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!”
Intermediate Packrafting: What I learned Photos, videos & story by Spencer Harding. Thanks to Spencer for reviewing the Four Corners Guides Intermediate Packrafting course he took July 2023 🙏🏼 For years I’ve stumbled my way through water trips. On my first trip packrafting I took a bad swim, with my camera in hand no less.…
Story & video by Waldo Aguayo. Photos by Andrew Burr. rolling a packraft Most packrafters or people who know about these boats wonder if it is possible to perform the famous “roll” in packraft. As the owner of a guide service (Scouting Rios Packrafting School) and an avid Chilean Packrafter (there aren’t many of us!),…
Read Part 1 What’s the ideal bikerafting gear? How do you choose the bikerafting gear you’re going to use? Is there an ideal set up? These are tough questions to answer, especially considering there are dozens of bikepacking gear companies in the world today! There’s really no ideal set up, and what you use totally…
Read Part 2. Bike-Packrafting Gear, Part 1: Bikerafting Bikes What’s the ideal bikerafting bike? Yikes, how to answer that?! We get a lot of questions about what kind of bikes one should use for bikerafting. As always, the answer depends on a lot of things, which we highlight below. There’s really no right or wrong…
An excerpt from, “Hellbiking,” Chapter 1 of The Bikeraft Guide, by Steve “Doom” Fassbinder & Lizzy Scully, with additional photos of bikerafting on the Whanganui River provided by Deane Parker from his 2020 adventure, “Forgotten Highways.” The History of Bikerafting: Were the Kennett Brothers really “bikerafting” in 1988? While the Alaskan Crazies (i.e. Roman Dial…
Part #2, What is “The Culture of Safety” and why is it relevant to bikerafters? Plus Luc Mehl”s Safety & Rigging tips By Lizzy Scully, Steve “Doom” Fassbinder, Luc Mehl and Andy Toop. There’s much adventurers need to consider to safely start bikerafting. I won’t cover all points here, but I want to give you…
Part #1, An Introduction to bikerafting safety and Risk ASsessment, an Excerpt from The Bikeraft Guide In 2022, Steve and I published the first edition of The Bikeraft Guide, a book we assembled during the pandemic. I interviewed dozens of people and read from dozens of obscure blogs to report the history. And we gathered…
Stories & photos from a historic alaska bikerafting adventure In July 2016, Brett Davis, Jon Bailey, Roman Dial, Mike Curiak and Steve “Doom” Fassbinder set out to do something no one had every done before. They wanted to ride and packraft around 150 miles from Cordova to Yakutat, the northern section of Alaska’s Lost Coast.…
A Testimonial for Four corners Guides Back in 2021, Mike Adamski did a day-bikerafting trip with Doom on McPhee Reservoir. Thanks so much to Mike for sharing his experience! I recently had the pleasure of going on a bikeraft tour of McPhee Reservoir with Four Corners Guides, and it was an unforgettable experience. The day…
Dogs of packrafting! Yes, you can take your dog paddling if you start early & train them right Story by Molly Harrison, photos by Molly, Lizzy Scully and Steve Fassbinder. We pile out of the Subaru as though it’s a clown car- dog after dog spills out of the backseat and they go tearing off…
Check out our 2023 summer kid’s packrafting camps! Sign Up Now! Pairing Bikes & Packrafts: It’s Not Just for adults! Story by Steve Hazelwood, photos by Steve Fassbinder. This is the unabridged version of one of the stories that appeared in The Bikeraft Guide. I fell in love with bikerafting before touching the water. I…
Hello Four Corners Guides Friends, It’s March 2, and we’re enjoying the last days of winter. Though snow still falls, it melts faster than we can ski on it. And the road becomes muddier and muddier! This time of year our road is a true 4WD experience. New Offerings With our season fast approaching, we…
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.
