Lachlan Morton's Latest Challenge: Beat the Horses of the Old Pony Express

Lachlan Morton, in his undying quest to check off an extraordinary ultra-cycling side quest every year, has announced his newest challenge.

Morton will set out to retrace the Pony Express, a foundational route of America’s westward expansion, on October 5.

The Pony Express was the historic route used to deliver mail from the eastern metropolises to the early settlements and cities on the western frontier. Like the horseback riders who relayed mail across the plains, mountains, and forests of the 1,966-mile trek from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, Morton will travel light and fast.

Additionally, as those riders changed horses every 10 miles of riding, Morton will swap between his road, gravel, and mountain bike on a varied route that is built to resemble the historic route as closely as possible.

To raise the stakes, Morton will be racing the fastest recorded time set by mail carriers back when the Pony Express was in use in the mid 1800s.

“The way they could get mail across the country at that speed—before there was any railroad connecting it—was revolutionary,” Morton said in a press release. “The idea of people traversing such massive distances just captured my imagination, especially knowing a lot of that terrain.

“Think of these big open spaces—huge plains, mountain ranges—and you imagine a slow transition, but with the elevation and the vegetation it’s always evolving, and when you’re covering big distances you get a really diverse variety of riding. It’s a great canvas for adventure.

“It’s existed there for so long, and you feel like you’re participating in what the country is all about.”

A new take on a historic route

The route will start in Missouri, take on the Great Plains of Kansas and Nebraska, before heading into the heart of the Rockies across Wyoming and Utah.

Perhaps the key of the journey, however, will be the long trek across Nevada—one of the most remote areas in the Lower 48—before Morton will finish through the Sierra Nevada, routes he knows well as he now lives in the foothills of California’s Gold Country.

While the route itself is not tied to any particular FKT or event, as his effort at the Tour Divide and Alt Tour were built from, his Pony Express effort will still have a time goal. Morton will be looking to beat the time set by the fastest Pony Express horseback relay.

In 1861, a team of riders and horses made the run from Missouri to California in just seven days and 17 hours to deliver Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address to California to convince the state to remain a part of the Union as the Civil War loomed. That will be the mark Morton will hope to beat.

The Pony Express was replaced later in 1861 by the first national transcontinental telegraph line, but the mythos of the horseback mailmen lived on as iconography of the Old West. In his effort to take on the same route, Morton is hoping to understand more about what the true experience of the Old West was through the lens of his own riding.

“The appeal for me is the history of it,” he said. “It’s wild to get into that mindset—you’re a kid trying to make some money, and there’s this opportunity to ride a horse with a mochila full of mail through the night for 75 miles flat out, across remote, gnarly terrain that no one else has been crossing.

“It’s quite a courageous thing. It’s hard to imagine, and that’s why I want to go out there and try to get a better understanding of what that would have been like, and the difficulties they faced doing it over 150 years ago.”

Morton will be supported by his brother, filmmaker Gus Morton, who will be documenting the journey for a film and transporting the bikes that Lachlan won’t be riding over any given stretch.

Gus’ support will be limited, but with the remote nature of most of the course, when Lachlan swaps bikes, he will also restock supplies, just as the riders did on the old Pony Express a century and a half ago.