Editor’s Dozen: Joe Cruz’s Favorite Gear and More of 2024

If gear, clothing, and bicycles were solely a matter of selecting for function, we would probably by now have triangulated on a relatively homogeneous collective list of the best stuff. Sure, it would vary by conditions of climate and terrain, but that kit rundown would likely not be nearly as varied as the actual palette of material that we bring on rides. One could blame the worst excesses of commerce for this. The market grows and thrives only through introducing products with minute and meaningless differences in the hope of harvesting our impulse toward novelty. Or a new standard is proposed that achieves a worthless percentage of improvement but nudges the industry in a way that ultimately forces consumers away from what they already have.

Those considerations—especially once they are transformed and internalized into a consumerist psychology so that they seem to originate in our own will rather than from structural economic forces—are indeed a driver for our acquisitiveness. But here I want to lobby for a different story. Naively optimistic as it may seem, I propose that the stuff we take on our rides is also, at least partly, at least sometimes, an expression of how we hope a ride will feel. We bring gear that is going to change the kind of experience we will have. Sometimes, I ride my single speed 1984 Univega Alpina Pro, rim brakes and no suspension, because the old school geometry makes threading through granite and dirt singletrack feel different. The smile I have, the body position, and the demand of the ride remind my body of when I was a beginner rider. Or I’ll travel with a tarp instead of a tent because I enjoy the campcraft of the different setups it encourages. There’s the feeling of a puzzle solved, and of letting the landscape dictate the moment I’m having. Or I’ll wear clothing that is made in a sewing room where I’ve met the makers and talked to them about what their work means. That is sometimes an expression of what I value, even if, purely functionally speaking, the product isn’t any better.

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I suppose another way of getting at what I’m saying here is that the idea of speaking purely functionally is a myth. We can think that we’re choosing the best product for the need within the limits of budget and availability, but that belief elides the fact that what we bring with us is saying something to others and, more importantly, to ourselves, about what we’re about to do.

I have enjoyed reading the introductory remarks of others on the editorial team about what they are thinking about these end-of-year roundups. You have probably noticed that it hasn’t been all or only about the fanciest gear, even if there has been plenty of stuff that is frustratingly expensive. We’re sharing a little bit of ourselves, the personal style we bring to bikepacking, our hopes about what we’re going to find when we’re out in the field, an ambition about the aesthetics and meaning of a satisfying hobby.

Ombraz sunglasses

Made in Italy / $160 at Ombraz

Until recently, I hadn’t thought much about Ombraz sunglasses except to note that my good friend Tenzin Namdol has for years looked strikingly stylish in them. Ombraz’s claim to distinctiveness is that they stay secure on your face with an adjustable cord that wraps around your head rather than with familiar temples that hook behind your ears. I was missing out on just how incredibly useful and comfortable this difference would be. Executed with high-quality construction and lenses, the Ombraz Viales are some of the most excellent eyewear I’ve put to face.

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The downsides are minimal: I have to remove my hat to take them off, and taking them off requires two hands. They are rock-solid stable on my face while riding, I hardly notice that I’m wearing them, and they pack flat and safe in a slim case. It was silly that I overlooked them for so long.

TPU tubes

$30-$40

On a bikepacking trip some years ago in Colombia, I was carrying one spare tube as backup to my tubeless setup. A dreaded unpluggable bead tear had me installing that tube, and it immediately failed at the stem. It was thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), one of the bright orange ones if you know that brand. I was infuriated enough to swear off the technology (irrational, I know, to judge so harshly from a sample size of one, but I don’t take kindly to betrayal).

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I’ve lately come back to TPU tubes and used ones by Wheelsmith, Rene Herse, and Revoloop. I’m an absolute convert. Here’s the thing: Tubeless is great and, when riding in thorn country, plainly essential. But there are a lot of bikes in my shed, and I’m often rotating through different tires for different applications. My patience for checking and topping off sealant, for wrestling with seating beads, or for dealing with the mess on the side of the trail if something goes wrong, is finite. TPU tubes are (now) reliable, light, supple, easily repairable, and reasonably puncture resistant. My gravel bikes are almost exclusively shod with TPU tubes. This season, I’ve even installed them in my fat bike wheels. If I have butyl tubes as a reference point, the cost of TPU tubes makes me wince every time. Instead, I focus on the liberating fact that they work very well.

Da Brim

Made in Mexico / $52.95 at Da Brim

Da Brim has earned no shortage of celebratory kudos here on the site (see Josh Meissner’s excellent and entertaining review). Rumor has it that even Logan has come around. For the uninitiated, Da Brim is a wide hat brim that easily and cleanly attaches to a helmet to provide sun protection. The inside edge that makes contact with the helmet has a rubberized strip that keeps everything secure, and there are velcro straps to keep the brim from deforming in the wind and to preserve a jaunty curvature.

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Da Brim has historically been associated with the bearded recumbent SPD sandal crowd in Arizona, and as a result been vilified. That’s a terrible mistake. Da Brim works splendidly. If you ride on sunny days, update your sense of cool and get with the future.

MAAD merino cycling wear

Made in Spain / €150-250 at MAAD

MÃÄD cycling is the clothing brand of Franka Ramia, who hand-dyes responsibly produced merino wool T-shirts and jerseys using local leaves, minerals, and food waste. Franka’s creations are sustainable art, they are expressions of a progressive philosophy, and they are statements of belief about what is important. At the same time, they are the highest quality merino activewear.

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I visited Franka in Barcelona a couple of years ago and got a chance to see her production. It is part botany, part chemistry, part patient empirical experiment. As we sat together drinking wine she produced, she railed passionately against cheap disposable clothes, products that concretize a horrifying blend of pollution, worker exploitation, and landfill destiny. Franka wants to be in a small way part of a better solution. She is under no illusion about the fact that her work is expensive. But she wants you to buy one just once and get sensible, exceptional use out of it.

I got my first MÃÄD T-shirt in 2019, and it remains my favorite for bikepacking. In between the leaves and branches, it now carries memories of great trips. It has been durable and versatile, and it often starts a positive conversation. At the end of 2023, Franka opened pre-orders for her unique pieces, and earlier this year, I received a gorgeous MÃÄD cycling jersey. Perfection.

Almost Roadie Tours

This year, I pursued a different bikepacking style than is my usual, and a format that is not often featured on this site. For me, there is a considerable difference between dirt expeditions, on the one hand, and all-road, mixed-terrain touring on the other. The latter can sometimes have a very significant tarmac component, such that it is almost what one would think of as a roadie tour. My trips in Taiwan, France, and Switzerland were almost roadie trips in this sense.

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This style, of course, has a long and forthright history. Part of my inspiration was reviewing Isola Press’s JOOBST BRANDT RIDE BIKE!, which chronicles Jobst Brandt’s influence on cycling culture. Tales of historic European cols and images of carefree pedaling in bibs and racing jerseys on maneuverable ultralight bikes had me vowing to travel in the same spirit.

These trips did not disappoint. We carried the least amount of kit we could get away with: inclement weather gear, a light off-bike outfit, repair material, toiletries, a spare pair of socks. We slept in chalets or guest houses and ate at roadside shops. We covered relatively big distances. The real difference, though, was in the resonances and tonality of the days. Dynamic, out of the saddle climbing on the long pitches pointed toward the sky. Swooping, carving, whooping through the switchback descents in an aero tuck down the valley. Pacelining over rolling kilometers to achieve a flowing cooperative efficiency. For nearly all of the years I’ve been bikepacking, I’ve also trained and raced on road bikes, and the call of the exhilaration of the demanding swift sweeping motion is strong.

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Trying to give necessary and sufficient conditions for bikepacking is foolishness. But having—in Logan Watts’s evocative phrase—a “dirt intention” remains in my view the aesthetic core. What that means in practice is that I crave dirt tracks. All of these almost roadie trips I took had a significant dirt component. When we created the routes, we didn’t hold back from including rocky doubletrack or hiking trails or abandoned World War I vintage roads. But tarmac had an equal place in the emotions of the trips, and that was very satisfying.

Gear that Lasts: Revelate frame bag

For all of the ATB bikepacking rides and trips I took this year, I used a custom frame bag made for me by Eric Parsons at Revelate Designs in 2011. Yes, you read that correctly. This spring will be the bag’s 14th birthday. It’s the same bag that I overstuffed and abused for a six-month trip along the Andes in the first year I had it. It’s been on countless weeklong rides, it’s been scuffed and scolded and made filthy in Arizona and Mexico and Colorado. It has two tears that I super-glued, and it’s not even remotely the same color that it was when it was new.

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This entry is not about Revelate, though. It is about using stuff until it wears out, repairing it when necessary, and accepting that a new version may be shiny and clean and have the updated colors, but it probably won’t work noticeably better. Feel welcome to post below a piece of kit that has served you well for over a decade in the conversation below.

Casio F-91W Watch

Made in Thailand or China / $13 at Walmart

This Casio has been on my wrist for just about every bikepacking trip I’ve taken in the last 10 years. It’s simple, durable, and absurdly inexpensive. It also satisfies my craving to have a stylish watch. Fashion is enigmatic, and you can’t deploy reason to make sense of the fact that a $12 watch would compete with wrist pieces that cost in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. But the F-91W does. Its design emerged from Japanese sensibilities of the late 1980s, and it is an iconic expression of form and accessible technology. It’s the most sold watch of all time, is both infamous for the ways that it has been misused (as a sign of the wearer’s bomb making knowledge, for instance) and famous for its ability to cross lines of wealth and sport and formality (including by the young Barack Obama). Watches are cool; get one of these.

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Rene Herse knobby tires

Made in Japan / $78-$98 at Rene Herse

Rene Herse tires are notable for being oh-so supple and having the highest-quality construction. They are also notable for being (wait, what?) expensive. Wrestle with that latter fact however you may. It would be entirely reasonable to angrily dismiss them. But I can say that the Extralight Juniper Ridge (650b x 48mm) tires I’ve had on my gravel bike for the last few years are absolutely the best I’ve ever pedaled on.

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They are fast and quiet on tarmac, confident in dirt corners, and ready for a surprising range of broken, uneven terrain. The feel and grip are magnificent. It’s true that the lightest versions are fragile, what with having no protection from cuts and punctures. I repaired my last set in a few places by gluing patches on the inside, but the need for that came after hard use. When they decisively wore out, I saved up for these replacements.

Thrift store shopping for clothes

I set myself to a personal project in 2024 of not buying any new clothes. I’d reached my threshold for disgust with the shoddy quality of clothes driven by fast fashion. With the massive waste and pollution of the global clothing industry. With the horrific treatment of the people who make our clothes. With what happens to clothes when they are discarded after a dozen wears. There are about a million books and articles—Maxine Bedat’s Unraveled is one that stands out for me—about just what an outsized role the clothing industry plays in making our world shitty. The dissonance of my own love of clothes and fashion was too much.

So, I started small and committed myself last year to not buy any new clothes for three months. That was pretty easy, so I extended it to six and again for six months more. Instead, I shopped at local thrift stores and on eBay. I had to measure clothes that fit me well so I could buy with confidence even if I couldn’t try the item on. I had to learn something about what techniques and brands yield high-quality clothes so I knew I wasn’t buying junk. I’m glad for the meaningful habit that all of this has cultivated in me. Looking for a thrift store version of something I want will now be the first thing I do.

Hyperlite Splash bivy

Made in Mexico / $250 at Hyperlite

Tarps are ideal shelters. They’re ultralight, incredibly versatile, and they call on one to exercise a thoughtful campcraft to figure out just the right pitch for terrain and circumstance. Alas, I live in New England, so bugs are an issue, and unexpected sideways squalls are not unusual. The answer to all of this is Hyperlite’s Splash bivy. It is an ingenious game-changer.

Keep an eye on these pages for a full review in the future, but right now I can say this. The Splash fits excellently into my lightweight shelter setup as a “third level” of camping. The first level is sleeping cowboy style, just on a mat and sleeping pad out in the open air. The second level is with the tarp overhead, which is effective in lots of different weather conditions if it’s sensibly pitched. The third and final level is when there is a need for bulletproof bug protection or for coping with a whipping storm. Enter the Splash.

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The Splash bivy can be integrated with most any tarp (I’m a big fan of Hyperlite’s own flat tarp) by attaching it to the underside tarp tie-outs. It has enough space for me not to feel overly cocooned. It can be pitched by itself if bugs are the only issue; in these photos I’ve strung it with a single cord and four stakes. The Splash packs so small—think burrito—and it’s so light that there’s no reason not to take it, even if, like me, you hope to use it only rarely. Bravo to Hyperlite; this is clever and well-done kit.

eBay Titanium seat post clamp with rack mounts

$27

When I started riding in the late 1980s, every right-thinking ATBer had a Blackburn rack. Where else would you bungee your jacket and warm gloves? The truth is, though, that racks back then were prone to breakage, which turned into a near certainty for the would-be bikepacker who emulated the pannier-centric packing style of road tourists.

After a hiatus in popularity, racks have come back as de rigeur accessories on bikepacking bikes. Their return has been driven substantially by the popularity of dropper posts, since in the lowered position, there is not enough room between the saddle rails and the top of the rear tire for a seat bag. And most dropper posts can’t lift any significant load back up to the extended seatpost position. Thus, many people are securing a dry bag to their racks or even affixing the latest generation of panniers.

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Back in the day, it would have been a puzzling choice by a frame builder to make an ATB without dedicated rack mounts. Now it’s not quite as surprising, but here on the site, we often list their absence as a “con” in our reviews. So, what to do when there aren’t upper rack mounts? One of the cleanest ways to attach the horizontal stabilizing bars of a rack is to replace the seatpost clamp with one that has integrated mounts. I can report that this one has worked terrifically all year. It’s titanium, it’s attractive, it’s made in China, and I got it on eBay.

Revelate Nook

Made in Vietnam / $50 at REI

I’m a proud Revelate ambassador, as I admire the company’s historic contribution to bikepacking with the soft bags that were for many of us transformative. A new offering I’ve loved is the Nook, a tiny bag that fits in the front of the main triangle right up against the headtube. I use it for day rides to carry a tube, a mini-pump, a plug kit, a multi-tool, and a light windbreaker. These items would normally be in a small seat bag, but I’m happy to have the weight off of the dropper post. Not to mention the time I gave Neil and Logan a scare when my small seat bag got sucked between my rear tire and seat stays at high speed when the post was in the lowest position.

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The Nook has a durable, robust construction. There’s no chance of me hitting my knees on it. It’ll fit a variety of bicycles, and it can work for odd spaces on dual suspension rides. You can find a little more detail on them in Miles’ review here.

My Favorite Shot of 2024

My aim was to drink beautiful wine, and Margaret’s was to pedal in lovely scenery. The Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region of France was an easy intersection of these. We packed evening outfits, riding clothes, and our folding bikes. In Paris, we picked up a tiny rental to drive to a B&B near Beaune. Each morning, we would set off to ride from village to village through vineyards over quiet farm tracks and gentle hills. We have often traveled this way, even our honeymoon, combining small luxuries with full days of riding. Happy images that stand out include sitting in cafés in medieval hill towns, walking tours of monasteries and chateaux, and leisurely countryside breaks with baguettes and cheese. The gold-pink sunsets were late and warm. We had a glorious time.

Most Played Record: Scorpions, Lonesome Crow

The record I listened to most in 2024 was the first, and I’d say best, Scorpions record. Lonesome Crow is superb psychedelic proto-heavy metal. Thanks for the recommendation, Mark Sirek.

Further Reading

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