***If you would like to join this ride but it is cost or transportation is prohibitive or you cannot afford all the gear, please let us know.

We’re heading up to Northern Arizona for our summer advanced bikepacking trip. This will be a 3 day trip traversing around 45-50 miles a day to cover the 124 mile loop and make a shorter last day. We’re picking this time of year as it will be a perfect time to escape the long summer heat of Tucson. Flagstaff this time of year is wonderful with the coming fall in the air and usually past the monsoons.

This will be a challenging ride with plenty of climbing and rough terrain.

For the rougher roads out there, we recommend Mountain bikes with 2.23″ tires or bigger. The fire roads can be deceivingly rough and there will be some singletrack. While this ride can be done on a big tired gravel bike, it does get chunky though and a front-suspension hard tail is likely the preferable bike of choice for most cyclists.

There are also relatively few resupply points for water and none for food. We’ll pass through some cattle and storage tanks, but there won’t be any stores until we get back to Flagstaff. There will be no reliable water between Mile 53 and 97 (sunset Crater) so we must keep that in mind.

We recommend carrying capacity at a minimum of 6 liters of water.

With our 8am depart time on Friday, we recommend driving up the night before. We’ll working on organizing car pooling as possible.

We will be contacting everyone who signs up for the ride to make sure they are prepared for the challenge. Please sign up if you plan on joining us.

NonPremium RideWithGPS users can get access to premium features for this route and other Campfire Cycling routes.

• Go to CampfireCycling’s Ride with GPS page.
• Click Join Now.
• If not already signed in, sign in to your Ride with GPS Account.
• OR Setup a Free Basic Ride with GPS Account.
• You will now be able to access this route and our Route Library.

***We strongly recommend all participants who do not have offline access to the route on their phone or other navigation devise, setup a free RideWithGPS account and use the above process to access the route and download it to their phone.

Protect the land/area that we recreate on. We will be on the traditional lands stewarded and still lived in by the Havasupai, Hopi, Pueblo, Dine (Navajo) Hohokam, and Ndee (western Apache) People’s

Full original Route details on BikepackingRoots.com.

John Schilling’s Recent Ride and Writeup of the Loop

Another Good Story of the Route