In 2017, Steve “Doom” Fassbinder and Lizzy Scully purchased 35 high-desert acres at the confluence of Weber Canyon and the Mancos River Valley. They spent two years constructing their base camp—the Scullbinder Ranch Community Barn Lodge—from 75% repurposed materials, including barn wood from Kansas and flooring from Johnny Cash’s mom’s house, among hundreds of other things. The smell of sage permeates the grounds, glamping tents and the Lodge’s loft offer comfortable sleeping options, mountain bike trails line the property and migratory birds fly up the canyons each spring and fall. This Ranch that Doom and Lizzy are caretaking in this lifetime is the original home of the Ancestral Puebloans, and lies on the border of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park and Mesa Verde National Park. You can follow their progress on Instagram @Scullbinderranch.
Tours Now Scheduled for Fall 2021!
“Steve “Doom” Fassbinder is known for completing nearly impossible adventures, like biking and rafting 1,000 miles across Tajikistan. The guy has an uncanny ability to suffer-early in his career, he was a repeat 24-Hour mountain-bike-racing world champ. Since leaving the racing scene, Doom has made a name for himself by piecing together creative multi-day routes around the world that require mountain bikes, packrafts, and the occasional llama. The customized tours launch from Fassbinder’s 35-acre Scullbinder Ranch. One of the trips includes special access to nearby Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park, 125,000 acres of protected lands adjacent to popular Mesa Verde National Park, with a fraction of the visitors. You’ll bikepack for three days through the park’s dusty canyons, fording the Mancos River to meet Wolf, a Ute Mountain Ute guide who’ll take you up wooden ladders into Native cliff dwellings. The tour finishes with a 40-mile gravel grind back to the ranch, hitting tiny downtown Mancos, where a craft beer on the outdoor patio at Mancos Brewing Company awaits. Because what’s a bike ride without a post-ride beer?” ~Outside Magazine, “27 Epic Trips You Should Start Planning for Now!”
Men’s Journal: “Chasing Doom” Thanks to Graham Averill and Men’s Journal for featuring one of our fall 2020 “Doom Tours” in their latest issue. As soon as it’s available online, we’ll share with y’all. Want to know what a burly tour with Doom and Four Corners Guides looks like? Grab a copy this month, April…
Illustration by Jeremie Lamart, a The Bikeraft Guide contributor. How-To Do a Self-Supported Packrafting Trip on the Grand Story by Lizzy Scully. Photos by Steve Fassbinder. Illustration by Jeremie Lamart. Please note we do not guide the Grand and will never guide the Grand. However, we can teach you many of the skills you need…
The Ideal Multi-Tool? What Boat Should I Get? Best Bike for Bikerafting? In this two-part series, we are taking excerpts from our DOOM Zoom Package presentation on January 29th, 2021, and turning them into two podcasts, with some enhanced re-recordings (since we had such terrible technical difficulties during the actual presentation). This first 45-minute episode…
A Short Film About Rock Climbing & Bikerafting Southern Utah, by Steve “Doom” Fassbinder A Foolz Errand: Bikeraft-Rock Climbing the Southern Utah Desert from Four Corners Guides on Vimeo. A Fool’s Errand: Catharsis, Mud and Tears in the Utah Desert When was the last time you went on a road trip without some app telling…
Diné Youth Go Bikerafting! It was a quiet dusty drive up the Moki Dugway. We passed Kane Gulch Ranger Station with the last of the evening’s sun thrusting the Bears Ears in full view when it dawned on me that I had no idea what we were about to embark on for the weekend. Caravanning…
Storytime With Doom: La Perouse Glacier & Roman’s Little Boat Hello and welcome to The Bikeraft Guide, The Ultimate How-To Guide, History Of & Wild Adventures Stories About Bikerafting. I’m Lizzy Scully, the host of this podcast and the co-author of the book, along with Steve “Doom” Fassbinder. This community multi-media storytelling project includes film,…
Lower Dirty Devil Bikerafting Flash Tour! This post was originally published on Doom’s blog April 12, 2011. Four Corners Guides now runs Dirty Devil Bikerafting tours, along with bikerafting on nearby Lake Powell. Want to read more Storytime with Doom tales, check out, “Foolz Tour: Aka Desert Therapy.” Want to join us on a trip…
Booked Thru October! We’ve been so busy! Steve and I both took separate vacations at the end of August, me on a weeklong, 150-mile bikepacking loop tour from Mancos, back to Mancos, through the La Plata mountains (see photos & other photos) and Steve packrafting some sweet backcountry terrain in Idaho for a week. But,…
Multi-sport adventurer, filmmaker and Kiwi, Deane Parker, recently came out with a new bikerafting film, “Forgotten Highways,” which was featured on Bikepacking.com. This short film documents a six-day journey during which Deane and his three partners explore New Zealand’s Whanganui River and learn about its history. Deane is one of, “The Bikeraft Guide,” authors. We…
Four Corners Guides partners with Dzil Ta’ah Adventures to run Navajo Youth Bikepacking & Bikerafting Series this fall Dzil Ta’ah Adventures and Four Corners Guides are taking the plunge! We’ve started the process of getting our Navajo Youth Bikepacking and Bikerafting program up and running. We’ll be doing a series of three trips this fall,…
Bikepacking is the synthesis of mountain biking and minimalist camping, where you explore large, contiguous landscapes via singletrack trails, gravel and dirt roads, carrying only essential items you need to survive. To learn more, visit BikepackingRoots.org or Bikepacking.com.
Packrafts are lightweight, inflatable boats used to “turn the blue lines on maps into trails,” as Luc Mehl, author of, “The Packraft Handbook” says. Because they weigh less than 10 pounds, it’s easy to carry them in a backpack or on a bike in order to pass through or get to remote landscapes that would otherwise be inaccessible.
So what is bikerafting exactly? Simply put, it’s a human-powered, multi-sport adventure activity whereby you use bicycles and packrafts, carrying one on the other depending on the terrain you’re crossing. Regardless of the length of a trip–single-day urban explorations or multi-day backcountry missions–if you ride a bike and then switch to amphibious mode and paddle a packraft across a waterway, while carrying that bike, you are bikerafting.
