Making bags

Although I have stated that I am a die-hard pannier fan at heart, I have taken to frame bags being much better for off road travel.  I have owned a Epic Designs frame bag for about a year, and it really does work well for carrying gear.

I wanted to try something a little custom, as I still have a "unique" feature in mind that I am trying to work out.  For Christmas, my wife and I ventured up to Saskatoon where she is from, and stayed with her mother for 9 days.  Well......  her mother is an accomplished quilter with a few different sewing machines, so we purchased around 10 yards of assorted coated nylons and decided to give it a try.

First, I started by cutting some shapes out of a scrap cotton fabric to make sure we had our patterns figured out right.  As you can see, my trusty friend El Mariachi is my companion that I am making these bags for.

After making sure they fit properly with the proper amount of extra for the seams, I transferred the pattern to the good coated nylon material that I wanted to use.

Cut out all the panels and sides......

And did a little bit of double checking......

I then went to make all the "small parts" for the bag.  Cutting out the panel parts was actually the easy part.  Making all the small straps, reflective piping, zippers and baffles is time consuming and tedious.

I also made a second set of everything while I was set up.   The blue bag is made from a very light, almost waterproof ripstop nylon.  It feels like tent material with a rubberized layer.  The yellow bag is made from the same exact material as kayaking dry bags.  Probably a bit overkill, but the fabric place had it on closeout for $7 a yard.  Cant pass that up, plus it is sturdy enough that it functioned as the pattern too, hence all the writing on the parts.

A few more physical checks to make sure the parts fit the bag and the bag fits the frame.....

And we have two frame bags, ready for sewing.

Water

For my trip, Water will be a large hurdle to overcome.  I will be flying out there, so pre-setting water caches is not really possible.  Nor is it really what I want to do when trying to be self-sufficient in the backcountry.

So I will choose the filter and/or carry route.  I felt that 340oz is probably the most that I would carry at any given time, being that amount would last me for 2 days (plus safety), which is the longest time I can see being away from a water source, this will be during the stretch from Schafer Trail all the way around until I get back to Hwy 313.

Back from my climbing / camping / kayak days, I became a fan of the MSR Miniworks EX filter.  I have owned this for about 6 or 7 years now, and it is still going perfect.  It is rebuildable and cleanable with just your fingers, and has cleaned water from the silty Colorado in the past with little effort.  This makes it the first obvious choice for taking with.  Woohoo!  456 grams added to the gear list, its the first item!

Next, I need a system to carry this water.  I will put a drinking bladder in my frame bag, a drinking bladder in my backpack, and one storage bladder in the frame bag as well.  For these bladders, I chose the MSR CloudLiner 100oz bladders and the MSR DromLite 140oz storage bag.  The reason I chose these bags is that the screw-lid interface was designed to work with the MiniWorks filter, so there is a nice tight design with no adapters or hoses between the filter and receptacle.  Also, when I talk about frame bags, there is a little trick I am trying to figure out that will make this feature more attractive.

The 4 liter DromLite is 145 grams and the CloudLiners are 176 grams each.  They will weigh much more when wet.  This brings me to 953 grams for the water system, just a hair over 2 lbs.

When I read back through this post, it sure seemed like I was a shill for MSR product.  I assure you, I am not, and I purchased these products with my own money and have no affiliation with MSR.  I purely chose them on the past performance I have received from their products, and the usability between the pieces.

Where?

Someone asked where this is.

Well, I recently acquired TopoFusion, and with the help of the functionality in that program, I was able to stitch together partial GPX tracks for Kokopelli's Trail, Porcupine Rim, the White Rim trail and Gemini Bridges trail, as well as draw in the road sections.

These trails are near Fruita, CO and Moab, UT.  While Moab can be a bit of a cliche for a mountain bike trip, I have spent a total combined of about 4 months of my life riding there, so I feel as if I know these trails decent.  This will help on my first trip to have a decent familiarity with the area and trail types.  Also, because I want to ride in April and there will (probably) still be snow here in Minnesota.

There you have it!

(thanks to ScottM for making this great software.  I have been trolling the software sites for over a year since I bought my Garmin 605 to find one of them that could stitch and draw GPX tracks.  I found this one, and it was very inexpensive to boot!)

The Ride

This is what it is all about.  The Big Ride.  I will invest hours of my time over the next 5 months planning, making and gathering to be successful on this first big trip.

288 miles.  26,496 feet of climbing.  5 days.

I can't wait.

What am I gonna write about?

What exactly will this blog be?  Well to start with, you can see below that I like to carry gear.  Lots and lots of gear.  But because of a few friends, and a drive to try some new trails, I will be making an effort to try lightweight "bikepacking" this year on a few different routes.

Rather than copy someone else's gear list, I am going to try and learn as much as I can, make some educated decisions, and pick gear here based on what little I know about bikes, my experience with loaded touring, and some info thrown in from my rock climbing and sea kayaking days.  Strangely, there is actually a lot of shared gear between these sports and bikepacking now.

Rather than just provide a gear list and a route, I am going to work through this one piece at a time, and try and "explore" my way to a cohesive 20-25lb package for my first solo bikepacking trip in April.

The old me

I was digging through some photos recently.  This is a good representation of the old me.  This was in Ireland, 2004.

Goodbye panniers.  I am nervous, but welcome the thought of travelling 60lbs lighter