In all his years as a bike tour guide, there is one guest Rich First will never forget.
Though she’d never ridden with clipless pedals, this particular client informed First ahead of a trip with his Woodstock company, Discovery Bicycle Tours, that she intended to use them. Those pedals can be tricky, he warned, urging her to practice with them first. She promised she would.
For non-cyclists, the term “clipless” may seem misleading. The pedals do, in fact, attach to bike shoes, a connection that produces a more efficient leg stroke. Back in the day, pedals were made with toe clips; now, pedals attach to a cleat on the sole of the shoe — thus clipless. Being able to smoothly clip in and out is the key to staying upright.
On day one of the tour, First was only mildly surprised when the guest handed him the still-unopened box of clipless pedals and asked that they be installed on her bike.
“I could have said no,” First, 57, recalled. But he realized she was trying to impress a new boyfriend, an experienced cyclist. Plus, saying no to a paying client on a bike tour is bad business. And it is a business: Discovery’s menu includes a three-day Lamoille Valley Rail Trail tour at $1,899 per person, a six-day Champlain Islands trip for $3,599 and an eight-day excursion to the Greek islands for a tidy $5,999.
So, after again warning his guest of the risks, First relented. Call it a feet accompli.
Once he attached the pedals, First held the bike upright so the guest could try clipping in and out several times. He worked with her until she said, “Let’s go.” But within the first mile she crashed, badly skinning both knees. As First bandaged her wounds, the client copped a plea and apologized. Flat pedals replaced clipless, and the six-day trip was salvaged.
Biking is one of the fastest-growing forms of tourism in the country, according the Adventure Cycling Association. Buoyed by the flush of baby boomer retirees and the availability of hill-conquering electric-assist bikes, Vermont is benefiting from the trend. That’s led to heightened demand for competent tour leaders — camp counselors on two wheels. Though guides are less a factor in choosing a tour than location, bike selection and lodging, they are frequently the difference between a good experience and a great one.
With touring season in high gear, Seven Days checked in with local pros to hear how they roll with everything from challenging clients to weather disruptions. It turns out that leading a bike tour is no walk in the park — but it does have its wheely good moments.
“It’s very rewarding to help people accomplish a goal,” said Sue King, who lives in Annapolis, Md., but became a tour leader for Discovery after being a customer for many years. “That goal may be just to have a really great vacation, or it could be to do something they’ve never done before.”
Guides are in the hospitality business, and accommodating clients is one of the skills required, in addition to being a mechanic, concierge, mediator, emergency medical technician and human Lonely Planet guide.
Though experience levels vary, bike tour leaders have one goal in common: Guide the group safely and enjoyably to its destination. Bill Reuther, who has worked for Discovery and its predecessor, Bike Vermont, said that, done right, the job is its own reward: “For me, it’s the traveling, interacting with interesting people and getting them out of their everyday lives.”
Dave Dostal, 50, who lives in nearby Hanover, N.H., has been leading tours for Discovery for 18 years. An engineer who works remotely, he relishes getting away from his desk. Dostal caught the touring bug when he took a summer job in college herding a dozen 13-year-olds down the Pacific Coast Highway from Seattle to San Francisco. “Every tour I’ve done since then has been easier,” he said with a laugh.
For Dostal, the beauty of leading a bike tour is that it impresses upon his clients the value of bikes as transportation. “People don’t always think of a bike as a way to really explore a place, get from point A to point B and have an experience along the way that you don’t get driving a car,” he said.
Whether you live near point A or B, you’ve no doubt spotted bike tours on the highways and byways of Vermont: a single line of a dozen or so bicyclists strung out on the road, sporting matching logo jerseys, with GPS devices or phones clipped to handlebars and, sometimes, identical flags jutting from the rear wheels.
“Your rapport will affect the way you roll.” Rich First
At the head of the mini peloton is the leader, the person yelling “car back” or pointing to a potentially damaging pothole or distracting roadkill. Vermont’s bucolic vibe, miles of lightly traveled roads and relatively tolerant motorists make it a potent lure for modest tour companies like Discovery, as well as bigger operations such as Vermont Bicycle Tours, headquartered in Williston.
VBT has become a worldwide enterprise. Lead tour designer Cammy Richelli said the company’s Vermont tours are more popular than ever: Enrollment in them has shot up 20 percent in the five years since the onset of the pandemic. Discovery said ridership has nearly doubled for its Vermont tours in the same period.
Family-owned Bike Vermont was renamed Discovery Bicycle Tours in 2010; it was acquired by New Zealand’s Active Adventures in 2024. Discovery employs between 25 and 30 guides, both full and part time, during its May to September season, according to assistant operations manager Olivia Oaks. Guides may do as few as three or as many as 20 trips, depending on experience and availability. Salaries range from $150 to $225 per day, and daily tips from each client average $20.
Asked what essential quality she looks for in prospective guides, Oaks said: “Is this a person you’d want to spend a week of vacation with?”
The same thinking applies to selecting guide teams. In a sense, the guides are in a weeklong marriage of convenience. “Maybe the best advice I ever got was: Whenever you can, yield to your coleader,” First said. “Your rapport will affect the way you roll.”
Most Discovery tours of 13 or fewer riders are guided by two individuals, who switch between leading the pack to bringing up the rear, driving a van called the SAG wagon. The acronym stands for “Support and Gear”: The van carries spare bikes and parts, tools, snacks, and water. But some refer to it as “Save a Guest.” Riders who get tired, injured or just plain bored can travel the day’s route on four wheels instead of two.
As the popularity of bike touring has grown, so have the number of guests with little or no experience riding bikes, the guides said in interviews. Basics such as the importance of proper seat height and knowing when to downshift have to be taught.
The big change is the prevalence of e-bikes. Oaks estimated that 60 percent of Discovery’s guests choose electric bikes, including some who’ve never put their butts on a bike saddle. “They think it’s a motor scooter, but it’s pedal-assist,” Dostal noted, meaning that you have to pedal to activate the electric power.
As with any tool, the bike is only as good as the rider. A $3,000 state-of-the art hybrid is not going to transform an inexperienced cyclist into Lance Armstrong.
While leading a Discovery tour two seasons ago on the Katy Trail in Missouri, Mark Lewis found the group consistently missing one rider.
“She was a former nun — very sweet but clearly not ready,” he recalled. “No sense of direction, and she’d keep getting lost unless we had someone with her.”
The three guides took turns staying with her. “We tried pairing her up, but the guests didn’t really want to watch her,” Lewis said.
Whether a rider is wayward, exhausted or an annoyance to others, the first remedy is to put them in the van. In rare instances, a miscreant might be told to return to the hotel — and stay there. Before he led tours for Discovery, First owned a bike-touring enterprise called POMG — for Peace of Mind, Guaranteed. He never had to unseat a rider for bad behavior, but in one case, the other riders did it for him.
Another time, in the late 1990s, First had to put all of his bikers in the van. He was leading a two-day, 200-mile tour through Vermont, from the Canadian border to Massachusetts, when a heavy storm struck. The next day had bluebird skies. But when the tour reached Waterbury, First was told to pull the riders off the road: There was flooding up ahead.
One of the 20 clients grumbled, loudly criticizing the decision, as the van drove south. “He chirped at me for hours — the whole way — that this was bullshit,” First recalled. “I was really rattled.”
Coming around a bend near Bethel, they were met with a startling sight. The White River was “busting at the seams, a looming disaster,” First said. In the shocked, silent van, everyone turned and stared at the Chirper. One guest yelled: “See that, you asshole!” The Chirper “literally shrank in his seat,” First said.
Though singles are welcome, most of Discovery’s tours are populated by groups of friends or couples. Reuther recalled guiding a honeymooning couple years ago. The tour traveled south along the Connecticut River, and riders were free to go at their own pace. A head count at a planned rest stop revealed that the newlyweds were AWOL.
“So I hop in the van and backtrack, looking for them, but no luck,” Reuther said. “I have to take a leak, so I pull over, park and walk down the riverbank a ways so I can’t be seen from the road.” At that moment Reuther spotted two bikes lying in the grass a short distance away. Closer inspection showed them to be bikes from his tour. It also put the puzzled guide within hearing range of “the unmistakable sounds of lovemaking.”
At the end of the day’s ride, with everyone present, Reuther made a request: If you leave our route, please place your bikes where we can see them so we have some idea where you are. As he scanned the faces of his guests, he winked at the lovebirds. The woman’s face turned crimson.
Reuther has led more than 400 tours and, at 66, maintains a sunny outlook on his second career, after selling a business at age 40. “My job is not going to change the world. I’m not solving cancer. I’m not, you know, bringing world peace,” he said. But, he added, if during a one-week bike tour, “I can take somebody who has a stressful life and give them a chance to decompress, maybe that person will go back to their more stressful job and solve cancer.”
Corrected July 5, 2025: A previous version of this story misstated the year of Bike Vermont’s name change and of Discovery Bicycle Tours’ acquisition by Active Adventures.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Wheel Life | Bike tourism is growing in Vermont, but leading a bike tour is no walk in the park”
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2025.
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