bikepacking to ainsworth state park
This past weekend I bikepacked out to the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon, one of the most beautiful places on earth. I started in Portland and rode out along the Historic Columbia River Highway to Ainsworth State Park. Total distance out was about 40 miles, with a total of about 1200 feet elevation. See this neat map of the highway and the waterfalls along the way. I did end up stopping at most of them, especially because they're either visible from the road or a short walk away.
This was my first time doing any sort of bikepacking journey, and also by far my longest single ride, but I felt ready to handle it with the increased amount of biking I'd been doing this summer. I'd done a few 30+ mile rides, but nothing with this elevation and especially not with the weight of packed up bags, so it was still a little intimidating. I also still have never changed or patched a tube, so I was really hoping this trip would not be when I had to try it out on my own bike for the first time. Thankfully, things were uneventful on that front.
This is my main daily driver bike, a Kona Dew DL with a rear rack added on. I quite like this bike, but I do kind of see why people prefer more robust steel frame bikes for heavy touring. It never felt unsafe, but there were points it felt like I was pushing the bike's capability a bit and this was not even too strenuous a ride.
For the bags, my favorite Portland-based bag company North Street Bags had a sale on bikepacking-related bags a few weeks before this, so I splurged on a rack-top bag and adventurer pannier to complement the pannier and handlebar bag I already owned. This kind of color coordination is not necessary at all, but it does make me feel good to have a pretty bike I can take pretty pictures of :3
One thing that I especially wanted to do this trip was hammock camp, and in particular, test out my single-tree hammock suspension rig using my bike as one end of the suspension.
As you can see, I set up my bike as one end of the hammock suspension. The brakes are locked down, and the bike is held in place by some cord staked into the ground. The load-bearing webbing is fed under the saddle, resting on the saddle rails, and connects to the hammock suspension system. This means that the bike, and especially the bike's seat post, is mostly bearing the vertical force of the hammock, which is largly my bodyweight, and not the tension in the hammock suspension, which could be pretty high. Overall this felt really stable and despite the bike end being a little low, an incredibly successful attempt.
This was inspired by posts like this one on reddit and the picture shown on the Tensa Solo product page and honestly, it just kind of works. I ended up making my own amsteel adjustable slings for this, mostly for fun, but just some solid stakes and webbing would be all you need to do this yourself. It even was easy to hang up a tarp over the hammock suspension.
I have ordered a Tensa Solo since this trip, to give me more options if there are no viable trees or if I want to do a single-tree suspension and still have use of my bike. It should be a super lightweight addition to my kit that gives a ton of flexibility for setting up shelter. Feel free to check out the gallery below to see more pictures from my trip!
