Ride Reports
Resupply Intel: Parker Canyon Lake
Last weekend I found myself in the little lake front convenience store at Parker Canyon Lake after enjoying some paddle-boarding with my family. The question of what this little store is actually stocked with has come up multiple times in the past few years. The thing is that this store is about a mile descent…
The Kofa Conting3ncy
February can be a tricky month for a weekend bikepacking trip. As I write this on a Sunday afternoon in the later part of the month, the temperature sits at a pleasant 75F. The last few years, however, our advanced trip that we usually schedule for this time of year has been met with incredibly…
No Country for Tommy Decker
It’s tiresome to still be writing about the heat, but this Summer was a doozy. For those of us in Tucson and the surrounding Sonoran Desert, we’re coming out of one of the drier monsoons of the last 50 years, logging 15 more 100F+ degree days than normal. Much of Arizona and the country at…
The Lemmon-Top Traverse – Our 2023 Swift Campout
Southern Arizona is well known as a cycling mecca. Hundreds of miles of singletrack and dirt roads lay within thousands of acres of public land ripe for day rides and overnight exploring. In the few short years I’ve lived here, the now iconic San Rafael Valley outside of Patagonia has gone from a ranching road…
55 Hours in the Santa Ritas
The Sky Islands Odyssey is a special route for us here at Campfire. In 2022, we rode the East Loop as the advanced option in our backpacking series, a trip that saw temperatures well below freezing and eternal wind. A few weeks later, we supported Sarah Swallow’s Ruta del Jefe event by providing repairs, service,…
S’moreos, Pups, and a Border Run
Back at the end of 2021, once it felt safe and reasonable to spend time with small groups of people outside, we restarted our bikepacking series with an overnight trip to the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge (BANWR) outside of Arivaca, Arizona. That trip was such a memorable time that we decided to end another…
Rolling through Craters & Cones – Campfire’s Sept/Oct’22 Highlights
Flagstaff draws us all up for different reasons. Some make the drive to visit family and old stompin’ grounds from childhood. Others wait for Winter snowfall to ski at Arizona Snowbowl, and a handful have made the cool pine country of Northern Arizona a yearly pilgrimage to escape the long summers of the Sonoran Desert….
Tombstone Hustling – Campfire’s Mar/Apr’22 Highlights
It’s been a busy spring here at Campfire and we have been having some fine adventures. The one that stands out the most has to be our lovely overnighter of the Tombstone Hustle- we had to plan this one a bit late in the season. But as luck would have it, we had a cool…
Our Sky Island Odyssey – Campfire’s Jan/Feb’22 Highlights
Our first plans for a circumnavigation of the Sky Island Odyssey East loop had been cancelled at the start of the pandemic. Finally getting around to leading this ride felt like a return to forward momentum after the chaos of the last two years. For this trip, I had a slightly modified version of Sarah…
A Winter/Pandemic Family Overnighter to Catalina State Park
The weekend following Thanksgiving, our family went on an overnighter bike campout from our house in central Tucson to Catalina State Park. It was the first bicycle camping trip of any sort that I’d taken since the start of the pandemic. Figuring out how to stay safe, manage our time, keep the kids having fun…
Our First Family Bicycle Campout!
Last weekend our family successfully embarked on our first bicycle campout. This campout was very meaningful to us because of what it meant for our family and for our business with the upcoming launch of CampfireCycling.com. As I’ve been preparing for the major directional shift to a bicycle camping focused business, a major dilemma has…
Everyday I’m Shuttlin’: Profiting from a Cycling Passion
Follow your passions, the self-help gurus said. So I followed my passion for cycling to Alaska. I may not be the fastest or the skinniest guy on a bike, and I’m certainly not the richest. But where other people pay to ride, spending their hard-earned dollars on entry fees and bib shorts and bike vacations,…
Go, Go Golden Circle! Biking the Golden Circle with BOB
Ker-PLINK ! Another broken spoke. My heart sank. My bike tour was going nowhere fast, and it had barely even begun. I had too much weight on two cheap wheels, too flimsy for a Clydesdale like myself. I needed a trailer. I felt my goals were modest enough: I wanted to bike the “Golden Circle”…
Tour du Mont Blanc – mini podcast
Time for something a little different this month. Here comes an interview with Owen Williams, about his bikepacking trip around the mega classic Tour de Mont Blanc. It’s the first time trying something like this – so please forgive any of the rough edges! Check out the pics, and dip in to our mini podcasts…
Give Me a Mountain
Give me a mountain. Give me 30 miles of steady grade. Give me 80 pounds of bicycle and gear moved pedal stroke by pedal stroke up thousands of feet of elevation. Give me the Cascades, the Rockies, the Ozarks, the Appalachians. The steep ascents and the switchbacks. Life on a bicycle is not without climbing,…
This Land Is Your Land: bikepacking or bust
[You might enjoy listening to this Woody Guthrie track whilst reading this blog] This week I have been in the forests of Sweden. I’ve been listening for wolves, and following the tracks of moose. I canoed down the Black River valley at sunrise looking for beaver, and saw long-horned roe deer prancing at dusk. This was…
Finding Balance Through Bicycle Touring
I have a confession: I could probably count the number of days in the past year I’ve ridden a bike–I mean really clicked off some miles–on one hand. Life, as it so often does, has provided its fair share of roadblocks. I bought a fixer-upper first home, started a new job, got engaged. There is…
The guilty pleasure of credit card bikepacking
I received a phone call from my youngest sister in England this January. We don’t talk all that much, especially now we live on different continents. But she was calling because she had met someone special. His name was “Pedro.” Pedro, she assured me was handsome, fast, and blue. And she wanted us to go…
The S24O
Riding The Route of the Condor was one of those reckless bar-talk ideas that wouldn’t normally have got traction beyond the hangover. Like most beer-charged plans, it should have been added quickly to the graveyard of other wonderful yet fantastical ambitions such as unicycling the Pan American Highway, or cycle touring the Kamchatka Peninsula. Yet somehow…
Riding back to happiness
A few months ago I got into a bit of a rut. Not an all consuming black cloud rut. Just your typical too much work, not enough sleep kind of overcast feeling. Normally when I start to feel like this I self medicate with a long run in the mountains, or put some uplifting energy…
Joe Grant Interview: Self Propelled
Joe Grant cycled away from his front door in Gold Hill, Colorado this July with everything needed for a month of mountain travel. He travelled in “self propelled” style by bicycle and foot, linking up and summiting all of Colorado’s 14,000′ peaks along the way. The bikepacking racer set a new record of 31 days…
Biking beyond the edge of the village
In the weak afternoon sunshine of late September 2014, I fingered my British passport at the top of the Flathead Valley before rolling down towards the US border at Eureka, Montana. After three days alone in the only uninhabited valley of southern Canada, I was looking forward to some human interaction with the border guard….
Cycling the conquistadors' graveyard
In May this year my friend Alan came to visit me in Chile. Our plan was to ride an enormous, ambitious loop through the land of volcanoes and monkey puzzle trees in the south of this long, thin country. The region is known as the Araucania. For over 300 years in this inhospitable terrain of…
Wild Nights On Cycle Tours
BEARS… Beside a mountain lake in British Columbia in 2014, I was awoken just before dawn as a grizzly bear mistook my tent for a bush and sat down on top of me in the darkness. The previous evening had been particularly cold. The geese had pecked away in the shallows, whilst I cooked dinner…