|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
When pandemic lockdowns limited where people could go, Megan Gardner, a Redwood City cyclist, set her most ambitious goal yet: ride every publicly accessible road and trail in San Mateo County.
“And then I realized — this was going to take years,” Gardner said.
It did. After five years and countless hours of navigating cul-de-sacs, fire roads and mountain trails, Gardner said she became the first known person to complete every mapped and bikeable segment in San Mateo County on April 5.
She was joined on her final county ride by fellow cyclists she had met through biking groups and performance tracking platforms. Among them were Barry Mann, Peter Norvig and Gregory Smith, who praised Gardner’s commitment and the effort it took to reach her goal.
“I have been fascinated by her dedication to completing San Mateo County, as there are some very challenging roads and trails to complete,” said Mann.
Gardner’s cycling journey began in 2016. She started with casual spins and eventually aimed for longer adventures — including a 500-mile solo ride to Disneyland in 2019. But it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that she set out on her most demanding biking goal.
With shelter-in-place orders limiting travel to a five-mile radius, Gardner began riding loops in nearby Emerald Hills. Curious about how much of the county she had covered, she started using an app called Wandrer to track her progress, which showed she had covered about 22% of the county.
“So I thought, maybe I’ll just do the whole thing,” she said.
Rather than riding for scenery or fitness, Gardner’s rides became strategic efforts to cover “unique miles” — roads and trails she had never biked before.
She used every ride to fill in webs of loops, cul-de-sacs and backtracks — determined to cover every last mile.
Over time, the unexplored terrains became harder to reach for Gardner. By early 2022, she realized she would need a mountain bike to finish, as many of the remaining trails were rugged and off-road. When she first started riding, she had never intended to become a mountain biker — but she was willing to adapt to reach the finish line.
“I feel like me and San Mateo County are best friends now,” Gardner said. “We know so much about each other.”
According to Craig Durkin, the platform’s developer, Wandrer connects to popular activity tracking platforms like Strava, Ride with GPS and Garmin. It analyzes users’ data and compares it against a global road network to determine which roads they traveled during a run, ride or walk.
Durkin said the app tracks roads users have never been on before. Each time someone travels a new road, it’s added to their personal map. Riding the same road again doesn’t count — the goal is to explore.
By September 2022, Gardner had completed 90% of her journey.
Later that year, she underwent surgery and faced a mandatory recovery period, followed by a challenging year of IVF treatments in 2023. Gardner had to pause riding for weeks before and after each cycle. The health issues took a significant toll on her body, often disrupting her riding routine.
But even as she recovered, her thoughts kept returning to her goal: to bike the entire county.
“And I just told myself, I needed to finish,” she added. “That was not an option.”
Her recovery wasn’t linear, and it took time to feel strong enough to return to the level of riding required to chase down every incomplete segment in the county. But slowly and steadily, she got back on track. She went on rides that yielded only a few new miles, often returning to remote locations to snag small, missing pieces.
She said she also made more than 2,000 corrections to OpenStreetMap — a free, crowdsourced world map that anyone can edit — by flagging inaccessible areas, removing private roads and adding overlooked trails.
“It (riding every trail in the county) is difficult because there are map updates all the time, so it is a moving target: you thought you had gotten all the little paths, and then another one is added to the map,” said Norvig.
The final stretch came on April 5. Gardner set out with her sister and a small group of fellow cyclists to complete her last 40-mile route, which included Sky Farm Drive in San Mateo. The ride began and ended at her home in Redwood City.
Afterward, the group gathered in her backyard to celebrate. Gardner checked her phone one last time to make sure every mile had been counted.
“It came through,” she said. “I held up my phone and said, ‘I’ve done it.’ And everyone started cheering.”
Gardner said her five-year project involved more than 2,000 unique miles. Though there’s no official recordkeeping body for such an effort, Wandrer lists Gardner as the only person with 100% completion in San Mateo County, she said.
“Actually getting 99%, let alone 100%, on a large geographic region requires amazing persistence…,” said Smith. “That is a big personal accomplishment no matter how silly anyone else thinks it is.”
Gardner, however, has no plans to stop. She has already started working on Santa Clara County, where she said she has reached 25%.
Her ultimate goal? All nine Bay Area counties.
Joan Lane, trailblazing volunteer and Stanford’s go-to for ‘sticky problems,' dies at 97March 25, 2026 3:23 pm
Love this story!