yeah. yikes. extra GPS AND two sets of batteries.

...those might be some of the 'tricks' of forest service road touring, eh, cyccocommute?

my tips I have for forest service road touring, is to sometimes, stop and listen.

I like to look behind me and look at where I cam from at significant forks in the road instead of placing markers, for possible backtracking purposes.

Don't be afraid of a closed forest service road.

keep an eye out for logging trucks, recent dust on the bushes, and dust rolling towards you you from ahead or behind. still be high viz in the woods. be ready to pull off for trucks, especially if they are on the downhill.

always top off bottles if you have the chance. and its easy to drink a lot of water on a hot dirt road tour.

bring some bailing wire.

If you DO put the bike down in the soft stuff, usually you are pretty well protected by the panniers.

lots of logging spur roads make for great camping sites; gated, unused, safe.

Not worth crap if you don't have any useful landmarks to orient by.

Which ones, the 15-minute or the 30 minute?

Not at all; grind it out like a big cigarette in bare dirt.

However did people get around before GPS? For several hundred years they used paper maps...on the ocean...without landmarks...in storms. Seemed to work well enough. One guy even 'found' a couple of new continents without a map

Prior to paper maps, people used things like knowledge of terrain...a technique I still use. Works in dense forest, desert, urban areas, all kinds of places. I probably wouldn't use it on water but, then, I've only ever been close to an ocean a few times in my life. I wander forests all the time.

Two GPS units? What if the second one fails?

Perhaps I'm wrong about the burn time. However, they still burn very hot and very intensely. They have no place in any forest that I've ever been to. Certainly not as a signaling device.

someone who thinks maps are crap, that they should bring road flares to signal for help and two GPS units really has a bit of greenhorn showing and shouldn't go too far afield, to be perfectly frank.

Safety flares in the woods are a very, very, very bad idea. you can't put OUT a flare unless you're next to a creek or snowbank, and i suspect flares still burn in snowbanks to be perfectly honest.

whistle, mirror, and matches are sufficient signaling devices. as are signals stomped out and made out of debris, dirt, clothing, etc.

a flare is only going to start a forest fire.

At that time the forest service will have better things to do than think to search for someone that's laying prostrate at the source of the conflagration.


what?

and for those advanced adventurers among us, i highly recommend this book.

finding your way without map or compass

Any type of flare, be it hand-held, or gun, very bad idea....too much risk of something going terribly wrong. As was mentioned, a small, controllable fire in the middle of a gravel road or stream gravel bar with green branches makes a lot of smoke seen from afar.

bek, realized afterwards my post about the unfortunate accident of the cousins son was miswritten, didnt mean it to be reflecting on your downhill run or you in general. As a kid we did canoe camping trips etc, so had to learn that you had to be responsible when out in the boonies, thats all I was meaning.

ps, I love to bomb down stuff too, always have, always will I suspect. As you say, its just a matter of judging all the factors to have fun while keeping a bit of leeway for wiggle room for a slide or whatever.
That washed out trail looked fun going along.

thanks, djb.

i certainly recommend traveling within ones own limits, and to be conservative when traveling solo in the wilderness. absolutely. you are the only one responsible for your safety in the woods and help is far from coming, if at all.

As to those youth canoe trips, absolutely the best.

Tin can billies, smelling like a cook fire, mosquitos and the camaraderie, a dunk in the rapids, snags galore.

the absolute best.

This is easy for most road touring bikes but you might want to a bit wider tires.

The fire roads (in the east certainly) are really mountain bike territory (not even easy mountain bike territory). (You could certainly use an mountain bike / off-road tourer on the roads but it isn't going to work very well the other way).

Bek, You you typically use low rider racks or a mountain rack? While I know that a mountain rack could be best I would like to avoid buying any new gear if possible. I have ridden some dirt trails with low riders and it was somewhat doable, but indeed I went down once in a rut because of them. However, that was a single track trail.

I could guess but what would you use it for?

...and you don't even live in a place where rubbing two sticks together result in this


2 day map

Final burn area


Well, not two sticks but a burning letter

to bail you out of trouble silly.

racks break.

barring that, i could use it to set a few snares for a snipe hunt, i mean, rabbit hunt, if i got really, really lost.

I once cycled into a remote area accessed by a logging road at the head of a large lake. I was going to be backpacking into the alpine after riding 26 miles on the old neglected and partly washed out road. Because I was packing, I wore my 60 lb. pack on my back rather than bother with panniers as well. It was the only time I had a bad crash from a bicycle in the back country. The weight was too top-heavy, so when I had to brake hard to avoid a washout, over I went, doing a complete somersault with my bike landing on top of me. Fortunately, no broken bones or badly damaged bike, just some nasty bruises and scrapes. So my incident is a warning to others, too much high weight in your pack can be trouble.

or just take a few pictures with your digital camera of the approach and the getaway, to quote from Arlo; color glossy 8x10s with circles and arrows can be produced when you get back to "civilization"

I like dual mount racks for either position. Jannd Extreme front, I think there's now a Salsa? rack that does the same, I think....

I never found panniers to be grabby EXCEPT on singletrack, like you. they can grab things bicyclists need to ride around on singletrack like cut logs, stumps, brush, etc.

I had mounted on my LHT dual front racks, totally redundant so if the low rider failed entirely, the top deck rack was still 100 percent functional. I bought a cheap $15 Bor Yueh front rack and just installed it on the fork around the low rider. You might look into that as a way to do it on the cheap.


If I'm planning a tour with a significant amount of single track ( a difficult proposition in Washington!) , i'll pack lightly enough to not need front panniers.

mole-I still say that quote outloud sometimes as it still makes me chuckle, along with mother-rapers and father-rapers....
I dont hear that song very often, but it really is a great postcard from that time, as well as an interesting story with all the tie-ups of story lines.

oh, not that I bike in the west, but I remember some friends of my wife in the Banff area telling us how one must be much more careful of surprising a bear when you are on a bike, as the approach time can be so fast so little warning to the bear. and henceforth risk of a scared, pissed off large mammal with big claws.

Only a problem on trails or partly overgrown roads, as I earlier stated, cougars as well..... 90% of the main forestry and logging roads have the brush cleared quite a ways back from the road; any that don't you should be cautious in case of approaching vehicles anyway.

I advise using markers because the type of forest I most commonly ride is fairly uniform plantation with no characteristic terrain or trees. Most of the junctions are crossroads and once looks pretty much like another. It would be very easy to lose count of the junctions. I'm pretty good at pathfinding through wild wood but plantations woods are much harder.
A handfull of stones or twigs in an arrows takes seconds to arrange and can save you from navigational strife.

everytime i have ridden up on a bear i have surprised the bear. it's pretty surprising to you as a rider, but the whooping and hollering sets in and with any luck, the bear moves out of the way.

......Nothing like coming down around a blind corner of a forest service road to find a bear's hind quarters blocking the road and the rest of the bear stuffed in the huckleberries to put a scream in your lungs and a spin in your pedals!

Im gonna touch some wood for you Bek....
its like motorsport (or city riding for that matter) you just gotta touch some wood sometimes....

there, touched it again just in case

For that type of riding I'd use my 29er hardtail with rigid fork and disk brakes. I use a Nashbar steel moustache bar with bar end shifters. The tires are 700x47 Michelin City. I've spent lots of time on the dirt on this bike with these tires and it works well.
I use a Axiom rack, skewer mount, but I have used an Axiom seat post rack which has the advantage of moving the panniers higher giving more ground clearance. I believe the seatpost rack would survive a crash better.
I use clip-on panniers but I'm thinking of getting some canvas saddlebags. They would be much tougher.
I wear a daypack and do not use front panniers.
My preferred shelter is a tarp pitched as an a-frame with hiking poles.
I don't have one, yet, but I saw a backpacking stove that burns twigs. It has a battery operated electric fan that makes it burn really hot.
I also saw a video of twig burning titanium stove with no fan that looked like it worked pretty well.

Really?