Ride Reports

The Kofa Conting3ncy

February can be a tricky month for a weekend bikepacking trip. As I write this on a Sunday afternoon in the later part of the month, the temperature sits at a pleasant 75F. The last few years, however, our advanced trip that we usually schedule for this time of year has been met with incredibly…

No Country for Tommy Decker

It’s tiresome to still be writing about the heat, but this Summer was a doozy. For those of us in Tucson and the surrounding Sonoran Desert, we’re coming out of one of the drier monsoons of the last 50 years, logging 15 more 100F+ degree days than normal. Much of Arizona and the country at…

The Lemmon-Top Traverse – Our 2023 Swift Campout

Southern Arizona is well known as a cycling mecca. Hundreds of miles of singletrack and dirt roads lay within thousands of acres of public land ripe for day rides and overnight exploring. In the few short years I’ve lived here, the now iconic San Rafael Valley outside of Patagonia has gone from a ranching road…

55 Hours in the Santa Ritas

The Sky Islands Odyssey is a special route for us here at Campfire. In 2022, we rode the East Loop as the advanced option in our backpacking series, a trip that saw temperatures well below freezing and eternal wind. A few weeks later, we supported Sarah Swallow’s Ruta del Jefe event by providing repairs, service,…

S’moreos, Pups, and a Border Run

Back at the end of 2021, once it felt safe and reasonable to spend time with small groups of people outside, we restarted our bikepacking series with an overnight trip to the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge (BANWR) outside of Arivaca, Arizona. That trip was such a memorable time that we decided to end another…

Queen’s Ransom Published – Dec’21/Jan’22 Bikepacking News

Queen’s Ransom Our top bikepacking news story for December and January is the publication of John Schilling’s new route, The Queen’s Ransom, at Bikepacking.com. We’re building up a great collection of routes here in Arizona, and this one is a great addition. John designed this as a bikepacking route he could depart on from his…

Our First Family Bicycle Campout!

Last weekend our family successfully embarked on our first bicycle campout.  This campout was very meaningful to us because of what it meant for our family and for our business with the upcoming launch of CampfireCycling.com. As I’ve been preparing for the major directional shift to a bicycle camping focused business, a major dilemma has…

Everyday I’m Shuttlin’: Profiting from a Cycling Passion

Follow your passions, the self-help gurus said. So I followed my passion for cycling to Alaska. I may not be the fastest or the skinniest guy on a bike, and I’m certainly not the richest. But where other people pay to ride, spending their hard-earned dollars on entry fees and bib shorts and bike vacations,…

Tour du Mont Blanc – mini podcast

Time for something a little different this month. Here comes an interview with Owen Williams, about his bikepacking trip around the mega classic Tour de Mont Blanc. It’s the first time trying something like this – so please forgive any of the rough edges! Check out the pics, and dip in to our mini podcasts…

Give Me a Mountain

Give me a mountain. Give me 30 miles of steady grade. Give me 80 pounds of bicycle and gear moved pedal stroke by pedal stroke up thousands of feet of elevation. Give me the Cascades, the Rockies, the Ozarks, the Appalachians. The steep ascents and the switchbacks. Life on a bicycle is not without climbing,…

Beers and Rafts, Sept.2017 Bikepacking Roundup

Its always a good time to go Bikepacking somewhere…  Here are are some very recent epic trips to inspire you. Croatia and the Adriatic Crest Route by Nicholas Carman on September 16, 2017 The Breaking Trail by Logan Watts on September 26, 2017 THE BIG GUIDE TO BIKEPACKING & TOURING IN EAST AFRICA by Logan Watts on August…

This Land Is Your Land: bikepacking or bust

[You might enjoy listening to this Woody Guthrie track whilst reading this blog] This week I have been in the forests of Sweden. I’ve been listening for wolves, and following the tracks of moose. I canoed down the Black River valley at sunrise looking for beaver, and saw long-horned roe deer prancing at dusk. This was…

C&O Canal Bike Touring

Finding Balance Through Bicycle Touring

I have a confession: I could probably count the number of days in the past year I’ve ridden a bike–I mean really clicked off some miles–on one hand. Life, as it so often does, has provided its fair share of roadblocks. I bought a fixer-upper first home, started a new job, got engaged. There is…

The guilty pleasure of credit card bikepacking

I received a phone call from my youngest sister in England this January. We don’t talk all that much, especially now we live on different continents. But she was calling because she had met someone special. His name was “Pedro.” Pedro, she assured me was handsome, fast, and blue. And she wanted us to go…

The S24O

Riding The Route of the Condor was one of those reckless bar-talk ideas that wouldn’t normally have got traction beyond the hangover. Like most beer-charged plans, it should have been added quickly to the graveyard of other wonderful yet fantastical ambitions such as unicycling the Pan American Highway, or cycle touring the Kamchatka Peninsula. Yet somehow…

Riding back to happiness

A few months ago I got into a bit of a rut. Not an all consuming black cloud rut. Just your typical too much work, not enough sleep kind of overcast feeling. Normally when I start to feel like this I self medicate with a long run in the mountains, or put some uplifting energy…

Joe Grant Interview: Self Propelled

Joe Grant cycled away from his front door in Gold Hill, Colorado this July with everything needed for a month of mountain travel. He travelled in “self propelled” style by bicycle and foot, linking up and summiting all of Colorado’s 14,000′ peaks along the way. The bikepacking racer set a new record of 31 days…

Biking beyond the edge of the village

In the weak afternoon sunshine of late September 2014, I fingered my British passport at the top of the Flathead Valley before rolling down towards the US border at Eureka, Montana. After three days alone in the only uninhabited valley of southern Canada, I was looking forward to some human interaction with the border guard….