A FORM OF MINIMALIST AUTONOMY

Bikepacking is loading your bike with some luggage in order to carry the necessary equipment for a cycling adventure

What fundamentally differentiates ‘bikepacking’ from ‘cycle touring’ is a kind of self-censorship, a voluntary restriction on the amount of stuff you carry in order to keep a sporting dimension to your setup.

Despite this minimalist approach, the main objective is to be autonomous. Self-supported. To be independent and choose when and where to ride without worrying about the time or the place. As much as possible, to be able to meet your needs in day time and night time; to wrap yourself up or to peel off the layers depending on the weather, to set up a camp for the night with simple bivy or pitch an ultralight tent.

THE ART OF GETTING THERE

The destination only becomes a pretext, an exotic point that will mark the end. Everything that happens in bikepacking is in the adventure that will link your departure to the final destination.

The goal is far less important than the art of getting there.

Leaving for a day or a week, we equip ourselves to feel free on the road, detached from obligations and from time. To be in real freedom of movement.

Learning to create a route, a path towards the unknown, is in fact trying to get to know yourself. Having the freedom to try a detour by this or that high mountain pass, deciding the pace you like, knowing how to push on when it is necessary and save energy when it is not, without any constraints other than those that you have fixed on yourself.

In almost all cases, the common point with a personal adventure will be the freedom to create your own route and to apply all the solutions that you will have found during your own experiences eventually for the benefit of a more sporting challenge. It can be a formal event or a self-made objective.

Either way it is one which combines the passing of your physical limits and the poetic adventure of travel.

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