The Great American Monkey 1000 is the Adventureman's Guild's flagship event, a 1,000-kilometer motorcycle adventure across some of America's most demanding terrain, ridden on 125cc monkey bikes. Participants are never given a map. They are never given a route.
Instead, weeks before the event, they start receiving mail.
This system began in 2019 for the inaugural 2020 Colorado edition and has become the standard format for every Great American Monkey 1000 since. Each participant receives a sequence of physical correspondence pieces, delivered to their actual mailbox over the weeks leading up to the event. The correspondence is from Dash Remington, a fictional explorer and Guild partner who scouted the route in advance and documented everything he found. His letters, telegrams, field notes, newspaper clippings, receipts, menus, and official documents form a puzzle. Decode the correspondence and you can piece together where you are going. Miss something and you are on your own.
Every piece was conceived, written, designed, fabricated, and mailed by hand. All narrative copy was written from scratch, before AI assistance existed as a production tool. Every document was laid out in Photoshop, printed on deliberately chosen paper stock on home laser printers, hand cut, hand weathered, and hand addressed. Envelopes were custom. Details included perforated edges, rounded corners, aged surfaces, period-appropriate typography, and fabricated local ephemera including bar menus, receipts, speeding tickets, and newspaper clippings, all created from scratch using satellite maps and Google Street View to build plausible artifacts from places never physically visited.
The participants never receive a direct answer. They receive a beer menu from a bar along the route. A receipt from a diner in a town they have not identified yet. A telegram with partial coordinates. A newspaper clipping about something that happened near a checkpoint. The final piece is an official-looking field report styled as airmail correspondence that consolidates the route information for the event itself.
The result is not a motorcycle trip with a packet of instructions. It is a treasure hunt conducted through the postal system, built entirely from paper, ink, craft knowledge, and a deep love of ephemera. When it arrives in your mailbox it does not look like event materials. It looks like evidence of something that actually happened.
This system has run across multiple events including the Colorado Rockies, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Montana, and Moab Utah. The archive below documents the original Colorado edition.
