Gravel riding has exploded in popularity over the past several years, and it’s not hard to see why. Dirt roads and rail trails pull you away from car traffic almost entirely, which means you can actually hear the person riding next to you — and have a real conversation instead of shouting over engine noise or riding single file to stay safe. That same distance from traffic opens up access to a different kind of scenery: forests, grasslands, creek corridors, and wildlife you’d never see from a highway shoulder. There’s also a democratizing quality to it. Gravel bikes are comfortable on everything from smooth rail trail to rough backcountry, so the same bike and the same sport can take you from a mellow weekend spin to a genuine adventure, without needing a garage full of different bikes. Add in a slower, more social pace than a lot of road riding, and it’s easy to see why so many riders are trading pavement for gravel.
“Gravel ride” doesn’t tell you much on its own, though. We run tours across a wide range of terrain — from crushed limestone so smooth you could ride it on a road bike to remote backcountry roads that demand real bike-handling skill. The right one for you depends less on general fitness and more on what kind of surface you’re comfortable riding.
To make that easier to size up at a glance, we’re borrowing a system skiers already know: green circle, blue square, and black diamond. Green means smooth and forgiving. Blue means variable, with some genuine technical stretches. Black means remote, rugged, and unpredictable. Here’s a look at the terrain on some of our gravel tours, rated accordingly, so you can get a feel for which one matches your experience before you sign up.
Our gentlest gravel: Mickelson and Katy — Green
Start with the gentlest end of the spectrum. Our South Dakota and Missouri tours ride the George S. Mickelson Trail and the Katy Trail — both rail trails, built on abandoned railroad beds, and that origin story explains almost everything about how they ride.
The Mickelson Trail runs 109 miles through the Black Hills between Deadwood and Edgemont, surfaced in packed crushed limestone. Because it follows an old rail grade, it almost never exceeds a 4% grade, even as it climbs from about 3,400 feet at Edgemont up to over 4,500 feet near Deadwood. The tradeoff for that gentle grade is patience: the railroad engineers who built the line took the long way around hills rather than over them, so the trail winds gradually through forest and meadow instead of climbing directly.
One caveat on our South Dakota tour specifically: the route also includes a fair amount of road riding connecting sections of the trail, so while the surface itself is green-circle easy, we’d still call for intermediate cycling skills to have a great time — comfort riding alongside some traffic and the general bike-handling that road miles ask for.
The Katy Trail is the same idea at a bigger scale — 240 miles along the old Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad corridor, making it the longest continuous rail trail in the country. Its surface is often called “limestone pug,” packed crushed limestone that’s hard and flat enough that road cyclists ride it on 28-32mm tires without much complaint, though it can turn soft and grabby after heavy rain. Grades rarely exceed 1-2%. It’s the kind of trail where a fully loaded touring bike and a gravel bike perform almost identically, because the surface simply isn’t testing your equipment.
What both trails have in common: engineered fill, consistent width, predictable drainage, and a surface designed a century ago to support a train. That’s a very different animal from gravel that was never anything but a road. Think of these as the green circles of our lineup — wide, groomed, and predictable enough that pacing and endurance matter far more than handling skill.
Our more variable gravel: Vermont, Southern Arizona, and Idaho — Blue
Our Vermont tour rides a different species of gravel entirely, and the state’s own road classification system tells you why. Vermont town roads run from Class 1 (state highways) down through Class 2 and Class 3 — regularly maintained gravel that a standard passenger car can handle in any season — to Class 4, which towns aren’t required to maintain at all. Class 4 roads can be washed out, overgrown, blocked by fallen trees, or cut by unbridged stream crossings. They were mostly built to connect 19th-century farms and hill settlements, not to move traffic efficiently, so they go straight up and over terrain rather than around it.
Riders in the gravel cycling world have their own shorthand for this kind of variability, often described in tiers: hardpack with a scattering of loose stone and occasional washboard on one end, working up through unevenly sized rock and exposed ledge, to genuinely technical riding — deep ruts, loose babyheads, rock gardens, and standing water. A single day on our Vermont route can move through several of those tiers, especially after spring mud season or a hard summer storm, since Vermont’s gravel roads see frequent washboarding and rutting that requires regular grading to keep passable.
Our Idaho tour shares that unpredictability for different reasons — steeper, more remote Forest Service and logging roads where surface quality depends entirely on when it was last graded and how the previous winter treated it. Loose, chunky, and occasionally rutted are the default, not the exception.
Our Southern Arizona-Patagonia tour sits at the gentler end of this blue tier. Riding through the grasslands of Arizona’s Sky Island region — Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, the Sonoita Creek corridor, and the high desert around Sonoita and Patagonia — the roads here are well-maintained and hard-packed, without the ruts, washouts, or rock gardens that show up in Vermont or Idaho. What earns it a blue rating instead of green is the terrain itself: rolling hills across 200 miles with days topping out around 4,000-5,300 feet of climbing, on a surface that’s consistent but not engineered like a rail trail. It’s a good next step for a rider who’s outgrown Mickelson or Katy but isn’t ready for backcountry-technical riding — and it’s a hotel-based trip, so it also works well on an e-gravel bike. We recommend a minimum 42mm tire.
This is our blue-square terrain: like a groomed intermediate run that still throws in a mogul field, it rewards riders who’ve handled some variability and are ready for a route that changes character throughout the day.
Our most advanced gravel: the Great Divide — Black
For riders who want the biggest challenge we offer, our new Great Divide tour follows sections of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route — roughly 2,700 miles of remote dirt and gravel tracing the Continental Divide from Montana to New Mexico. We break the full route into fully supported 7-day segments, so you can take it on one stretch at a time rather than all at once. This is the far end of our spectrum: extended remote sections, minimal services along the way, significant elevation gain, and surface conditions that shift with weather and elevation day to day. If you’re comfortable on Vermont- or Idaho-level terrain and want to push further, this is where that leads. If you’re not sure whether you’re ready for it, that’s exactly the kind of question to bring to us before you register.
Like a black diamond run, this one isn’t for building confidence — it’s for riders who’ve already got it and are looking for the real thing.
Why gravel tires are wider than you think
If your reference point is road cycling, gravel tires can come as a surprise. Road bikes typically run 25-32mm tires, pumped to fairly high pressure, because the goal on pavement is minimizing rolling resistance on a perfectly smooth, predictable surface. Gravel tires run 38mm up to 50mm or wider, at noticeably lower pressure — and that difference is what makes rough surfaces comfortable instead of punishing.
A wider tire holds more air volume, and that air is doing the same job a mountain bike’s suspension does on a smaller scale: absorbing bumps before they reach your hands, seat, and spine. At lower pressure, the tire can deform around a rock or rut instead of bouncing off it, which keeps your wheel in contact with the ground and makes the ride noticeably smoother. Modern tubeless setups make this possible without the pinch-flat risk that low pressure used to carry on a tube — you can run 25-35 psi on gravel where a road tire might need 80-100 psi just to avoid flatting.
Width also buys traction. More rubber on the ground, plus room for actual tread pattern, means better grip in loose gravel, sand, or mud — exactly the conditions that show up on our Vermont, Idaho, and Great Divide routes. That’s why the tire recommendation scales with the terrain: something in the 35-38mm range with light tread is plenty on the Mickelson or Katy Trail’s packed limestone, while Vermont and Idaho reward 40-45mm with real tread, and the Great Divide is often ridden on 45-50mm or even a light mountain bike tire. The rougher and looser the surface, the more that extra width and lower pressure work in your favor — comfort and control increase together, without much of a rolling-resistance penalty once you’re off pavement.
What this means for deciding if a ride is right for you
A bike and tire setup that feels overbuilt on the Mickelson or Katy Trail is often exactly right in Vermont or Idaho. Wider tires with more tread, lower pressure, a bike with a bit more clearance, and a rider comfortable getting out of the saddle to unweight the front end over rough patches — all of that earns its keep on backcountry gravel and does essentially nothing on a rail trail.
Handling skill matters more than fitness on the technical end of the spectrum. You can be strong and still get bounced around badly on a rutted road if you haven’t spent time reading terrain, picking lines, and staying relaxed through chatter. Rail trails reward endurance and pacing. Backcountry gravel rewards bike handling — and a rider who’s only trained on smooth crushed limestone can be in for a surprise the first time the surface underneath them stops being predictable.
Neither type is “better” or “harder” across the board — they’re different disciplines wearing the same name, the same way a green run and a black run are both skiing but ask completely different things of you. The honest questions to ask yourself are:
- Have I ridden loose, uneven, or rutted surfaces before, or only packed and groomed ones?
- Am I comfortable getting out of the saddle and adjusting my line on the fly, or do I prefer a predictable, consistent surface?
- Does my bike have the tire clearance and geometry for a rougher route, or am I set up for something smoother?
A note on e-bikes or renting bikes
Rail-trail-style routes like the Mickelson and Katy are well suited to e-bikes — gentle grades and a consistent surface mean the assist does exactly what it’s good at, flattening out a long day without asking much of the bike’s handling. Even some of the more variable backcountry routes can work on an e-bike if you’re comfortable with the terrain.
The real constraint isn’t the terrain, though — it’s charging. E-bikes make the most sense on hotel-based trips, where you can plug in overnight and start each day with a full battery. On a multi-night camping trip without reliable outlets, keeping a battery charged for consecutive riding days gets a lot harder to manage. If you’re considering an e-bike, the accommodation style of the specific ride matters as much as the surface type.
And if you don’t own a bike suited to the terrain — or don’t want to travel with your own — we offer great rental bikes for our gravel tours, e-bikes included where the trip supports them. You don’t need to already have the right setup to sign up. We offer rental gravel bikes on all of our tours, so you can try the wider-tire, lower-pressure setup for yourself before deciding whether to invest in one of your own. It’s a low-risk way to get a feel for what actually works for you on the terrain you’re riding, whether that’s your first time on gravel or you’re stepping up from a rail trail to something more technical.
Still not sure? Email us
Every one of our gravel rides has its own surface profile, and it’s not always obvious from the route description alone. If you’re weighing whether a particular ride is the right match for your experience and equipment, email us — we can walk you through what the terrain actually looks like day to day, what tire width and bike setup we’d recommend, and how it compares to routes you may have already ridden.