What is "bikepacking"?

[Audax67]

I think it's really a word that competitive cyclists who scorn cycle touring use when they want to go cycle touring.

... or in fact any that think they're too cool for the traditional images of cycle touring.

"Cool" is the word I needed. The ones who never even glance when they pass me in the other direction.

[al_yrpal]

Yes, cool is the word. Very difficult to consider Camping if you only have tiny frame bags. Never seen any bikepackers here living 50 yards from Sustrans 3, but folk with panniers and camping gear every day for the last two years.

Its not a movement...

Al

[Bmblbzzz]

Is this a bikepacker?


Is this a bikepacker?

Note that he has a Carradice saddlebag.

Both photos from https://bikepacking.com/plog/not-even-h ... er-divide/.

[Nearholmer]

Its not a movement.

Using the same parochial test, I’d say then that traditional touring barely exists any more, and that bike-packing is definitely a movement.

(I live within yards of NCN6 and 51, both of which I use daily, and right next to the GU canal. I see about two trad tourers a year, but quite a few singleton or small group bike packers along the canal.)

I guess that to form a valid judgement, we’d both have to get out of our own back yards.

[rareposter]

"Cool" is the word I needed. The ones who never even glance when they pass me in the other direction.

Why would anyone need to look at you or, conversely, why would you be upset if they didn't?

This is getting perilously close to the "I wave at everyone and some people don't wave back" complaint that pops up regularly...
https://road.cc/content/blog/no-i-dont- ... sts-298943

[mattheus]

Is this a bikepacker?


Is this a bikepacker?

Note that he has a Carradice saddlebag.

Both photos from https://bikepacking.com/plog/not-even-h ... er-divide/.

Proof that panniers = more smiles!

[Nearholmer]

Although, unlike some here it would seem, I both believe that bikepacking exists distinct from trad touring, and that it has a groundswell of support (I.e. it’s a movement), I have always been deeply sceptical of sticking-out-the-back seat-post bags, which seem to me to defy engineering logic, and am watching with interest as racks and panniers stealthily re-establish themselves as the practical answer.

Already seat-post bags have evolved spines and stabilising legs, and now mini-panniers are being attached to those legs, and super-minimal racks costing ten times as much as not-minimal ones that could be made minimal given ten minutes with a hacksaw are coming onto the market from the US.

Give it another year, and racks and panniers (small ones, not the ones big enough to use as sleeping accommodation) will emerge triumphant in this Darwinian struggle between species of bike luggage.

[plancashire]

I rode a short distance behind a bloke with a long black wrapped thing swaying behind his bike saddle. At the lights I noticed some bags tied into his frame triangle and on the bars. We'd just passed someone about to leap into our path, so I has pinged my bell. He looked round at me and made as if to let me pass. I explained that the ping was for the leaper. At the lights I ascertained that he had no bell and explained that it is a legal requirement in Germany. He pointed to his cluttered bars and said "no space" after we'd established he spoke no German. I pointed to my bell mount among the steering spacers. "Ah" he said "I'll get one when I get home".

For me bikepacking seems to be a way to force a bike not designed for luggage to carry fairly lightweight wrapped bags of stuff with the fixings getting in the way or rubbing the paint off. It's a bodge which may have advantages off road. I don't go off road, so I have only ever seen the kit on the road and there it just looks clunky. I still remember a pair of bikepackers who parked opposite my wife and me at a cafe. They had been most ingenious in finding ways to attach things to the bikes which were never designed to carry luggage - gaffer tape, bits of pipe insulation to stop rubbing, zip ties, bungees - but no baler twine.

BTW - my handlebar bag fixes to a neat bracket which takes up little space. It can't be bikepacking as there's no velcro or straps and it is removable in a jiffy.

[Nearholmer]

Strapped-on luggage certainly re-emerged when people began to use bikes that weren’t designed for luggage to tour over terrain that the bikes that were designed for luggage couldn’t sensibly negotiate. Off-road touring on MTBs basically. I think the US army using MTBs for reconnaissance and special operations used similar gubbins and played a part in the re-emergence too.

It was definitely a re-emergence, in that if you look at pictures of very early, 1890s, bicycling explorers, and military cyclists, they used strap-on luggage, dangling things from all over their bikes, because that was all they had. Bags filling the diamond of the frame seem to have been an early invention, but panniers were early too, carried over from horses, of course.

Australian explorer Ted Reichenbach in 1914. Familiar at all?

[plancashire]

...
(I live within yards of NCN6 and 51, both of which I use daily, and right next to the GU canal. I see about two trad tourers a year, but quite a few singleton or small group bike packers along the canal.)
...

Here in Germany I see lots of bikes with panniers and traditional luggage, almost never bikepackers, but then I don't cycle off road, although I do use gravel tracks.

I wonder if bikepacking is more popular in the UK because road cycling is so unpleasant compared with Germany? Motorised traffic and lack of infrastructure has forced people on bikes off the road, where panniers have some disadvantages.

[rareposter]

For me bikepacking seems to be a way to force a bike not designed for luggage to carry fairly lightweight wrapped bags of stuff with the fixings getting in the way or rubbing the paint off. It's a bodge which may have advantages off road. I don't go off road, so I have only ever seen the kit on the road and there it just looks clunky.

There's an element of that but equally it gives a lot more flexibility as to where and how you mount stuff.

On a touring bike you're largely riding with a fixed rack and panniers so there's limited flexibility - everything sort of has to mount "here" and "here".

With bikepacking, while there's certainly an element of bodging to get things to fit, it's possible to come up with far more options to mount kit on and around the bike with the advantage that it all comes off pretty quickly to leave you with a "naked" bike suitable once again for its intended purpose.

[Nearholmer]

TBH, I have not the faintest idea which is more popular in the UK, and I strongly suspect that nobody else knows for sure either, which was the point I was trying to make.

And, given that “trad” and “bike-packing” overlap to some degree, I’m not sure how you’d ever find out. If a person fly-camps and sleeps in a bin bag they’re pretty surely a bike-packer, but beyond that it’s possibly down to self-identification.

[PH]

Riding and chatting to someone over the weekend who was telling me about a 15 day tour on the Himalayas. Two tour guides. a driver and cook for the party of 15, some tented accommodation in large tents erected before they arrived, or hotels, all meals and snacks provided, luggage transfer.... you get the idea. Cycle touring? I can't think of a better way to describe it.
It made me think what an all encompassing term it is. Maybe all bikepacking it touring but not all touring is bikepacking, we should stop seeing them as competing terminologies, rather as bikepacking being a style withing the broader term.

[Vorpal]

I think of it as an American term for cycle touring. It's fairly logical, on that basis.

Backpacking = long distance walking, or travelling whilst carrying your possessions in a large backpack / rucksack

Bikepacking = long distance cycling or travelling whilst carrying your possessions upon a bicycle

[Audax67]

"Cool" is the word I needed. The ones who never even glance when they pass me in the other direction.

Why would anyone need to look at you or, conversely, why would you be upset if they didn't?

This is getting perilously close to the "I wave at everyone and some people don't wave back" complaint that pops up regularly...
https://road.cc/content/blog/no-i-dont- ... sts-298943

That's about right. City-dwellers, I reckon. 'Nuff said.

ETA: