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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…

Bikes of the Klondike Gold Rush

“White Man: He sit down, walk like hell.” That was how one Native Alaskan described Ed Jesson riding a fixed gear bicycle down the frozen Yukon River in the winter of 1900. How a man with practically no supplies and the simplest of bikes could ride over a thousand miles in the dead of an…

Some of My Favorite Things

Gore-tex that doesn’t go damp, Treads that don’t wear flat, Chains that never skip or squeak, These are some of my favorite things. When you ride for long enough, you settle into habits and gear. Maybe it’s a brand of socks that don’t bind, or bib shorts that don’t chafe, or gloves that keep your…

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 Bike-Friendliest Little Town in America

I’m sitting in Bites on Broadway in Skagway, Alaska, a hundred-year-old saloon-cum-coffee house, watching tourists walk down the wooden boardwalks. For every dozen tourists, there’s a local guide biking past. The guides look lean compared to the typically tubby cruise ship passengers. They ride up to the post office mailbox across Broadway to drop off…

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…

The search for the perfect touring bike

It has taken me thirteen previous posts before I got round to writing this one. So far I’ve mainly described some of the rides I’ve been lucky enough to take through the wilds of Patagonia, the smoking volcanoes of the Atacama Desert or the bear country of the Great Divide. The bike itself has been…

The Utility of Folding Bicycles

It’s cute, but is it practical? That’s the question many folding bikes elicit. Sure, it looks neat, but how well does it actually function? Form follows function. Ergo, the form of a folding bike should follow its function. Folding bikes are designed to be compactly carried and stored in other vehicles, but still provide reliable…

Pimp my Patagonia Bikepack

Last month I wrote about my bikepacking expectations. We were about to head down towards Chilean Patagonia on our retro-fitted 1980s Thorn touring tandem. In the weeks building up to the trip I had done away with the bulky Ortlieb panniers and kitted it out with slicker, lighter-weight, snugger fit and generally far more fancy…

Tandem Bikepacking Expectations

For a long time it seemed that boiled-down living couldn’t get much simpler. Anytime I wanted to travel, all I had to do was clamp those brightly coloured, slightly unwieldy, boxes onto the side of my bicycle and I was away. I bought my shiny red panniers in 201o. Today they have dust and holes…

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…

Rolling Recumbent, Part 1: The Utility of Recumbents

Recumbents. You’ve seen those oddball, laid-back bikes being ridden by slightly goofy guys (yeah, it’s usually guys). They’re smiling. They’re waving. And they’re looking suspiciously comfortable. Recumbents are practically the opposite of everything that bicycling is supposed to be about. There’s no crying in baseball, and there’s blessedly little comfort in bicycling. Right? Well, maybe…

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…