Alumni bike from Florida to Alaska

About 2,500 miles into a 9,000 mile bike tour from the Florida Keys to northern Alaska, UNC alumni Rachel Burns, Brady Lawrence and Reese Wells have encountered open roads, ghost towns and a rogue bison.

The graduates and three others are using the Keys to Freeze tour to raise awareness and money for the National Parks Conservation Association. So far, they have raised more than $1,000 for the association, Lawrence said.

“Conservation is becoming more and more important as suburbia is growing and our cities get bigger and people want more land,” Burns said. “It’s just a really cool thing to be a part of — on a hard day, we can remember why we’re here and why we’re doing this.”

The team has been on the road since February, traveling through St. Petersburg, Fla.; New Orleans; Houston; Austin, Texas; and Albuquerque, N.M. Lawrence said they are racing to get to their final destination in Deadhorse, Alaska, by Aug. 15.

“You can’t ride bikes that far up in Alaska after that point,” he said. “Once it gets to September, everything starts to freeze over, and they start getting blizzards.”

The team also hopes to encourage young people to go to national parks.

“A big thing that we’re doing is trying to connect our generation and younger generations to the national parks and just being outdoors and having those outdoor experiences in general because our generation and the generations after us are having less initiative to go out and experience these wild places,” Lawrence said.

Not long after the team started its tour, a third-grade class in Providence, R.I. contacted them.

“There has been a significant drop in our generation and younger going to national parks, so it was really awesome to establish a connection with these third graders and get the chance to share our journey with them,” Wells said.

Lawrence is filming the team’s journey and plans to make it into a documentary film about the team’s adventures, including an incident in Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park in Florida when some of the team members encountered a bison while hiking.

“We went out and saw the sunset but stayed later than we were supposed to,” Lawrence said. “On the way back, there was this bison blocking the entire trail, and it basically cut us off from being able to go back. We approached the bison, and right as Tyler’s hand was like three inches away from this bison, it just lowered its head and charged forward two or three steps. Everyone just screamed and ran backwards. I thought someone was going to get totally run over by this bison, but I got it all on film.”

Wells also plans to write a novel about his experiences.

“A lot of these places I’ve never been to before,” he said. “Every state we go to is a new state for me.”

Burns said one of her favorite parts of the trip is riding through small country towns.

“A lot of the roads we’re taking are old country highways,” she said. “These old highways used to be the main highways until the interstates were built, so a lot of these cities that used to be small thriving cities have become these empty, eerie ghost towns.”

She said she likes to meet the people along the way and learn their stories — her favorite being a man named Frog Man, who claimed he was the best frog catcher in Louisiana.

Though they have stories to last a lifetime, the three are just a quarter of the way into their tour.

“It’s been a really wild experience so far,” Burns said. “It’s a crazy thing to imagine when you look at the map and see how far we’ve gone.”

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