Field Reports

This is a pioneer trip so there’s no telling how this will turn out. But if you’re new to unscripted adventure, this here unroute is a really good place to start. We expect most folks will use this as a baseline for their meanderings. Most of the towns listed have a plethora of places to stay and camp.

If you prefer the Shackleton approach to adventure, then by all means ignore this and chart your own course.

At 3.5 days it was our shortest trip to-date so we made up for it by cramming in as much lostness as possible. Mother Nature helped as well by dropping 14 hours of straight rain onto our Pioneers and conveniently dropping the temperatures by 20 degrees below average. Bless her heart.

Things we love: cold rain pelting you in the face, diner breakfast, and first night celebrations going on a wee bit too long. The recon trip for AshToNash had all of that and more.

A while back we got in touch with a guy named Joe and learned that he was a former Pro Cyclist. “How convenient!” we thought to ourselves.

Gorgeous gold on the outside, top-of-the-line American dirt on the inside, the Lost Dirtbag is designed to give your hesitant friend a taste of adventure. And if they're willing to get a little dirty, inside they'll dig up a discount code you can both use on any future Lost event.

If quarantine is good for one thing, it does a damn fine job of drumming up wanderlust. The 5th Edition welcomed our largest group yet while still keeping it within our Adventure Guidelines for the Covid Age.

This is the part where we’d write about all the horrible weather that teams had to struggle through. The cold rain in their tents, the hail on the bike ride, and the swarms of gnats. But there was none of that. The weather was nearly perfect which makes for a boring writeup. They made up for it in Adventure though and there was plenty of goose poop.

Real life camaraderie shan’t die in the covid age; we just need to play by a new set of a rules. It’ll mean more bike rides and less flights, small groups and less cruises, and (here comes our favorite part) more outside and less inside. Just like the doctor says… “Wear a mask and stay at least a canoe’s distance away from others.”

We asked the Lost community to look through the rear view mirror.

“Tell us a travel story,” we said, “that isn’t about sunshine and rainbows.”

“Sure” they responded, with the halfhearted enthusiasm that we’ve grown to love about them.

“We want more people to experience the pure joy that comes at the end of a good adventure. It is a high that is difficult to describe; a sense of achievement, exhaustion and a burst of energy at all once. It aches in the best way. The realization that you have to go back to real life suddenly becomes the biggest anxiety in the world. It makes people question what they want to do with their lives and how they want to spend their time.”

Attendees came in from five different states to take on the Drifty and they brought with them varying degrees of preparedness. One hadn’t biked more than 12 miles in a day; one hadn’t been on a bike in 10 years. We had a brother-sister pair, our first all female team, and our first solo participant. True to form, Wisconsin weather didn’t disappoint. 50 degree temperature swings, a hail storm, and blinding sunshine were all present.

Now that that we have two Drifty’s under our belt we’ve started to compare them, like every good parent. We know they’re not created equal but we love them both the same. We’re serving up the Drifty twice per year because we think all this variability is awesome.