Bikepacking Vermontshire: Part 8

October 02, 2024

For this year's bike tour, Meg and I rode our ATBs from Littleton, New Hampshire, in a loop around Vermont, and back to New Hampshire. Along the way, we checked out some new spots, and visited some old favourites. We connected it all with a collection of class 4 roads, singletrack, dirt roads, and -- occasional -- pavement.

On the eighth day, we rested. OK, I took a ride up to Linda's Lookout on a bunch of local black diamond town trails. And we went to Wildbloom again to catch up with friends (and hit up a local food truck before they close for the season). But we mostly rested.

But on the ninth day, we took our other bikes -- the touring ones -- over to East Burke, Vermont, for some dirt road (and unintentional class 4 road) riding. The weather was perfect, the skies were blue, the tourists were all heading home by early afternoon, and after a week of riding, we still hadn't flushed all of our bicycle riding needs out of our systems.

So we did a little loop on some dirt roads, singletrack, and class 4. We stopped by the Lyndonville Bagel Depot for breakfast. We grabbed some caffeine (and obligatory delicious donuts) at the best coffee place in the area, the Coffee Cabin (and learned that not only will they remain open all winter -- they're starting a basic diner in the same building as the Orange Rind!). I look forward to sampling Becky and Logan's take on the Crunch Wrap -- if their donuts and coffee are any indication, it'll be serious competition to the Crunch Wraps at Ranch Camp and Mad Taco in NYS.

We wound up on only one class 4 road. It was a blast.

Halfway through our ride, we enjoyed a rest stop at Dirt Church Brewing. A couple of beers, some food truck wings and fries later, we continued along.

We only hit one flood-destroyed bridge, which was easy to route around.

Only one dog approached us. Fortunately he was nice.

We finished up our ride -- and our 2024 Autumn holiday -- with a spectacular sunset at The Hub. Meg took some time to watercolor the view; I started work on some blog posts.

It was a very good day.

Conclusion

So, overall how did this trip go?

Some good, some bad. Our routing was a little ambitious, particularly for the first couple of days, considering we didn't build in any rest stops (because there weren't any!) and we were wild camping.

Wild camping went well. We found campsites each night. However, at the end of a long day of riding, a $30-40 campsite doesn't seem like a massive expense. And it's nice to know that you're unlikely to be disturbed by any animals or Creatures of the Night.

Our Moonshiners worked well, and except for Meg's (known, anticipated) brake pad issue, and my inadequately-tightened rack, nothing malfunctioned on us. But even though the Moonshiners are really fun rigs for singletrack and class 4, they feel like overkill on dirt and pavement, especially loaded. The 1x gearing is also just... not as easy as Meg's 3x touring bike setup. Throw a load on that, and some grades become really unpleasant to pedal up. I think we'll lean towards more touring-style trips in the future -- dirt roads, class 4, and light singletrack are fine! But pavement is an unfortunate necessity, and our touring bikes are just more fun across all of those different, essential surfaces. From now on, we'll reserve the Moonshiners for their strengths: day trips where we want to ride miles and miles of singletrack and dirt roads, overnighters on singletrack and class 4 roads, and of course all of our mountain biking. Because mountain biking is silly.

Weather is always unpredictable, but we got a pretty awful draw this trip. Easily our worst ever, with two days of serious rainfall totalling multiple inches across almost our entire route. I'm grateful that we didn't get soaked either of the first two days -- some of that class 4 would have been damn near impassible -- but two days in a row of rain really sucks. It definitely sours your spirits and detracts from the ride. That's probably a big part of why we didn't even try to stay a seventh night in Vermont; some of our gear was still wet, and we just wanted a warm, dry bed and a shower.

We had a lot of great social interaction this trip. Lots of chats with business owners, beertenders, campsite managers, other bikepackers, and locals. When I'm out on the bike, it's becoming increasingly easy to spontaneously chat with random people. I wish I was better at that skill in 'real life', but maybe this is a good way to practice.

Finally: I don't really understand how bikepacking works. Our other bikes are more like traditional touring rigs, even if we take them on a lot of rugged terrain. Touring rigs traditionally use panniers, which are easy to put on and take off. We both used smaller panniers for this trip, and -- as our initial gear struggles show -- we had a hard time trimming down our equipment to fit into those small containers. We didn't bring any of our cooking equipment. Sleeping supplies, water, and the bear bag took up at least 80% of our space. I suspect most bikepackers don't bother worrying about bears, but that feels irresponsible to me. And when autumn nightly lows can easily drop below freezing in Vermont, I'm not comfortable bringing my smaller summer sleeping bag. So I suspect most bikepackers omit a lot of safety gear for camping, bears (and critters like racoons), and get by with the smallest containers of water possible. Oh, and they probably don't bring many changes of clothes -- if they do, they're probably not bringing a full set of rain gear, or a change of shoes (Meg eliminated her sandals to save space even with our massive bags, by bikepacking standards). That doesn't even include all the equipment you need to fix issues with your bike, purify water, keep yourself warm at night, and batteries, headlamps, and more. God forbid you try to pack a book or a notebook.

All in all, I don't want to be a pack rat when it comes to my supplies. But our touring rigs are already pretty scant. It's hard to imagine responsibly packing much less than this. The only thing I could reasonably eliminate is water, but there are plenty of places where you'd have to pack more anyway because you don't have constant freshwater stream access like we have in Vermont.

So we'll probably plan a bike tour next, though I'm sure we'll route on some crazy terrain and bushwhack at some point. Maybe we'll do something on one of the Eurovelo routes. Perhaps we'll try Japan, or South Korea, or New Zealand. Maybe we'll finally get to Ireland. Or maybe we'll finally devote to a multi-month tour in the next few years. All I know is, we've really dialed in our preferences and abilities, and there's so much to look forward to.