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Bikepacking: like backpacking but on a bike. You ride dirt roads and easy trails away from cars, carrying your food, water, warm clothes, camping gear, etc...

Bikepacking: like backpacking but on a bike. You ride dirt roads and easy trails away from cars, carrying your food, water, warm clothes, camping gear, etc... in bags mounted on your frame. The format is also used for races, you ride as quickly as possible and can only rely on commercial services available to all for resupply and lodging, no prearranged or private support.

femiagbabiaka 2y ago
Doing the Great Divide trail is high up on my bucket list.
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  Split it up and start now; there's no reason to wait because you think you have to do it all in one go. You can always do that, but you can carve it up into meaningful week or less pieces and go for it. ex: Banff to the US border is a pretty easy 3 days.
  - mauvehaus 2y ago
    Having thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, I can tell you that most thru-hikers are pretty awed by the people who have racked up serious miles section hiking a week at a time. Regardless of where home is for you, at some point the logistics get challenging. Most of Maine, for example, is miles and miles from a useful airport, and even bus service is pretty sparse. It wouldn't be hard to spend as much time getting to and from the trail as it would be to actually hike/ride it. A couple years ago, my wife and I thru-hiked the Long Trail. We looked pretty hard at taking a bus to the start, but couldn't come up with an itinerary that took less than two days. Her parents ended up both driving us to the start and spotting our car at the finish. The finish is in the middle of goddamn nowhere; the start is near a fairly large city in western MA. It sure seemed like it should've been easier. For our honeymoon, we did a couple hundred miles of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. The nearest place to the start to return a rented vehicle of any sort was a neighborhood U-haul (as in, not a corporate location; think a gas station with a couple trucks). And then we still needed a 1 1/2 hour shuttle ride to Old Forge. We spotted our car to the end of the trip and threw our boat in the back of the truck to get to the start.
    - skeeter2020 2y ago
      For the GDT the start is pretty easy to get to (Banff is ~1.5 hr from Calgary Airport, flights from anywhere) but the finish in NM is also in the middle of nowhere. The only saving grace is that the finishing season is typically compact enough that you can organize some sort of transportation. Most of the thru riders end the videos or logs at the border; it would be helpful if they showed how they got home from the middle of the desert.
dowager_dan99 2y ago
>> You ride dirt roads and easy trails away from cars Usually away from cars, but not typically easy. Sometimes it feels like pushing a shopping cart over a mountain.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Yes, the roads are usually where they are for good reasons and avoiding all of them means having to deal with higher gradients and slower speed.
seadan83 2y ago
Apparently bike-touring was called bikepacking by the old timers in the 70s. Somewhere along the way it turned into touring. Then got misappropriated to mean road vs dirt. Bikepacking is any kind of bike riding where you've got your "backpack" on the bike. All bikepacking is touring. Backpacking is simply carrying everything you need in your backpack, eg: "backpacking across Europe". Bikepacking is similar, but for with a bike. When you're riding a bike and carrying everything you need for a multi-day, it's bikepacking, regardless of terrain. #pedantics This last summer I left my front door in the PNW and road 800 miles on a mixture of terrains to the tour divide, road 300 miles of that, then road another 1500 miles of pavement to Iowa. I'd call that bikepacking, and by my previous assertion it's also touring too. Not all touring is bikepacking, but all bikepacking is also touring. That trip is a good counter example of why it gets silly to define bikepacking by the terrain type.
- WA 2y ago
  You are only a modern bikepacker if you ditch your traditional bags for what us Germans call "Arschrakete" (butt rocket): https://heuer-radsport.de/wp-content/uploads/asgarosforum/8/Arschrakete-gepackt.jpg https://heuer-radsport.de/wp-content/uploads/asgarosforum/8/... /s
  - MezzoDelCammin 2y ago
    Thanks for the new vocabulary. Now I'm wondering if Ortlieb ever comes up with a new product line ;-)
- MezzoDelCammin 2y ago
  My personal take on touring vs bikepacking is that the bikepacking movement was always more parallel to touring, rather than a superset. The bikepackers I've met are usually a lot more focused on minimizing the amount of stuff they carry. It can be simplified into a "saddle bag" vs "paniers", but IMO this is just a symptom. A form folows function. If You need to carry a full tent, sleeping bag and a change of clothes, touring paniers and heavy frame are probably the only way to go. If You can cut down on comfort (or are optimizing for speed over long distance), suddenly You're left with a whole lot of options on how to carry whatever's left and You can use much lighter frame to do so.

femiagbabiaka 2y ago

Doing the Great Divide trail is high up on my bucket list.

dowager_dan99 2y ago
Split it up and start now; there's no reason to wait because you think you have to do it all in one go. You can always do that, but you can carve it up into meaningful week or less pieces and go for it. ex: Banff to the US border is a pretty easy 3 days.
- mauvehaus 2y ago
  Having thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, I can tell you that most thru-hikers are pretty awed by the people who have racked up serious miles section hiking a week at a time. Regardless of where home is for you, at some point the logistics get challenging. Most of Maine, for example, is miles and miles from a useful airport, and even bus service is pretty sparse. It wouldn't be hard to spend as much time getting to and from the trail as it would be to actually hike/ride it. A couple years ago, my wife and I thru-hiked the Long Trail. We looked pretty hard at taking a bus to the start, but couldn't come up with an itinerary that took less than two days. Her parents ended up both driving us to the start and spotting our car at the finish. The finish is in the middle of goddamn nowhere; the start is near a fairly large city in western MA. It sure seemed like it should've been easier. For our honeymoon, we did a couple hundred miles of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. The nearest place to the start to return a rented vehicle of any sort was a neighborhood U-haul (as in, not a corporate location; think a gas station with a couple trucks). And then we still needed a 1 1/2 hour shuttle ride to Old Forge. We spotted our car to the end of the trip and threw our boat in the back of the truck to get to the start.
  - skeeter2020 2y ago
    For the GDT the start is pretty easy to get to (Banff is ~1.5 hr from Calgary Airport, flights from anywhere) but the finish in NM is also in the middle of nowhere. The only saving grace is that the finishing season is typically compact enough that you can organize some sort of transportation. Most of the thru riders end the videos or logs at the border; it would be helpful if they showed how they got home from the middle of the desert.

dowager_dan99 2y ago

>> You ride dirt roads and easy trails away from cars Usually away from cars, but not typically easy. Sometimes it feels like pushing a shopping cart over a mountain.

prmoustache 2y ago
Yes, the roads are usually where they are for good reasons and avoiding all of them means having to deal with higher gradients and slower speed.

seadan83 2y ago

Apparently bike-touring was called bikepacking by the old timers in the 70s. Somewhere along the way it turned into touring. Then got misappropriated to mean road vs dirt. Bikepacking is any kind of bike riding where you've got your "backpack" on the bike. All bikepacking is touring. Backpacking is simply carrying everything you need in your backpack, eg: "backpacking across Europe". Bikepacking is similar, but for with a bike. When you're riding a bike and carrying everything you need for a multi-day, it's bikepacking, regardless of terrain. #pedantics This last summer I left my front door in the PNW and road 800 miles on a mixture of terrains to the tour divide, road 300 miles of that, then road another 1500 miles of pavement to Iowa. I'd call that bikepacking, and by my previous assertion it's also touring too. Not all touring is bikepacking, but all bikepacking is also touring. That trip is a good counter example of why it gets silly to define bikepacking by the terrain type.

WA 2y ago
You are only a modern bikepacker if you ditch your traditional bags for what us Germans call "Arschrakete" (butt rocket): https://heuer-radsport.de/wp-content/uploads/asgarosforum/8/Arschrakete-gepackt.jpg https://heuer-radsport.de/wp-content/uploads/asgarosforum/8/... /s
- MezzoDelCammin 2y ago
  Thanks for the new vocabulary. Now I'm wondering if Ortlieb ever comes up with a new product line ;-)
MezzoDelCammin 2y ago
My personal take on touring vs bikepacking is that the bikepacking movement was always more parallel to touring, rather than a superset. The bikepackers I've met are usually a lot more focused on minimizing the amount of stuff they carry. It can be simplified into a "saddle bag" vs "paniers", but IMO this is just a symptom. A form folows function. If You need to carry a full tent, sleeping bag and a change of clothes, touring paniers and heavy frame are probably the only way to go. If You can cut down on comfort (or are optimizing for speed over long distance), suddenly You're left with a whole lot of options on how to carry whatever's left and You can use much lighter frame to do so.