Boomer Breakaway

Many members of a generation decide it’s time to ditch vanilla vacations in favor of challenging outdoor conquests.

- Dan Tracy

IT WAS DAY 2 OF OUR GREAT MONTANA cycling trip. Earlier we had finished climbing the infamously steep Going-to-the- Sun Road in Glacier National Park and were setting up our tents in a campground outside the small town of St. Mary.

Steve Hoppes, a retired University of Oklahoma professor from Tulsa, looked at me, smiled wanly and said in a soft voice, “All those kids who rode by me today. It was like watching my youth pass.”

I could relate. The relentless 11-mile grind up to the Continental Divide and Logan Pass had taxed me like no other ride. I was drained and we had four more days of challenging routes ahead, including a so-called century, or 100-miler, over precipitous hill and dale.

We had no one to blame but ourselves. We had volunteered for this outing, paid $2,000, in fact, to pedal nearly 400 miles from Glacier in the north of Montana to Yellowstone National Park in the south.

It was an adventure vacation, something members of the Baby Boomer generation are turning to increasingly as they approach the age when getting out of the Barcalounger to visit the bathroom is considered exercise.

Instead of going to the beach and sticking their toes in the sand for a week or lounging around the house and watching television during a staycation, people born during the years 1946-64 are climbing mountains, scuba diving, ziplining, rappelling and, yes, riding bicycles long distance.

If it’s out of the ordinary, chances are you might find a Boomer doing it along with the younger crowd.

“They actually have a wider, extended window that their parents didn’t have, that their grandparents didn’t have,” said Sharon Carnahan, a Rollins College psychology professor.

Part of it is money and time, Carnahan said, as well as improved health care that allows Boomers to be more fit and daring.