When you think about it, it’s probably no surprise that hostelling is a pretty eco-friendly way to travel. A HI USA study from 2017 showed our average guest stay has just 5% of the carbon footprint of a traditional hotel stay. These days, that difference has a lot to do with the built-in shared resources that make hostels more affordable, like water, electricity, gas, and reusable dishes and cutlery in the kitchen. Throw in hostellers’ tendencies to pack light, travel slowly, and favor local public transportation over driving, and the picture becomes even clearer.
But for HI USA, green stays are more than just a happy byproduct of the shared travel experience. Respect for the environment has been built in from the organization’s very beginning, when hostelling was almost synonymous with bicycling.
In the Beginning
When HI USA was founded as American Youth Hostels (AYH) 90 years ago, bicycling was part of the framework. Like Richard Schirrman, who founded the world’s first hostel in Germany in the early 1900s, HI USA founders Isabel and Monroe Smith were enthusiastic cyclists. They saw riding as a way to build health, strength, and a sense of adventure. But even more practically speaking, they saw it as the main method of access for the network of hostels they founded in the United States beginning in 1934.
After establishing the USA’s first hostel in Northfield, MA, AYH quickly expanded the concept. The Smiths modeled their growing hostel network on those they’d seen while chaperoning groups of young people on “missions of friendship” throughout pre-war Europe.
“We weren’t there for a day even when we noticed kids bicycling with a knapsack on the back of the bicycle and how they’re traveling in shorts and open-necked shirts, sandals,” Monroe Smith once recalled of his first trip bringing a group of American youth to Europe in 1933. “I thought that was the way to travel. So did the group.”
Building for Cyclists
The Smiths wondered, though, if young travelers would enjoy the cycling as much back home in the States. “Do you think we’re too much married to the automobile?” they asked the group before returning home. “Do kids want to ride a bike 15 miles, 30 miles, or 45 miles to the hostel when they can go by automobile so much quicker?”
The answer, it turned out, was yes. Focusing locations that offered not only close proximity to nature but easy access to each other via cycling trails, the Smiths and their supporters built a network of hostels across 500 cyclable miles within the first few years of AYH’s founding.
Beyond that basic function of getting travelers point A to point B, bicycling was fundamental to the organization’s ethos from the start. Early exploratory trips that the Smiths and their supporters led for youth included bike rides across Europe, Mexico, and much of the United States. And in the 1930s, a “rolling hostel” housed in an old train car included space for each hosteller to pack a cycle, which they’d bring out to explore sites that were literally off the prescribed track.
The bicycle was an important part of the experience itself, helping travelers more intimately explore new cities, towns, and countries different from their own. Cycling got travelers outdoors, got them exercise, connected them to nature, and bonded them with fellow travelers in their groups.
In her adulthood in the 1970s, the Smiths’ daughter Betty would describe herself as having been “born on a bicycle.” And you could say the same about hostelling as a movement in the United States.
“Life-Changing” Adventures
Over the years, AYH cycling trip offerings exploded thanks to organization by regional hostelling councils across the country. Through their local councils, teens and young adults could sign up for trips traversing places like the Canadian Rockies, Cuba, or the west coast of the United States. Trips were run by AYH-trained trip leaders, who’d supervise as their charges cycled between campsites and hostels all over the world, often for weeks or months on end.
“AYH trips were life-changing, super confidence-building experiences for leaders and trippers,” Nancy Libow, who led AYH trips from 1982-1986, recalled a few years ago on an AYH Bike Trips social media group page.
That group page today is alive with memories from people who led and participated in those trips decades ago. They post grainy photos pulled from old shoeboxes of the friends they made, smiling on their bikes in front of the Swiss Alps or the Golden Gate Bridge, of exhausted but enthusiastic young cyclists over the decades in headbands and bellbottoms and short shorts and wraparound sunglasses, sitting around a hostel dining table or making camp in the middle of nowhere with their bikes propped up against a tree in the background. There are photos from people who still have the AYH patches they collected for their cycling jerseys, the saddle bags they used to pack for their cross-country journeys, the clippings from their hometown newspapers celebrating their return home after cycling thousands of miles.
“(I) became a hometown hero after my 1984 Transcontinental AYH tour,” Rob Hall recalled on the group page. The faded image of a clipping from a Northern California newspaper accompanies his post. “The article failed to mention that I learned to ask directions, talk to strangers, read a map, make plans, predict weather, find water, be a mechanic, etc. etc.”
Dave Kalter, who led AYH cycling tours in Europe for nine summers before spending his career working for HI USA, began his lifelong hostelling journey on a bike in the early 1970s. He set off from Dayton, OH for a 700-mile ride to visit hostels in Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “It was a great time to find out just who I was,” says Kalter. “And to watch the redwing blackbirds that would fly along beside me for miles, and watch storms form and pass miles away. Beautiful hills, long climbs and downhills, the Sparta to Elroy rail trail — one of the first in the country. And long stretches through huge forests of glorious, gorgeous conifers!”
A Legacy of Cycling
The nature of hostelling in the United States has changed over the years, and HI USA’s hostel footprint has changed with it. These days, instead of dense networks of cyclable waystations in small homes clustered throughout the country, you’re more likely to find our hostels spread across bigger cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Most people arrive by plane, train, or automobile. But that passion for the connection cycling has always created – to nature, to other people, to the world around – has stuck with us. Whether you’re joining a local cycling tour led by one of our wonderful hostel volunteers, cycling between our rural coastal hostels, or simply setting off to see the world on your own terms, you’re connected to nearly a century of predecessors who rode with AYH in hopes of shaping a better world.