Bikepacking + Packrafting = bikerafting
Excerpts from The Bikeraft Guide by Lizzy Scully & Steve “Doom” Fassbinder.
The Definition of Bikerafting
Simply put, bikerafting is 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.
Over the past 30 years, people have called the sport all kinds of things: hellbiking, nature biking, raft-packing, raft-bikepacking, pack-bike-packers and bike-packrafting. In recent years, consensus appears to have settled on the term “bikerafting.”
So people do carry motorcycles on packrafts and trail kayaks and other lightweight boats behind their bicycles these days. But we don’t consider them bikerafting adventures
While their trips are badass, motorcycles are motorized machines. And kayaks and canoes, no matter how lightweight, at this time don’t compare to a five- to eight-pound packraft. Plus, they aren’t rafts. We do consider people who bikeraft with road bikes and packrafts true bikerafters. They are, after all, embarking on a human-powered mode of transportation. Bikerafting does not only refer to backcountry travel.
Chapter 1: Hellbiking… It Wasn’t Called “Bikerafting” For a Reason - The 1980s
And what even constitutes bikerafting anyway?
People have been packing their gear onto two-wheeled, human-powered contraptions for well over a century. They’ve been traveling hundreds of miles across the backcountry by bicycle to buy and sell goods, explore new places more quickly and efficiently. Or they go just to bask in the glory of nature.
The birth of mountain bikes in the early 1970s made this easier to do, relatively speaking. But taking these bikes and lashing them onto small boats? Who started that, how did they do it, and why?
And what even constitutes “bikerafting,” anyway?
In 1987, during the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic, Ben Summit writes on “Classic Report” about Hank Timm and Randy Pitney, “They blew all the competition out of the water and the mountains with a collapsible canoe on mountain bikes, wheeling it east instead of west and winning by 17 hours on a route twice as long as everyone else’s.” Did this adventure qualify as “bikerafting”? Perhaps not, but it was a start.
Are Inflatable tubes & Bikes bikerafting? Hmmm…
What is bikerafting? Is it floating down New Zealand’s Whanganui River on inflated truck inner tubes? In 1988, three irreverent brothers—Paul, Simon and Jonathan Kennett—rode an abandoned, barely passable, never-pedaled “path.” And then they put their bikes onto their makeshift inner tube “raft” in order to float downriver to access their next doubletrack. Was this a key moment in the genesis of bikerafting? Probably not since few people have heard about this harebrained exploit.
Perhaps the earliest bike-packraft pairing we got word of was a 1982 solo adventure reported to us by, Rachel Light-Muller, a Student Conservation Association volunteer in the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. While working in the ranger
station one day, a man popped in and told her of his recent adventure.
“He had biked the White Rim, then floated the Colorado River with two ‘Kmart’ rafts, he in one, the bike in the other,” she explains. “He then hiked out via lower Red Lake Canyon Trail. Needless to say, I was quite impressed but didn’t get his name.”
After asking around, a local resident of Moab, Utah in the 1980s, Kathy Hands, now owner of the Mancos Brewing Company, confirmed she also heard of this solo adventurer. Unfortunately, neither she nor any of the other dozen people we reached out to could identify him.
Caption: Paul Adkins on our crossing of Alaska’s Chugach Mountains from Chitina to Cordova. He’s hauling the bike-on-boat up a 100-foot cut-bank on the Copper River at the mighty Bremner Dunes. Photo by Roman Dial.
The first recorded pairing of bikes & boats
Hunt-Bikerafting
The first recorded pairing of a packraft and bicycle we can document is Roman Dial’s 10-mile hunting, mountain biking mission to the Alaska Range. This early trip sparked dozens more of the same style trips. He dubbed these “Hellbiking.” In a 2001 Adventure Cyclist in 2001 Drew Walker, wrote about a trip he did with Roman to Talkeetna. Hellbiking, he explains, is when one treks, “across untracked wilderness, using only a topo map and compass, in a place too big to fit in the Lower 48.”
It’s the ultimate expression of bicycle power, he adds, whereby the rider relies on nothing but what he can carry through vast swaths of wilderness; in this case food, the bike, some key camp gear and a packraft.
However, at this point, the packraft, though indispensable, played a small part in the overall storytelling. It simply ferried gear and bikes across bodies of water.
ALASKA & THE SW BIKERAFTING
Roman did carry at least one packraft to
ferry gear on about a dozen Alaska adventures and even one trip to the American Southwest.
In 1988, he crossed the Wrangells from Nabesna to McCarthy using one boat for three people (250 miles). The packraft earned barely a mention in the story he subsequently wrote for Mountain Bike mag…
“Thirty-five miles that reached back over a glacial pass, through shin-deep snow, past crevasses, over hideous moraines, through bad brush, and across a river demanding multiple ferries of bikes, men and gear in a four-pound, five-foot nylon packraft…”
And he did two more bike trips carrying packrafts in 1989. He traveled the length of the Denali Fault in the Alaska Range riding on the glaciers (150 miles). As well, he paddled and pedaled from Whitmore Wash to Diamond Creek on the Grand Canyon. On the former trip, he again used only one boat for three people. But on the latter he actually also used packrafts to get downriver. Of that trip, David Roberts writes in his book, Escape Routes.
“In 1989, with two cronies he would prefer to keep anonymous, Roman Dial biked illegally from the north rim of the Grand Canyon down to the Colorado River, inflated a trio of packrafts, floated 45 miles over two days without a permit, then biked up to the south rim in the dark. ‘It was an outrageous trip [Roman told him]. On the river we ran into a group of guides doing their own trip. ‘You guys have a permit?’ they asked. ‘You bet we have a permit.’ They thought it was hilarious. ‘You better hurry,’ they said, ‘because the Perk Service is a day behind you.’ Because of that worry, it wasn't as much fun. We couldn't play in the rapids.’”
Conclusion: What is Bikerafting?
Did other explorers pair bikes and lightweight boats they could also carry in the ‘80s or even earlier? Maybe after this book comes out, unknown “bikerafters” will come out of the woodwork to share their stories in hopes of reaping belated glory and riches. (Well, glory, anyway).
Nevertheless, for the sake of historical record, we expound upon the following tales as the earliest known evidence of people putting two-wheeled contraptions on small, inflatable, floating thingies, and hereby enter them into the canon of bikerafting origin stories.
