Bikepacking Gear

Consider this as part three in a Gear Index subset all about bottle cages, cargo carriers, and boss-mounted bags for carrying extra gear and water. If you’re looking for solutions for attaching cages or adding mounts to your frame, check out Ways to Attach Bottle Cages and Add Cage Mounts to Your Bike. And if […]

Harking back to the good ol’ days of long bar ends and loud colours, the Onza Canis 27.5 x 2.85” Skinwall tires not only look great, but offer low rolling resistance and enough tread to tackle a wide range of trail conditions. Read on for our full review after riding dirt, sand, roots, and rocks across British Columbia, Colorado, and beyond…

Back in 2010, Salsa Cycles released the original Anything Cage, an oversized, open-sided cage made from lightweight aluminum tubing. The idea of an oversized cage wasn’t completely new, but Salsa’s concept was pretty groundbreaking. With the intention of stowing items that are significantly larger than a standard water bottle—almost anything—the Anything Cage gave birth to […]

After a long and bumpy ride with earlier versions of the Selle Anatomica saddle, we were happy to see the release a stronger and lighter Series 2 saddle frame. For this long-term review, we put a few thousand miles on the X2 leather skin and then swapped it out for the new heavier duty H2.

Apidura’s new Expedition Fork Pack provides extra storage for any fork mounted cargo cage, weighs just 120 grams, and is 100% waterproof. Here are our initial impressions after some wet winter riding on British Columbia’s west coast…

Just announced, the Revelate Designs Polecat is an ultralight, waterproof bag designed for fork-mounted Anything-style cargo cages. We tested the Polecat on a week-long trip in Ethiopia for this first look review…

With the growing popularity of eyelet-mounted bags and cargo cages, bike tourers and bikepackers are increasingly looking for ways to add mounts to their fork or downtube to attach such accessories. In addition, many desert routes and trips through warmer climates require extra hydration, so mounting extra bottle cages or oversized cages under the downtube, […]

Expecting inclement weather on your next bikepacking trip? Think full-length waterproof pants are overkill? Cass suggests taking a pair of Ground Effect’s minimal, three-quarter length Helter Skelters for a whirl…

In the world of family cycling, there are tagalongs… and there are tagalongs. A far cry from the cheap lookalikes unearthed on Craigslist, Tout Terrain’s Streamliner is a super high end, suspended trailer bike complete with a 160mm air shock, a 1×9 SRAM drivetrain, a light tubeset, and a whole list of quality components. Cass Gilbert takes one bikepacking with his family and finds out if it’s money well spent…

Carrying water bottles and gear on your fork is now standard bikepacking practice, and can be found on touring bikes going well back into the 70s and 80s. However, forks with bottle cage mounts were hardly commonplace until recently. It wasn’t until the fall of 2008, on the inaugural “Fun Guy Green” Salsa Fargo, when […]

A few months ago, Wanderlust Gear announced some major updates to their Rattlesnake Stem Bag and new color options for the Beargrass Top Tube Bag. We got our hands on the complete set and put together a first look here…

We used rivnuts, aka rivet nuts or threaded rivet inserts, to add bottle bosses and attach an Anything Cage to a steel fork. It worked well, but here are some things we learned, and what we’d do differently next time. Plus, everything you’ll need to do it yourself…