Sara Dykman - Bicycling with Butterflies: My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration

BICYCLING
with
BUTTERFLIES

My 10,201-Mile Journey Following
The Monarch Migration

Sara Dykman

To the monarchs

Scanning the forests belly, I paused for a second look at some distant branches sagging with the weight of what looked like hives. No, not hives, I thought. Are those nests? Beyond my footsteps, mahogany-colored clumps dripped from the branches of scattered trees. They shimmered in the sparse light, nearly indistinguishable from the tree trunks and pine needles.

Wait, are those?

Puzzled, I ambled closer. Through squinting eyes, I began to see the details made clear by the light and shadow that grazed each wing and defined each butterfly. Not just any butterflies, and not just one. Millions. Millions of monarch butterflies. Known to scientists as Danaus plexippus and to Spanish speakers as la mariposa monarca; to me they were simply spectacular. I stood, enchanted. I had seen pictures and videos, but now I was finally among them. Millionsclinging to the trees like shelved books waiting to be read, their stories of adventure painted on their wings. Each had flown thousands of miles to escape the freezing winters of the United States and Canada. Each had the potential to travel many more miles back north in the spring. As did I.

Soon, as had happened for so many springs before, the monarchs would leave the protection of their canopy shelter and launch north. Unlike all the springs before, however, I would go with them: the first person to ever attempt to bicycle the entire route of the monarch butterfly migration. I stared up at my future traveling companions. They huddled in silent bundles on the branches and coated the tree trunks in stilled wings. Those trees, wearing butterfly wings, would function as the start and finish line of my upcoming adventure. When warmer weather nudged the monarchs to the sky, I would begin.

The idea to bike from Mexico to Canada and back with the migrating monarch butterflies arose from a simple wish to visit them. In 2013, crossing Mexico by bike for the first time, a friend and I entertained the idea of visiting the monarchs at their overwintering sites. Because it was April and the monarchs had already begun migrating north, we decided to forego the side trip.

I spent the next few years idly daydreaming about returning. Over time, my plan morphed and grewuntil I no longer wanted to just visit the migrants, but to accompany them by bicycle on their great migration. In 2016, I stopped daydreaming and picked a start date for my journey: spring of 2017. My idea was now a plan, and I had a year to work out all the details.

As with every adventure, planning was part of the fun. For a year I immersed myself in emails, web design, press releases, and business cards. I talked with scientists, clicked through websites, pored over maps, questioned my plan, and traced the vague outline of a route.

Eventually, there was nothing left to do but start. In January 2017, I braved a fifty-two-hour bus ride from my hometown outside Kansas City, Kansas, followed by a two-day bike ride, to arrive at the parking lot of the El Rosario monarch sanctuary in Michoacn, Mexico.

Including El Rosario, Mexico shelters between seven and eighteen known overwintering monarch colonies every winter. The number varies because smaller colonies are not consistently occupied and new colonies are still being discovered. Four of the colonies are open to the public: Piedra Herrada and Cerro Peln in the State of Mexico, and Sierra Chincua and El Rosario in the neighboring state of Michoacn. Though the designations of colony and sanctuary are often used interchangeably, the listed public sites, aside from El Rosario, are technically the names of sanctuaries containing specific monarch colonies. El Rosario, on the other hand, is technically the name of a colony, found in the sanctuary Sierra Campanario. If such nuances of nomenclature confuse you, dont worry. I too was confused. Plotting my route prior to my arrival, I found just locating these sites, with their different names, difficult. Yet once in Mexico, there was always a local to help point me in the right direction.

Call them sanctuaries or colonies, I was able to visit the resting monarchs at all four public locations, and note their differences. El Rosario was the most built up, with multiple parking lots, many souvenir stands, and a paved trail to start (including 600 cement stairs). Along with Piedra Herrada, El Rosario also had the largest crowds of people, especially on the weekends. Cerro Peln, on the other hand, felt the most like wilderness, with a long, steep slog to the colony. I found Cerro Pelns trail to be the most difficult and Sierra Chincuas single track, with its mellow grades that dipped up and down, the easiest to negotiate. The subtle variations of each colonys forest composition yielded dozens more distinctions, from the ratio of pines to firs, to the openness of the flowering understory. Each colony was part of the whole, yet each was unique. Each felt different. Everyone who visits develops a favorite.

Arriving in Mexico in January, I chose El Rosario for my first visit not only because it consistently has the most monarchs, but because it is the most accessible. I arrived at the parking lot, walked under the arched entrance, bought an entrance ticket for fifty pesos (US $2.50), and met my guide, Brianda Cruz Gonzles. Together, we began walking up the trail.

Had it been an option, I would have opted to go alone up the mountain. But one of the rules at the overwinter sites is that visitors must be accompanied by a local guide. Most days at El Rosario there were around seventy guides waiting to lead hikers up the mountain, and forty more waiting to take people up on horseback. Besides keeping a watchful eye on both tourists and monarchs, such work provides local economic opportunities and reduces the pressure on the mountains and forest to provide logging, mining, and cultivation jobs. The guides are a mix of young and old, men and women; it was my good chance to have been paired with Brianda. She was twenty-six and lived with her family at the outskirts of town, where there were more fields than houses.

I didnt know it on that first visit, but soon I would come to see Brianda as a sister and her house as my own. I would come to learn that among friends, she had a perennial smile, a hearty laugh, and a strength that, despite our different worlds, I saw in myself. As I walked with Brianda that first morning, in the company of towering oyamel firs (Abies religiosa) and leggy, smooth-barked Mexican pines, she was just my guide. She patiently led me down a dusty trail, forgave me for my crummy Spanish, and courteously laughed at my attempted jokes. Respiro profundamente solo porque quiero, I explained. We both chuckled despite the fact that my joke, Im only breathing hard because I want to, wasnt that funny. I was simply acknowledging, with a bit of self-deprecation, two truths. One: I was out of shape and breathing hard. At 10,000 feet above sea level, my Midwestern lungs craved the missing oxygen. Two: I