy oilfield traffic, the route skirts the outer perimeter of the Permian Basin. As we caravaned down a dusty road, Adele watched black smoke billow from the horizon and wondered if it was a fire off in the distance. She looked back at the motorcycles in front of her and watched calamity happen in slow motion. Navigating deep sand on the oilfield road, Jerod’s two-wheeler fishtailed as he battled with his handlebars. His machine went down, and Jerod gracefully stepped off the bike. Over the radio in my helmet I heard Jerod’s voice. “I’m down,” he said. I rode back. It took both of us to raise his machine upright. The heat and sand did not help. I was exhausted.

We made a brief detour through Lubbock and did a ceremonial lap around Texas Tech’s Memorial Circle. It had only been five days since the students were on campus, but being back in Lubbock felt foreign to Adele. Like she was a visitor in her own town. It was dark when we rode into camp at Caprock Canyons State Park & Trailway outside of Quitaque in the Texas Panhandle. Bison lumbered along the edges of the road as we entered the canyon in search of our site. After dinner, Jerod and I switched gears. In addition to the dispatches, I’m writing for Texas Tech NPR – those words are going up on thegreatplainsproject.com. Jerod adds his pictures to each day’s dispatch. He sat in his tent and downloaded photos so he could edit them on his iPad. I sat at a picnic table as bugs swarmed my computer screen and wrote until my eyes said no more.

Adele woke before dawn and watched as the sun illuminated the canyon. It was gorgeous. Not wanting to encounter one of the park’s free roaming bison, she skipped her morning run.

I slept for five hours and snagged my first shower in five days. I was still groggy. We all convened at the park headquarters for a production meeting and took a pulse on everyone’s disposition. The crew was spent. We had gone nonstop for four days, videoing, shooting pictures, recording audio, and long hours of waiting. They wait on me and Jerod to arrive, to do an interview, to write a dispatch, to take a photo, to upright a motorcycle or… here’s some foreshadowing, to fix a flat.

Also, there’s no solace while they ride in the chase vehicles. In Simon’s production Jeep, the occupants listen to Jerod and I converse over the comms in our helmets for hours. There was no escaping the production.

Our final miles in Texas were epic. We rode 30 miles of red dirt roads through the middle of the historic 190,000-acre JA Ranch. It was hot and Jerod and I baked in our bulky jackets and helmets. Simon’s Jeep crew was blasting the A/C. Adele sat in the front seat and managed files on a laptop. Her primary role on the crew is digitech; she transfers and labels files from the cameras and audio recorders. We produce terabytes of data daily and that mass amount of content must be cataloged. It is tedious and, yet, one of the most important roles on the crew.

Oklahoma: 415 miles

Two Sleeps

We crossed into Oklahoma under the dark of night and scavenged dinner from the offerings at a Domino convenience store in Elk City. We pitched our tents along the shores of Foss Lake just outside of Foss, Oklahoma. With no bison to worry about,Adele rose early and ran 10 miles at a 7-minute-and-26-second pace. I’m not sure where she found the energy. I slept six hours and did some morning lakeside yoga. I felt better.

It was another convenience store breakfast in Weatherford, Oklahoma. There was a palpable sense of rejuvenation amongst the crew. We rode a portion of Route 66 and stopped at Lucille’s Service Station, a historic (non-working) gas station built in 1927. Jerod and I wantedsome photos in front of the old gas pumps. When I stepped off my bike, I counted five cameras trained on me and Jerod. Kenneth (my helmet audio tech) was standing in the road with a furry boom mic recording audio. It was a surreal moment.

The dirt roads around Stillwater have a surface that resembles red velvet cake. Where everything in Texas felt familiar, the backroads of Oklahoma were exotic. We stopped in Guthrie at Hoboken Coffee Roasters. I explored the downtown square and discovered a bookstore called A Novel Idea, where two free-roaming basset hounds named Miss Lizzie and Mr. Darcy had the run of the store. I’d been missing my own hounds back home. so I was beyond stoked to pet a basset hound. Madison and Hannah caught the whole affair on camera.

Later that night at our campground along the shores of Lake McMurtry, we interviewed Bobby Wintle and Seth Wood. Bobby owns District Bicycles in Stillwater and runs the prestigious Mid South gravel cycling race. Bobby collaborated with Jerod to develop the route in Oklahoma. Seth is one of gravel cycling’s elite athletes. We chatted about the Great Plains Gravel Route, how it will impact the sport, and its possibilities for tourism. Bobby and Seth were chomping at the bit to ride the whole thing.

We were granted a very special interview on our final day in Oklahoma. We stopped in Pawhuska and talked with Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear, leader of the Osage Nation. The interview lasted over two hours, and the crew captured it like the pros they had become. We were in the rhythm of the trip, and things started to click. We finished the day crossing the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, the largest in the world. Its 40,000 acres of grass has never seen a plow. Just before Kansas, we encountered a shallow water crossing along the Elk River. A short little drop called Orso Falls cascaded beneath our path. We scouted the crossing to make sure it wasn’t slippery and crossed with ease

Kansas: 458 miles

Two Sleeps

We slept on the lawn outside the Beaumont Hotel Airport in Beaumont, Kansas, and took showers in a vacant room. There’s a grass strip nearby where small planes fly in for the weekend. Adele was burnt out and took a day off from running. She’d stayed up until midnight backing up data. It had been a short night for her.

We started the day on a double track road overgrown with tall grass. Adele sat in the Jeep as it followed us on the motorcycles. To her, this was no road. It appeared to be a bunch of grass with tire tracks. Unbeknownst to us, there were hazards hidden beneath the flora. Jerod was in front when he dropped into a knee-deep hole. It popped him up like he was riding a bronc horse. The inertia threw him back, which caused his right hand to twist the throttle. Out of control, his bike lunged toward a barbed-wire fence. Luckily, he stopped his machine just in time.

The flint hills and gravel roads that serpentine through Kansas are world famous for gravel cycling. The small shards of flint clattered like dull wind chimes under our tires. The road curved and climbed hill after hill as we chased a caravan of horizons. I rode with exuberance, spinning my back tire as I twisted the throttle. The afternoon had warmed, so we stopped for a water break in the shade of the dry Canning Creek. That’s when I discovered I’d been too aggressive on the throttle. I’d picked up some metal and my rear tire was flat. Simon’s Jeep had gone ahead of us, so Jerod quickly radioed them, “Brandon has a flat.”

Simon was exuberant. “Yes!” he shouted as he turned the Jeep around. This was conflict for their narrative in the docuseries. Adele was excited to shoot the mechanical, figuring there could be some drama involved. She assumed the process would take maybe an hour. Changing a flat on the rear tire of a heavy motorcycle is difficult. You pull the wheel and replace the tube, but the tire bead was very difficult to pry open. We encountered complications and the process took over two hours. The crew waited and waited. And then they waited some more. Jerod and I were busy the whole time. There were only so many ways they could video us working on the tire, so the crew just had to sit on rocks and watch. It got so boring Adele wanted to curl up in the shade and take a nap.

We stopped in Emporia, Kansas, and ate at Silvia’s Taco trailer. Afterward, Jerod and I rode ahead to our camp at Council Grove Lake, where we found the most luxurious showers of the trip. Each shower was its own little room. Both Jerod and I took the opportunity to take a prolonged shower and wash some clothes. The farther north we traveled, the colder our nights got. Adele had not packed that level of cold-weather gear, so she shivered while sitting at the Jeep’s tailgate, backing up files. Simon offered her a blanket, and she pressed on, working into the night.

I woke up at 5 a.m. to join Adele for the start of her run. I lasted barely a mile before I could not hold her pace. I turned around and headed back to camp. She disappeared into the darkness for a seven-mile run.

The farmland along the backroads of Kansas is idyllic. Dense strands of blue stem grass danced in the morning light as we rode past a green field with round bales of hay waiting to be plucked away. A thicket of timber obscured the immediate horizon. The outside world felt far away. We stopped at a quaint little farmhouse outside of Alma, Kansas. “This looks like where Clark Kent grew up,” one student commented.

Auturo and Wrenn Pacheco welcomed us into their home and cooked us beef hot dogs sourced from their cattle. The Pachecos are old friends of Jerod’s and Texas Tech alumni. Their cattle operation in Kansas sells beef shares directly to the consumer. After lunch, we sat down with the Pachecos for an interview and talked about raising cattle and life on the Great Plains. After the interview, Wren handed Jerod and me a couple of frozen Kansas City Strips to cook at camp. We thanked them for their hospitality. Walking back to my motorcycle, I noticed a small amount of oil next to Jerod’s tire.

Nebraska: 810 miles

Four Sleeps

Team B arrived from Lubbock and met us at the Feit Memorial Park Campground in Blue Springs, Nebraska. Team A briefed their replacements on what was in store for them while Jerod and I thawed our partially frozen steaks on my bike’s warm engine. That oil I saw next to Jerod’s tire earlier in the day meant his front suspension fork was leaking. It could be catastrophic if not addressed.

The next morning was cold, and Adele procrastinated her final run of the trip. She decided to sleep an hour longer and run fewer miles. She ran six. Kenneth prepped my helmet for the last time. Before he placed the Rode wireless microphone in my helmet, he recorded a cue so later the editing team would know what day the recording was from: “Brandon’s mic. Day nine. Leaving Blue Springs,” Kenneth said into the small microphone. Team B was now on the clock. We had breakfast with the entire crew in Beatrice, Nebraska, at the Country Cookin’ Café, an expansive subterranean diner under the Nebraska Baseball Hall of Fame.

Jerod and Simon had scheduled the transition to be a short mileage day. That would give us time to find an expert to inspect Jerod’s motorcycle. A leaking fork seal has the potential to dump oil on the tire or brakes. Luckily, we found Rod’s Power Sports, a large Honda motorcycle dealer, on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Anna Walker took over Kenneth’s audio duties. She rode in the Jeep with Simon, Kenneth, and Eddie McBroom from Team B. Kenneth helped Anna make the transition. He gave her tips on how to handle our helmets. “Don’t touch the visor,” he said. “You don’t want to leave fingerprints.” They followed us into Lincoln, Nebraska, and spent three hours wandering the dealership as we got Jerod’s fork repaired. It was a great introduction to the art of waiting.

Anna is a sophomore from Richardson, Texas. Her senior year of high school, she developed a passion for motorsports from watching the Netflix docuseries, “Formula 1: Drive to Survive.” She loved the idea of combining motorsports with a travel documentary. She specifically chose Texas Tech because of the Adventure Media class and all the experiential programs offered in the College of Media & Communication. No other school she looked at was offering that level of in-the-field experience. The Great Plains Project is her first field course at Texas Tech.

`We camped at Branch Oak Lake, outside of Lincoln, and watched the sky turn orange as the sun set along the lake. The next morning, we said goodbye to the hardened production veterans of Team A as they departed for Lubbock. Jill Fulton and Shaylin Romero joined Anna in the Jeep. Savanna Montgomery and Eddie McBroom slid into the Tundra to complete our new quintet.

The first gravel miles of the day were dusty as we encountered a convoy of large trucks hauling soybeans from a field. We stopped and watched a harvester pour grain into the back of a large trailer called a buggy. Jerod and I rolled into the field and struck up a conversation with Steve Rafert, the farmer running the harvest. It was an impromptu interview that was literally in the field. Anna was stoked that folks we encountered were as curious about us as we were about them. She stood nearby with the boom mic and recorded our conversation as Shaylin and Simon videoed. The transition was seamless. It felt like this new crew had been with us the whole time.

The sun set and we were shrouded in the magical light of golden hour as we traveled along Nebraska’s Minimum Maintenance Roads. The county has a laissez-faire approach to grading these cozy little dirt roads, making them perfect for our all-terrain motorcycles. Simon’s Jeep was loving the rough-and-tumble road, too. The crew inside was feeling some good vibrations -- a kinetic energy as they careened along the rugged road through the remote prairie. The windows were down, and the air was pleasantly brisk. Simon handed Anna a camera to shoot out her window. Anna was invigorated. They were engaged in good, hard work and having fun doing it. She was ready to tackle the next five days.Nebraska is an amazing destination that will shatter any preconceived notions you have about The Cornhusker State. Every night we camped next to a spectacular body of water and rode through some of the most epic landscape of the trip. Along its remote and expansive dirt roads, we cut through vast amounts of cultivated corn, crossed the braided Platte River, traversed the undulating hills and valleys of Loess Canyon, and struggled to keep our motorcycles upright in the Sandhills of Nebraska. We departed through the Nebraska National Forest along dramatic bluffs with rock spires and towering pine trees.

South Dakota: 327 miles

Two Sleeps

Darkness caught us, as it always did on these long days. We followed the narrow beam from our headlights into the Black Hills National Forest of South Dakota. We rode up a steep and loose 4x4 road looking for dispersed camping. Jerod started the climb and lost traction in a patch of silt. His spinning tire created a fog of dust in my headlights. I got off, gave him a push, and then dropped my motorcycle when I tried to restart. The crew watched the dance of lights among the dirt fog from the base of the climb. They hoped we were OK and wondered if their production rigs could make the climb. We pitched our tents around midnight and had no idea what the land looked like around our campsite.

Anna woke the next morning and took in the grandeur of our camp along Red Canyon. She had never camped until she started the Great Plains trip. We were on a gentle hill surrounded by pine-covered mountains. The vibe was chill at camp that morning, so Jerod and I sat next to our tents and had a casual coffee chat about the state of our travels. It was a filming opportunity. Anna stood nearby and recorded audio with the boom mic. Simon, Eddie and Shaylin circled us as they videoed our conversation. I’d grown accustomed to my every waking moment being documented.

We hit the road by late morning. I was entranced by the smell of the mountains as we rode through the pines and rubbed elbows with brilliant yellow quaking Aspens. We stopped to record a dispatch at the reflective Deerfield Lake and exited the forest along the asphalt curves of Spearfish Canyon.

The sun set and the temperature grew frigid as we traveled north out of Belle Fourche, South Dakota, making a detour along a dirt road to the geographic center of the 50 United States. It was marked by a fluttering American flag illuminated on the dark prairie. It hit home to Anna just how far the crew had come. Eight days ago, they had been in Texas and now they were in South Dakota. They were a working documentary crew. She took a great deal of pleasure in that. Standing in the middle of the United States, Anna was overcome with a sense of peace.

We ended the day at Three Toes Campground in the small town of Buffalo, South Dakota. The temperature was in the low 40s, and the campground’s lone shower with endless hot water was put to good use. The next morning, we descended upon the Blossoms and Brew Cafe for breakfast. The locals embraced us like family and asked a million questions. Our crew dispersed throughout the small restaurant and mingled with the coffee shop regulars, sharing their adventures. Jerod and I sat down with longtime resident Ronnie Jim Ginsbock, a commercial welder, for an impromptu interview. Anna soaked in the entire scene as she listened to the cornucopia of conversations stream into the headphones connected to her boom mic.

We had seen so much diversity along the Great Plains, and day 14 did not disappoint. The Tundra, Jeep, and our two motorcycles caravaned across a sea of yellow grass with a lush strip of cottonwood trees growing along the Little Missouri River. We crossed Boxelder Creek and entered North Dakota, our final state.

North Dakota: 363 miles

Two Sleeps

We rode along a pink gravel road that dissected the crinkled and cracked hills of the North Dakota Badlands. We stopped briefly in the quaint town of Medora, North Dakota, outside Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and then pushed on to the Elk Horn Campground. We pitched tents, cooked dinner and wrapped up production for the day. The North Dakota sky had other ideas. It started with flickers of light striations. Anna wasn’t even sure if this was possible. Did the aurora occur in North Dakota? Those flickers grew into pulses as the night sky erupted into an ethereal display of green rays floating on top of a bed of stars. Our final night of sleeping outside would be underneath the magical northern lights. It felt like our directors Simon and Madison had ordered special effects just for this occasion. For Anna, it felt like a reward for this crazy journey she had experienced. She was not ready for it to be over.

So here we are, back to where I started sharing this journey. I woke up with a headache this morning and my body hurt from simply sleeping. That’s just how it goes – there’s a lot of wear and tear on this excursion.

We have gone all out for 14 days, working as a cohesive team. The logistics and planning are never ending. I’ve never been a part of anything like this. I’m ready to see my family back home, but I’m not ready for this to be over. There’s a tremendous amount of purpose in our daily lives on the road. We are telling the story of the Great Plains and the people who call it home.

Anna felt the same way. She and her team were in a rhythm. It was easy to get up and grind it out every day. She wondered if they could just stay and finish the semester on the Great Plains. Jerod and I packed up our motorcycles for the last time. It was bittersweet. My body and head no longer hurt. It was time to ride.

We stop at the confluence of Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. I had no idea that both waterways were this far north. This has been a trip of discovery: mentally, physically and spiritually. I’ll never think of the Great Plains the same way again.

Just before the border of Canada, we stopped at a farm supply/auto parts/mechanic shop/convenience store. The décor was dusty and utilitarian. There among the smattering of packaged cupcakes, sundries, tractor parts and hydraulic fluid was a row of colorful tie-dyed sweatshirts. The front read “Farmers Union Oil Co. – Genora, North Dakota.” I purchased one for my wife. It summed up the people of the Plains perfectly: hard working and practical, with a bit of whimsy.

We finish at the Port of Fortuna, North Dakota, on the Canadian border. We do not cross into Canada. Instead, we ride around the United States border station and finish to the cheers and tears of our crew. No one is there but us. We share this moment together as a team. We did something. But the work has just begun. Those hard drives in the back of Simon’s Jeep, they have over 25 terabytes of video and audio that document this journey. Our crew and Simon will spend countless hours honing down a mountain of data to make a six-part docuseries about this journey. Stay tuned.

Brandon Weaver is a Texas-based outdoor adventure writer who specializes in immersive storytelling. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine and Texas Highways, and his travels across the country are well documented in his podcast, The Tinstreamer.