Editor's note: The board of the Adventure Cycling Association submitted the following response to Diane Jenk's guest editorial, whichposted last week.

For nearly five decades, Adventure Cycling Association has been the heartbeat of long-distance bicycle travel in America. Born from the audacious dream of 1976's Bikecentennial when 4,000 cyclists pedaled coast-to-coast to celebrate the nation's 200th birthday we grew into the country's premier resource for bicycle touring and advocacy, transforming hundreds of thousands of lives through our three pillars of nonprofit programming: building high-quality routes, connecting cyclists through unforgettable experiences, and inspiring with incredible storytelling.

However, like many in the nonprofit and bicycle sectors, we're facing a crossroads that demands we reimagine how we fulfill that mission. As a nonprofit board coming from diverse sectors and spanning geography and age, we are united in grappling with these challenges by our shared love for bike travel and for Adventure Cycling.

After many months of collaboration, analysis, and discussion between staff and board, Adventure Cycling has made a difficult decision were selling our headquarters and moving to a smaller space in Missoula.

This is just the latest in a series of challenging decisions we've had to make to ensure the financial future of our organizations: staff restructuring in early 2023 and in the first quarter of 2025, reductions in magazine production, price increases across membership and guided tours, and ending new life memberships as the cost of their benefits outweigh their investment over time.

Since 2020, weve also experienced three executive irectors in five years, impacts of the pandemic and inflation, and a decline in membership and guided tour participation. Without further major strategic decisions and changes, we will not overcome the challenges.

What started as a moment in time as Bikecentennial transformed over the next few decades into a national movement called, eventually, Adventure Cycling. For decades, we curated long-distance bike routes and sold print maps. We mailed publications, catalogs, and renewal reminders. We guided cyclists on tours based around the philosophy that sleeping under the stars and collectively sharing camp duties could connect us to one another on a deeper level than an all-inclusive model that held each riders hand. We created the resources and inspiration for cyclists to travel by bike in the U.S. long before anyone else.

In 1991, we bought a building in Missoula, Montana, and transformed it into a communal space for staff and a place of respite where traveling cyclists could share their stories. And that model worked. Until it didnt.

With the move to crowdsourcing information on the internet, everything changed, and the ways people travel and plan their trips has been transformed. Of course, we made some adaptations: a website, Bike Bits newsletter, Companions Wanted, and a Bicycle Route Navigator app.

But there were many signals and trends we didnt, or couldnt, address, such as an increasing desire for low-traffic gravel and off-road routes, an aging membership, changes in media consumption, and for-profit competitors finding niches we werent serving.

Perhaps most importantly, considering digital and paper maps sales are a key part of our model, is the proliferation of digital navigation apps and websites that allow users to post cycling routes online for others to download for free. Sometimes those routes are ones Adventure Cycling has developed such as the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route.

That means that cyclists today can plan a trip from end to end using nothing but a computer or a phone without paying a dime. Ultimately, this is a good thing because it makes the bike travel world larger, so we must evolve with the market.

As our traditional demographic has matured, demand for higher-end tour experiences has increased: Once you reach a certain age, sleeping in a bed in a nice hotel begins to outweigh the community- and friendship-building benefits of camping out. Thats put our lo-fi guided tours in direct competition with luxury bike operators, and despite being competitively priced, we've seen a decline in tour participation for years. Weve had to cancel many tours to the point that we can no longer cover the costs of operations.

Adventure Cycling discussed these shifts for over a decade, without making meaningful changes, and now we're facing a rapidly declining membership, many having aged out of the sport or needing to tighten their financial belts in a world facing rapid inflation and economic uncertainty. Those memberships and additional donations are a key funding source for covering the cost of our beloved magazine, the development of new, curated routes, and our advocacy work promoting safe bicycle travel.

Taken together, it means that we spent $1.8 million in reserves last year to fund operating losses. We cannot, and should not, continue down this road. And while we have 17 employees thanks to the proliferation of remote work and our goal to hire the best employees wherever they are this beautiful, 9,966-square-foot building in downtown Missoula currently hosts only eight Missoula-based staff members and a fraction of the visiting cyclists we greeted at our height between 2010-2016.

We love our building it holds so many stories and memories, making it spiritually significant to many staff, members, and allies. The bikes, photos, and memorabilia covering its walls all talk. But there are fewer and fewer visitors and staff present to listen.

Despite this decline, we believe more people are participating in bike travel than ever before. We can see it in our website traffic, social media followers, and e-newsletter subscribers. We can see it in the excitement generated across the internet when we announce new routes like the 50th Anniversary Gravel Epic route were building now. This tells us that bike travel wasnt a moment in time but a movement that spans generations, and that Adventure Cycling should be, too.

Its the boards fiscal responsibility to ensure that the spirit of Bikecentennial that collective inspiration to ride across the country, changing the lives of all who participated is passed along to todays cyclists. Adventure Cycling cant remain relevant in a changing world unless it, too, changes. We must preserve the resources we have to protect and perpetuate this important mission.

Although we plan to maintain a space in Missoula for staff and visiting cyclists, as a nationwide organization, the physical location in Missoula should not be conflated with the full breadth of our mission. Selling the building will allow us to use the investment that life members and donors gave the organization an investment that has grown in property value to help us adapt to our reality, giving us the runway to reshape our programs and resources to continue inspiring transformative bike travel experiences.

Changes to the organization and how we serve bicycle travelers are coming, as were committed to addressing brutal truths while maintaining faith in the mission. We look to the support of cyclists to help us now to make the big moves. You can support us with a donation here.

Noel Kegel,President of Wheel & Sprocket and Adventure Cycling Board Treasurer

Lael Wilcox,Ultra-endurance Bike Rider and Racer and Adventure Cycling Board Member

With support from the entire Adventure Cycling Board of Directors