The 20th Tour de Rez kicks off on Memorial Day 2010, beginning a summer of adventure, education and amazing experiences for hundreds of youth from across the Navajo Nation.  Students will bike, hike and backpack their way around over 1000 miles of the rez!  Throughout the summer, students will have the chance to feel the empowerment that comes through meaningful service projects that we will engage in along the way.  Your support helps make all this possible.

Visit our website for more info about the Tour, see a bunch of pics and find out more about the other programs that we do throughout the year - www.navajoyes.org

The words of Everett Reuss sum up the adventure that is about to commence: 

"You could not guess in what a fantastic place I am.  On all sides, the burning sun beats down on silent, empty desert.  To the right and the left, long walls of sandstone reach away into the distance. . . . Before me, the desert drops away onto a vast valley, in which strangely eroded buttes of all delicate and intense shadings of vermillion, orange and purple, tower into a cloudless turquiose sky.   This is the end of a long trip - hundreds of miles of desert, canyon and mountain.    I have constantly known beauty so piercing as to be almost unbearable.  I have led a wild life of fantastic adventures!"

The Tour seeks all summer to provide youth with experiences in this "fantastic place" that is Dine' Bikeyah - Navajo country.  From the Chuska highcountry to the depths of Grand Canyon - and the 1000-plus Tour miles in between - we hope that riders will experience the beauty and enjoy the adventures that Everett so vividly describes.  And the service projects throughout the Tour  allow the youth to realize that they are the ones capable of creating the change that they hope to see in this magic land of Dine' Bikeyah.

A hearty "ahehe" for your support -- and don't forget to forward this to anyone who you think might want to support the cause.