The park, built on the former corridor of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad (MKT or Katy), is 240 miles long and runs between Clinton and Machens with 26 trailheads and four fully restored railroad depots along the way. The section of trail between Cooper County and St. Charles County has been designated as an official segment of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. Katy Trail is also part of the American Discovery Trail, has been designated as a Millennium Legacy Trail and was added to the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy Hall of Fame in 2008.
The Katy Trail has been on our list of things to do for a long time now. We had planned on tackling it this fall when the weather cools down, but we lucked into a super pleasant week last week and decided to give it a go! We haven’t actually taken our bikes bikepacking yet, but luckily we had everything we needed already so we loaded it all up, threw the bikes in the truck, and drove the 3 hours north to Clinton, Missouri to get started! Jason has done some bikepacking, but I haven’t and I was pleasantly surprised at how little the extra weight on the bike actually affected it’s handling. I was also surprised at how nice the community center in Clinton was. They graciously allow bikers to park their vehicles in their lot and have showers and bathrooms available for free. After loading the final things onto our bikes we headed on out to the trail!
Our plan was to take the week and ride around 40 miles a day to the end of the trail in Machens so today’s ride ended up being 40 miles. We probably pushed a little too hard to get to the train depot in Sedalia before it closed because I really wanted to see it!
We made it to Sedalia! YAY! We definitely should have eaten more food because we were starving by the time we finally rode back into town to the closest little restaurant. I destroyed a reuben sandwich and fries!
Even though we had all of our camping stuff on our bikes, we decided to make it easy on ourselves for our first night and stay at a little rented room on the edge of town. It was inside the house of Maxine and Pete, an adorable older couple who have a bunch of wildflowers and donkeys. We had amazing showers and slept awesome after a day of biking! Unfortunately, Jason’s knee was really hurting and both of our butts hurt from not having ridden bikes for that long before. (we mountain bike a lot, but you don’t sit down on those! and our dumb asses didn’t train at all for this ride!) We made the decision to not just push through and turned around and headed back to the truck in Clinton.
While we didn’t get to ride as much as we had planned, the trip was still back to back 40 mile rides and we got to test out all of our bikepacking gear! We learned a lot. Mostly that we have to at least train a little bit before doing long rides like this. Also the tail bag on my bike won’t work because I’m so short that it hits the tire and I need a rear rack instead. This was a good experience and a good preview of what the trail is like! I can’t wait until the fall to try it again!