The 406 Ride: Folding Bicycles in Montana

When I reviewed Bike Friday’s All-Packa folding bike a year ago, I waxed enthusiastic about how it expands imaginative possibilities for a dirt-centric bike tour. That revolutionary potential owes to the easy and fast fold of the All-Packa into a package that can be taken on trains and buses, stashed into the boot of a compact car, or packed into an airline checkable suitcase. My mind swirled with the multimodal potential: I could take Amtrak to Philadelphia, then a bus out to a small Pennsylvania town, ride a point-to-point route, then take another bus home. Or I could set aside time for an open-ended exploration of Spain, linking different regions by rail, never having to worry about selecting the right bicycle-friendly train line or paying extra fees. Or a few of us could go on a half-float, half-bike trip and, at the end, take public transportation home. Having a rugged, go-anywhere folding bike opens a world of fun horizons.

Last fall, I had the chance to turn these musings into practice and make new friends at the same time. We billed our trip “The 406 Ride” in light of a bike nerdy fun coincidence: Montana’s telephone area code is 406, and the standard folding bike (and BMX) 20″ wheel tire bead diameter is 406mm. We would unfold our knobby-tired, little-wheeled bikes in Whitefish, convening via whatever way was most practical for each of us. Willie took a train from Eugene, Oregon. Ally and Joel folded up their bikes and tucked them into the corner of their truck bed camper for the drive up from Missoula. And I pieced together trains and planes and pedaling to make it to the rendezvous.

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Montana has a special vastness, not just on a map of the USA but also in its outsized resonance in the imagination. The wide sky and big climbs and quiet, little-trammeled spaces set out a clear call to pedal there. Montana is a metaphor for distance itself, or the stretching of ordinary threads of connection. It’s the sort of place where I might head out alone to think unconstrained thoughts and let a rise and ebb of emotion just be in me. For at least half the nearly four decades I’ve been riding bikes in places far from home, I’ve done so solo. I’ve appreciated the chance to meet loneliness head-on, to find peace and illumination in it. And I’ve found meaningfully transformative the way that vulnerability opens me to listen to strangers and the landscape with a better understanding. Those trips are inward and outward both, hours spent evaporating into an introspection that, in the best cases, folds into a singularity.

Lately, though, I’ve tended to take trips with small groups of friends. That’s quite different, satisfying in its own distinctive way, and a chance for a more closely shared joy. I was headed out west for this trip not knowing any of the team beyond a couple of phone calls and text exchanges. There is the need for negotiations, perhaps there is a default contraction into the microcosmic construction of the tiny community that you’re with. These connecting trips can be their own sustenance.

It took me about ten minutes to pack up the bike in my NYC apartment. Down the elevator, out the door, I rolled the suitcase to the end of the street to get on the subway to NJ Transit light rail that would take me to the airport to catch a flight to Glacier Park Airport. When I landed, I walked to an airport hotel where I’d spend the night before setting off—leaving the case in the hotel luggage room—to meet up with the crew. I’d reverse these steps to get home. We were set to ride a version of The Red Meadow Pass Loop, modified by Ally to include some trails at the Whitefish Mountain Ski Resort at the end. She bragged that the loop is one of the most beautiful rides that she’s done, and I can confirm that it was a gorgeous place to spend a long autumn weekend.

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Our rollout from town had all the familiar sensations: expectant excitement, alertness for whether everything was working, chatter, and giddy checking in with one another and oneself. But I feel like for us there was another sense of unity in our small-wheeled bicycles more than just the superficial commonality of, say, all wearing the same T-shirt. Something more like a shared enthusiasm for bicycles that function in a certain way to achieve a purpose and therefore create a specific aesthetic. In my view, folding mini-velos better fit into the best ambitions of travel. Sure, they are cute and portable and disarming in their dorkiness, but most of all, they are supremely functional. They are tools that fit a vision of moving and finding rather than bulky contrivances that we bend ourselves to so as to be able to get somewhere. So there we were, amused by our own spectacle and in a solidarity that all cyclists anyway have, but also more.

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In this full-on bikepacking context, the All-Packa was a hoot and a crushing success. Everything I wrote in my original review of the bike still holds. It’s steady and poised even though—like all small-wheel bicycles—the steering feels comparably quick. The basal perception is of being balanced and centered, which is decidedly unusual for mini-velos. There’s a solid steady purposefulness to the pedaling, like riding the best dirt-touring-oriented, fully rigid ATBs. The downside of riding 20″ wheel bicycles is that they more easily get hung up on obstacles like taller rocks or a downed tree. On this trip—and, honestly, on the vast majority of trips that aren’t full-on mountain biking—that handicap was negligible.

And—not to bury the lede on the discussion of the updated 2024 All-Packa—how about the 2.8 tires? Willie cleverly contrived a plan where I would swap wheels with Ally during the trip, so I could spend half the time on the Vee Rubber 20″ x 2.8″ Crown Gem and the other half on the demonstratively excellent Kenda 20″ x 2.4 Booster Pros. There were certainly differences. Unsurprisingly, the 2.8s pedaled more heavily and had a notably less nimble feel. No one would call the Crown Gem “supple,” as they are much lower quality tires than the Booster Pros. But in exchange for that plodding disposition, there was copious, astonishing, remarkable traction and farm-tractor tenacity on the track. This is mated with splendid cushioning and a kind of baby fat bike unflappability over tricky terrain.

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I don’t know that upgrading to 2.8″ tires from 2.4″ is mandatory, however. The 2.4s do just about everything I’d want them to do, and owners of the 2023 All-Packa absolutely have no need to rush out to replace their fork and rear triangle to earn the greater clearance (though Bike Friday will happily oblige if you feel you must). It’s the analogical difference between 29+ tires and full-blown fat tires, but translated to the 20″ wheel context. At any rate, should there be any doubt that the All-Packa can be taken on rough, chunky, bumpy, rutted, loose, treacherous track, mounting 2.8″ tires should hush any such thoughts. Another welcome small innovation for the 2024 edition of the bike is the provision for an externally routed dropper post. Yee-haw!

Shivering came on quickly after the sun went down that first night. We stood around the fire ring with our sleeping bags wrapped around us like shawls, not inclined to surrender the lakeside just yet. A father and his two young kids were packing to head to their camp after a few hours of fishing. We shared what lore we could of flame tending and the children had speculative ideas of their own. We settled into the cadence of making new friendships with one another. To do so is to travel in the imagination of another person, and to take on their hopes as hopes that you have for them.

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Over the next evenings and during our breaks, we talked about art and of making things and having wide-open eyes for the possibility of inspiration. Willie had us gasping and laughing at stories of his sailboat racing days and of working on them as a mechanic and engineer and how all of this led to his bicycle design work. Ally has given so much thought to what it means to tell a story, narratively and visually, and to do so with honesty. To listen to her is to visit her sense of design and meaning. Then Joel read the trees and related to us what they said of the land. He pointed to a line on the hillside of leaf textures just a little off of the rest and explained that there was perhaps a road there a century ago; the differential sunlight that reached to the ground on that strip changed the patterns of what grew to make a legible mark.

I thought about that for a long while after, how our individual marks would fade more or less instantly but how that was no excuse to be uncaring with them. And how our collective traces are persistent at telescopic time scales. There’s a futility in pedaling away from our signs, as if they can be left behind. All things cause all other things, we’re scarcely different. It’s just that we’re patterns that can appreciate our own patterns.

At the end of our third day of riding, we descended off of the ski area on the Summit Trail, a piece of singletrack that had us hollering with joy and the orange and red leaves blazing with the setting sun. It was a fast chute with kitty litter stones over the hard-packed dirt, with the occasional rock mound to finesse our way through. The All-Packa tracks better in jaggy turns than I earlier realized, and it didn’t suffer the heave of the obstacles much thanks to the cushy tires. The long straights had me whooping and on the throttle. Willie has said that the All-Packa feels to him not dissimilar to old 26″ wheel bikes with 1.9″ tires. I see that even more clearly now. I was testing the limits of the All-Packa and it felt pretty close to what I remember of all those years ago on early mountain bikes.

After dinner, we pedaled a few blocks to the station to see Willie off. He consolidated his bags, removed the front wheel, and folded up his All-Packa to strap it all into a compact parcel. We traded high fives, and he boarded the train to head back to the West Coast. Ally and Joel re-stashed their bikes into the camper, and I folded up mine to put it back there, too. They kindly drove me to a camping area in Glacier National Park, dropped me off, and drove off into the darkness.

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For my part, I spent another night in the tent before pedaling up the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park. The autumn textures were fully realized. Once at the pass, I coasted back down and rode to the airport in anticipation of an early morning flight the next day. That solo Glacier ride ended up being one of my longest rides of 2023, mileage-wise, all gleefully done on the folder. I recovered my suitcase, undid the fasteners to pivot the rear triangle around, took off the bars and front wheel, and dropped it all in the case.

The imperatives of the best group trips aren’t literal. Hard terrain is a summons to shared purpose. October nights are an invitation to stand closer in order not to be able to stop smiling and guffawing at a story that is itself a warmth. A blazing descent re-entry into a valley on the other side of the ridge is the gravity of the memories of the people that you’ll find there, all of us leaving our marks on one another and the 406 marking us. I’m looking forward to more trips on the All-Packa this year.

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