Budget Bikepacking Build-Off: Evan’s 1990s Bianchi Ibex
For Evan Christenson’s Budget Bikepacking Build-Off entry, he looked around at the people closest to him and asked, “Who needs a bike?” Enter his sister, an eclectic free-spirit who’s been afraid of bikes for two decades. Read on for the transformation of a 1990s Bianchi Ibex and, more importantly, another person who has sampled the beauty of life on two wheels…
PUBLISHED Jan 29, 2025
The Snake and Bear Desert Ramble was my sister’s idea. Eli, with that big-tooth, puffy-cheek smile and a spare bedroom for all her clothes. Eli, as graceful as a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck, as reliable as an ‘84 Rover, she wanted to go see the Grand Canyon. At the time, her sleezebag boyfriend offered to take her. But I, brother bear, said no. I never liked that guy. And I had my truck, the time, and a vision. For years, we had drifted apart during college, on opposite sides of the country, doing two very different things, always too busy to call. Back home, I thought we needed the trip to reconnect. I could take her camping, and we could do it the right way. That boy was already halfway out the door, anyway. So Sister Snake and I left for the desert.
That year, we drove and sang songs and camped in BLM land and made vegan burgers and watched a rocket launch and hung our legs over the bottomless pit that is the shockingly impressive Grand Canyon. I brought bikes for us. We rode little: a bit around the rim, one night in a small valley outside Prescott, an hour in Salton City. Snake was never all that into bikes. She fell off one when she was eight and broke her wrist, and she hadn’t ridden since.
Like all siblings, we have our similarities and our differences. Eli and I can make up songs and predict what the other will sing. We can say, “Remember that time?” and nothing else and still know exactly what the other is talking about. We like the same music, have the same politics, and read a lot of the same books. She’s taught me feminism. She buys all my clothes for me. We like to play pool on a Friday night and shoot the shit. I’m grateful to call her one of my best friends.

But Eli is what I would call an “indoor person.” A vintage clothing dealer, a cat mom, a voracious reader, and a watcher of cinema. Her Sundays are going to the swap meet and lying in the park with a book, a blanket, and a bottle of wine. Our second Desert Ramble, we drove the loneliest highway in America, shooting pool in small bars in Nevada and soaking in solitary hot springs on the roadside. I tried to get us to ride a bit more, but she only made it an hour on my fat bike before she was done. And at the time, I didn’t care. Because bikes or not, we were together, and it was beautiful.
I have always had this blinding naivety, or maybe it’s arrogance, to think that the things most right for me must also be right for everyone. If it makes me happy and it feels right, then it should be spread. For me, riding a loaded bike in the desert, listening to the wind, looking at the plants, feeling my muscles pound and the air funnel through my lungs, feeling alive and in the moment, it’s my heaven. Similarly, riding through the city, diving through traffic, wheelies in the neighborhood, strangers to talk to in the park, makes me feel alive. Much more so than stop-and-go traffic, electronic push button ignition, double-pane insulated glass windows, 11-point airbag deployment, and those 14 blaring sensors saying death is imminent, so you better pay attention, dummy. I see the people I love languishing in car culture, and I just want to pry all those plastic doors off and scream, “Get out of there! Here’s the world! Go be in it!”
I wanted to get my sister to ride more. Frankly, I want to get everyone to ride more. I believe that any life plus bikes is a more vibrant one. My sister lives in a very bikeable part of San Diego, yet she spends a lot of time in the car. She has anxiety about work, about climate change, about the heightened state of world affairs. For me, a bike ride is the way to clear my head. To learn my city. To talk to a stranger and feel a little bit more whole. Why not her too?
The bike
When Lucas debuted the Budget Bikepacking Build-Off with his chrome 1986 Diamondback, I immediately loved the idea. I rode a $100 Trek from the ‘90s for a year and adored it, and I missed the simpler days of low-tech and slower speeds. I gave that bike away to a tourer in Mexico after his was stolen, and I’ve always felt a bit sad about that.
But I also didn’t need another bike, even to prove the point that a great time can be had on a cheap bike. So, I waited. I thought. And all along, there was my sister, bikeless as always, driving four blocks for groceries in her bike path-riddled neighborhood. One night, rolling a joint with both a Tiny Desk and Fortnite in the background, I pitched the subject gently. “What if I got you a bike?”

Within 20 minutes, I found this 1990s Bianchi Ibex on Craigslist for $150. A bit expensive, but that tri-fade paint and the Bianchi name suckered me in. Eli sometimes wears a vintage Bianchi cycling cap, and it and Trek are the only two bike companies she knows. Things moved fast. The next day, I met Marty at his house, a guy in his 70s, in a small single-lot house stuffed to the brim with things. Surfboards, foosball tables, furniture, drum kits, and grandfather clocks towered and stacked all over each other. The bike was stuffed in a closet with rotting tires and slimy grips. We wrangled it through the halls and out to the street. Surprisingly, it rode pretty well. I tried to talk him down. He said, “These things go for $80 for just the frame on eBay!” And I tried to explain that really only the frame was valuable, but he didn’t understand that. It was too perfect to pass up. We agreed on $120.
I cut the grips off and swapped the stem and handlebars out at my local co-op. I found a set of tires for $20 on Craigslist, and put new brake pads and grips on it. It was riding okay, stopping and going, a bit more tri-flow in the housing to get it to shift, trying again when it would jump around still more. Finally, I gave up on the old Suntour shifting and bought a Microshift Acolyte eight-speed group set for $54 for the shifter, derailleur, and cassette. I got a new chainring for $20 as well and made it a 1×8 because teaching a new rider how to work two shifters is surprisingly hard. At last, it was riding perfectly. Smooth in the streets near her house, upright and comfy, stopping well, shifting perfectly. I even found a cushy gel saddle at my local co-op for $10. And after all this, I liked riding it so much myself that I took every opportunity to ride the bike around the neighborhood, a six-pack on the rack, flexing the tubes, and trying wheelies on the short frame. These old lugged steel frames… there’s just something about them.

Using the skills I learned from Adam at San Util Design on my visit to Colorado, I got back to the sewer’s table, ordered some cheap fabric from Rockywoods, and sewed a framebag. The laces are army surplus bootstraps, and the plastic bolt-on plate is a cut-off cover from our copy of Lego Indiana Jones we used to play together on my PS2. Eli stole my bottle cage for her Hydroflask, and we bought her a bell, a taillight, a helmet, and a lock at the VeloSwap. I stuck cards in her spokes to match her cards tattoo and used fabric scraps to make tassels. Our grandpa bought us all wheel lights for Christmas. And finally, I bolted on a Wald basket and sewed a basket bag out of other scraps for her. Eli picked the name: Ol’ Bessie was born.

Eli immediately took to the bike. We started by pedaling around the neighborhood, out to the market, down to the park, ringing the bell, and listening to music. We worked on shifting and braking, how to ride through traffic, and at night, how to shine your headlamp into the cars to make sure they know you’re there. Eli is a rebel, her favorite slogan is, “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” And once she saw how a bike can be faster than a car in the city, how we have the right of way, how we have more fun, and how morally superior it is to ride a bicycle through your community than to drive a polluting, meat grinding machine, she became a cyclist. On Halloween, riding around her bike-friendly neighborhood—Bo on my handlebars, Eli dressed up as a devil on her own bike—a man driving a Tesla stopped to yell at us for riding in the road (the road had a sharrow). I tried to politely tell him we were allowed to be there. Instead, he threatened to get out and fight me, then flipped us off and floored it. We all yelled at him, Eli the loudest, “Fuck you! And fuck your Tesla!”

Eli started riding without me to her friend’s place, to downtown, looping back home, watching the buskers in the park, and stopping for ice cream at a new place. She would call me excited with her news. I’d come over, and we would ride at night with a speaker and our lights and go see the bridges, the overlooks, the backroads. We would screw around like I screw around with all my bike friends. Screaming down hills, feet out, wide-eyed. On the bikes, trying something new, I got to see a different side of her. Nervously confident, I’m still not allowed to ride next to her. But she’s brave, taking on this challenge. And I felt like she finally got a glimpse into this world I’ve fallen so deep into. I felt a radiating pride when she would text me, “Let’s go ride!”
The Snake and Bear Desert Ramble 3.0
And so, returning for year three, it’s us, Snake and Bear, dingus and buttface, off to the desert to ramble and giggle and frolic and be free. This year, no truck. No cat, either. And my girlfriend is here. And, most importantly, Eli is now a cyclist.
Bikepacking in the desert is a demanding enterprise. The sun, the sand, the hills, the pokies, and the rattlers. But we’re going to try. Because bikepacking, this way of moving through the world, is central to my being. That naive push of bikes are better than cars worked the first bit for her. And if I’ve gotten her this far, why not over the bikepacking hump?

I looked for a fitting loop in the desert close to home. The desert being a key part of the Desert Ramble. But here, in Anza-Borrego, short routes are few. Easy, there are none. But I found a small 40-mile loop we could ride in three days. I figured that would be easy enough. We rented her some gear at REI and drove out, not exactly rambling just yet, but with dirt intentions.
In the desert and loaded up, all the water and food on my bike, her camping gear on Bo’s, just a couple of veggies and clothes in her basket and my old sleeping bag strapped to her saddle, I was optimistic. This desert, with its infinite beauty and weird botanic oddities, the pink and shriveled paddle cacti, the century plants and ocotillo popping like confetti, the cholla and yucca spiny, squirrelly, and superb, this desert is so fantastic in its beauty. It pushes me through all of the deep-sanded misery with the promise of a weird plant and an interesting shape just around the bend. Her bike was light. I let the air out of the tires. The road wasn’t that sandy, and the loop was short. We had plenty of chocolate. I had high hopes.

We set off into the wild, committing to the hard way, up the mountain and lying down on the ground. She grunted, she swore, she spit, and she laughed. I wanted us all to feel the sand between our toes and the sun on our skin. I wanted the struggle of a mountain and the bliss of the descent. The accomplishment at the end of a long couple of days out. The way time can stand still, how a day can last a week, and how the world closer up is that much more enthralling. I wanted her to start riding and to just keep on going. I wanted us all to ride to China.
But mountain biking is hard. And the sand was a bit too much. And our route might have been a bit too ambitious. Eli grunted and swore and got angry. After a few hours of hiking, hours I thought we would be riding, we got to the top. And the descent off the backside, the reward I thought we were all waiting for, proved too much. Off camber, rutted-out, a bit too out there. She walked her bike downhill, too. We got to camp and pitched our tents. She shivered through the night and woke up sore. We decided not to push on.

But with all of our food and water, we decided to hang out for the day, walking around, watching the jeeps trundle through, playing with sticks, and throwing rocks at each other. We cooked on the fire and rolled cigarettes and told stupid stories, and we had the time and space to let them ramble. Eleven years after our mom died, my sister is my gateway to the woman I could never know. So much of my mom is in her, in the fart jokes, the pranks, the chubby cheeks, and the always-down attitude. Mom rode motorcycles. She jumped horses. She was an adventurer. She was a world champion. I’ll never go camping with Mom. But in my sister, her spirit lives on. And through my sister, I’ve learned more about my own mother, and by extension myself.
The next morning, we loaded up and rolled back down the climb. Eli, well rested and with the end in sight, was flying. Sliding in the corners, jumping off in the deep stuff, tucking and yelling, “Come on, Ol’ Bessie!” while the valley unfurled beneath. We flew down together, sweeping the berms and yelling into the wind. We got back fast, and we took off our helmets and sat in the shade. The construction trucks beeping in the road, the cars passing by, we returned to the real world. We looked back at the nondescript canyon off in the distance. An anonymous brown slab, tiny and easily overlooked, but our home for two nights.
Eli was smiling still, but her shoulders were slouched. “Ah, man. I’m like, really sad to not be out on the mountain anymore,” she said. And it’s this I take for my victory, her flash of nostalgia for the things that were beautiful. To not dwell on the hard parts but see how they are one piece of a larger, more complete story of a few more intense days of life.
I wonder if this is the base for another Desert Ramble. I’ll approach the topic when the wounds have healed. But for now, it has given me hope.

Ol’ Bessie Expenses
- Bike: $120
- Rack and shims: $55
- Tires: $20
- Bars: $10
- Saddle, grips, cable: $21
- Framebag: $30
- Chainring: $20
- Shifter: $16
- Derailleur: $20
- Cassette: $18
The total cost for the bike was $330, and we loaned her all the necessary camping gear, which we have plenty of. I know this goes a little outside the rules we established for the Budget Bikepacking Build-Off, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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