Bikepacking; camping on wheels

What do you get when you combine biking and backpacking? You get what is widely referred to as bikepacking. An activity that I learned about from friends who’ve done it and some internet surfing. 

The idea of it had me intrigued, and I had the desire to take a trip of my own, but there was one problem: a lack of experience and gear made the idea feel too far out of my reach. 

This is just the thing Outdoor Programs at Utah State seeks to assist with and make easier to access according to trip leaders Anna Rupper and Junlin “Dolphin” Qian. 

It was just a few weeks ago that I had been talking about going bikepacking with a friend of mine. Neither of us had experience or the proper gear, but we were going to try anyway. 

A few days after that, the OP announced a bikepacking trip, and I thought to myself, “This is perfect — we have to make it on this trip.” 

Make it we did. We signed up without much discussion, and from there, excitement but also nerves built in anticipation. 

What were the conditions going to be like? Will I pack the right things? Will I be able to do it? How am I going to organize all I need into just a few bags? These are just some of the questions I had prior to the trip. 

A $50 fee secured us food, gear and transportation to and from our starting point. The trip leaders also recommended we bring any gear we already own and that we would figure out how to make it all work. 

Before we embarked on our bikepacking adventure, a pre-trip meeting was held to discuss trip details, rig bikes and get to know each other a little bit. 

Rupper, the main guide for the trip, said in her initial email that this trip was a first of its kind for the OP, so the pre-trip meeting would be based around planning. 

According to Rupper, she first proposed a bikepacking trip a year and a half ago and would go on to propose two more.  At the time of the first, she hadn’t even bike-packed but now, equipped with experience of her own, she felt confident it could work and they could pull it off.

“I started off having a really big dream of doing a multi-day bikepacking trip through the desert,” Rupper said. However, she mentioned difficulties with acquiring permits for specific areas. 

After playing with a few ideas, she eventually came to the realization she would need to start small.  

“Rather than putting together an elaborate, multi-day bikepacking trip, I opted for an overnight in the mountains nearby, which ended up being perfect,” Rupper said. 

On the night of the pre-trip meeting, I entered the rental shop and sat down at a table to fill out some paperwork. There was an air in the room that screamed, “We don’t know each other, and we’re doing new things,” which is to be expected when you’re doing new things with new people. 

Following an icebreaker, we discussed the route we wanted to take and some applications that are helpful in route planning. 

We discussed each of our comfort and skill levels to gauge an optimal route, which I felt to be a beneficial and preferable way to pick routes. 

Rupper had brainstormed some routes prior to the meeting, so we picked from some she had cooked up beforehand. We landed on a route that was around 10 miles, which gave us the option to drop into town or explore if we wanted to. 

The next item on our agenda was food. We carefully customized our menu which consisted of Mountain House freeze-dried meals, various fruit, charcuterie options and many snacks. 

Rupper, who does not refer to herself as a pro bikepacker but is a longtime biker, wrote up a guide which we reviewed at the meeting. The guide, titled, “Bikepacking 101 By: Anna (by no means a professional),” included gear, steps for how to prepare for a bikepacking trip, how to route plan, the many methods to bike rigging, some essentials and more. 

To close, we worked on bike rigging, which has no one singular approach. Depending on the bike and the available gear, it can look any number of ways. 

By the end of the meeting, the air of newness and the nervous feelings transformed into excitement and a desire to learn about this activity and those around me. 

I left the meeting as adequately prepared as I could be for something I’ve never done and feeling much more solid about the logistics. 

The night before the trip, I attempted to pack as light as I could without losing essential items, especially considering the weather at the time of the trip: warm bordering on hot in the day and chilly bordering on cold in the night. Utah is tough that way. 

On Friday, Oct. 11, I parked my car at the old OP shop by Maverik Stadium and I went to class. The day felt like a blur of wrapping up last minute tasks and waiting for our 2 p.m. rendezvous. 

Around 1:30 p.m., we met to pull everything together. At this point, we distributed the food and Rupper and Qian helped with some last minute rigging. 

The main gear rigging that needed to happen consisted of dry bags and straps, which we loaded with our things and attached to our bike bars. We also strapped other items as needed. Rupper said we had to get creative because the OP doesn’t currently have designated bikepacking gear. 

Racks, pannier bags and frame bags can help make rigging bikes for trips like this much easier. A friend of mine let me borrow a frame bag and other smaller bags which made packing more straightforward and ergonomic. 

I talked with Qian about the unique qualities of bikepacking. 

“I think bikepacking — sharing responsibility among a group, going out together and helping each other — is what really makes bikepacking pretty fascinating,” Qian said. 

Qian mentioned this was a quality that can occur in other outdoor activities but is emphasized with bikepacking. 

Once we got everything squared away, we loaded the bikes and hit the road. 

We reached our starting point in Avon, Utah just under an hour later and proceeded to hit the trail. 

The elevation gain was expected to be around 1,500 feet, which we intentionally chose. All members of the group aside from the trip leaders were new to bikepacking so we picked a route with relatively chill distance and incline. Believe it or not, 30 pounds or more of gear does make a difference in your ride. 

Though the trail wasn’t the most intense, we still ran into a few challenges. Minor bike issues and rigging faults made for an uphill battle, but it didn’t stop us completely. We persisted onwards and upwards towards our destination. 

A few things surprised me about the trail. I took the first two thirds of it well. I didn’t really feel it much. The extra weight on my handlebars was much more visually concerning than it was practically. It made no noticeable difference in my ride. 

Towards the end, the gravel also had some larger pieces in it. The extra texture in the trail in combination with my physical fatigue offered a considerable challenge for me personally. It wasn’t anything I couldn’t do, however. 

For the most part, we were able to bike as a group with the occasional break to rest and regroup. We trekked on and not too long after the chunky rock section reached the summit. Upon arrival, we got a beautiful view of Eden, Utah and surrounding mountains. 

A quick ride down and hike up through some trees got us to the campsite, our destination for the evening. 

For the rest of the night we chatted, laughed, plotted, snacked, feasted and got to know each other as we sat around a fire. 

This is where I’d say the conversations got the most interesting. 

The seven of us on the trip come from Utah, Missouri, Wisconsin, China and Turkey, which brought a wide range of backgrounds. We talked about anything from the culture of our places of origin to the culture of Utah where we reside and study currently to what we would do in obscure hypothetical situations to things that are going on in our daily lives. 

In hopes of spotting the Aurora Borealis, a few of us stayed up and chatted around the fire but eventually surrendered to the chill of the night. 

One of my favorite parts about being outside with other people is the essentially undivided time to really get to know people. It’s not a time we get much of unless we make it happen. Camping often strips away a lot of the comforts many people have in their daily lives, creating an interesting environment in which to connect with people. 

The next morning we took things slower than we had originally planned to. Six of the seven of us shed our gear and departed from camp just before 10 a.m. en route to Eden for a little tour of the town. 

While in Eden, we hit a café for a coffee and/or sweet treat. After a time there, we topped off our waters at a local Maverik. On the way into town, someone spotted an estate sale, which we stopped at on our way back. 

Not only did we peruse the sale, but we took a minute to check out the trampoline on the property. 

By this point, it was about lunch time, so we biked to a park to eat. A collaborative bike-themed charcuterie board made for a fun, pre-lunch activity. 

After a while at the park, snacking and sampling different charcuterie combinations, we hit the road again. We biked up through Eden, campsite bound. 

The route between the campsite and town was a brisk ride down in the morning but a much less brisk ride up. In fact, Rupper and I ended up hiking most of the way up. 

The warm bordering on hot day temperatures were a bit brutal as we hiked up the gravel path back to the campsite. 

A lot of biking, from what I’ve picked up on, is knowing when to push through and when to walk, which I reckon has applications in life as well. 

We each rolled into the campsite at our own pace, packed up and began to make our way back to where our journey began just about a day earlier. After we stopped for a group photo, we started down the mountain. 

The bike ride down to our motor vehicles was a lot of fun, but it was done as quickly as it began. I could say the same thing about the whole trip. 

Back in town, we cleaned and organized gear together, and then we parted. 

That feeling — once a feeling of newness — now replaced with a feeling of connection and familiarity, lingered as we said our goodbyes. Many hugged and some exchanged social information. 

I chatted with Rupper and Qian post-trip about the future of bikepacking at USU. 

“I think starting is kind of hard. And with the OP program, with the gear rental and everything, it makes it easier. It gives people a push start and a jump start, to get going and get into a new thing they want to look into. It’s important that the OP keep pushing and keep doing it,” Qian said. 

“I hope that, if not through the OP, there will be a community in Logan that wants to do some bigger biking trips and create a biking community within Logan that can dream big,” Rupper said. 

I can now say that I’ve successfully made it out and back on a bikepacking trip. The confidence that comes from that is huge. I also understand more firsthand just how much goes into these trips. 

Of the many things I acquired over the trip, a reinvigorated feeling of excitement for bikepacking is one of the most important — a feeling I hope to continue to build and explore in the future.