Seasoned thru-hiker Bernie Krausse just turned a serious, semi-developed cross-country bike route into a hike. If hikers start launching into Great American Rail-Trail en masse, they’ll have Krausse to thank for a lot of route discovery. In some ways, the Great American Rail-Trail is a capstone of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s attempts to turn old railbeds into hikeable, bikeable paths. The Great American Rail-Trail itself is still evolving. “Until now, the Great American belonged to cyclists,” he wrote.