I think I have all my gear selected for my 1000-mile bike trip from San Diego to El Paso. I am heavily leveraging last year’s GUMBIRD ride, and making a few adjustments. For example, I am adding more warm clothing, since I may be facing sub-freezing temperatures at higher elevations on the west. Here’s the overall summary;
Yikes! This is heavier than my last two long rides. Let’s look at the details. Here’s my bike, consumables, and gear needed for the actual biking:
Note that the bike itself is almost 36 pounds! This is about 14 pounds heavier than my carbon fiber bike that I ride in RAGBRAI. The main reason is that the frame is made out of durable steel. It also has two racks and three water bottle cages mounted to it, not to mention a homemade GoPro holder. And extra heavy-duty tires for all the highway shrapnel down south. It all adds up.
The consumables category varies every day. In backpacking terms, my “base weight” is only 83 pounds, but I will need to usually have lots of water and some extra food due to the long distances out west, so I’ll usually be in the higher end of that 83-93 pound range.
Next is the 11 pounds of clothing (including what I’ll be wearing):
Next is the Camping category, which is what I need to live out of a tent and cook on a stove. This is only about 10 pounds, since I started spending more on lightweight equipment when I started long-distance solo backing when I turned 60 in 2020:
The last category is kind of scary. When my brother Jim and I started doing long bike trips 40 years ago, our electronics weight was exactly zero, and now it’s over TEN POUNDS! But I have to convince myself that I’m not taking a camera or two on a bike trip; rather, I happen to be biking during a filming expedition. Yeah, that’s the story.
