My housemates and their dinner guests drank a 24 pack of lagers yesterday. What luck! After gleefully mangling a half dozen cans, I successfully constructed an ultralight back/bikepacking alcohol stove. This model is called the Hannah stove (PDF instructions here). This variation on the pressurized penny stove does not require any special equipment or glues — just a […]
Read More Flaming Beer Can Stove!I slept out in my bivy in the first big rain of the season. Be sure to get the full story here! The East Bay Bike Camping group on Facebook snowed over yesterday with a flurry of posts. The discussion was over whether to go with a bivy sack or a lightweight tent for bike-packing. […]
Read More Bivy in the Backyard – FindingsIt was raining steadily around 10:30pm last night. Perfect weather for testing how my ultra-light bike camping equipment performs in the wet. I decided my experiment wasn’t about how wet I got setting it up — a test of technical skill and decision-making. The test was about how wet I get sleeping in the thing […]
Read More Bivy in the BackyardThis post is ONE BIG HOLLA to my speedy, game and adventurous friends, Peter and Becker. At a bbq last week, Peter let on that he was looking for a bike adventure in the coming weekend. He suggested that we ride Tamarancho, a Boy Scout maintained single-track mountain biking trail in Fairfax. Later in the […]
Read More Fairfax All-Terrain Stage TourBe sure to catch up on Day 1 of the Fairfax All-Terrain Stage Tour. Becker and I woke up Sunday morning in the 6am dark. The search and rescue training group gave a rally cry in the distance and tromped by again, a line of them in headlights. We crouched by the creek like Sam […]
Read More Fairfax All-Terrain Stage Tour – Day 2Saturday morning, I threw my bike-camping gear on my mountain bike and met a crew at MacArthur BART. After arriving on the San Francisco side of the bay, we crossed the Golden Gate bridge and rode north to Fairfax. During this leisurely 20 mile, I could not help but unleash to chase down roadies. I […]
Read More Fairfax All-Terrain Stage Tour – Day 1The Revolution is the annual fundraising ride for BORP, the Bay Area Outreach and Recreation Program. My friend Greg Milano runs the cycling program, which gets people with physical disabilities on bike. They also have a tandem cycling program, and for the past two summers, I’ve volunteered as a tandem pilot for visually impaired and […]
Read More North Bay RunaboutBe sure to read about my first solo bike camping trip, in Part One of this post. Along the way, I saw this church slogan in South Hayward: Milan Kundera writes about coincidences in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “[Human lives] are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a […]
Read More Solo Bike Camping: Part TwoI am fallen in love — with my new bicycle. She is gorgeous and made of carbon with brushed aluminum lugs. Swift, but old school. I purchased her as a birthday present to myself, impulsively deciding that I needed a go-fast bike. The Naming We took a ride up Tunnel Road the morning after purchasing […]
Read More Solo Bike Camping: Part One
Flaming Bike 