A History of Bikepacking
Long-distance cycling is full of incredible stories. Since 1890, European people started to cycle to China. And of Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, who pedaled around the world in 1894 and was the first woman to become an international sports star. The same year, Fanny William and his wife rode more than 3,700 miles from southern India to the Himalayas. Later, many cyclists chose to travel to many places around the world, and this is an interesting history.
the history of bikepacking is the history of bicycling itself. If the concept of “bikepacking” refers to the act of embarking on a bicycle in search of quiet dirt tracks for extended rides with a sense of freedom, while carrying all necessary items for the day, an overnight trip, or a multi-month journey.
In the late 1800s, there was a significant cost and difficulty associated with traveling from one’s homeland. Walking a considerable distance was a time-consuming endeavor, whereas riding a horse or train was costly and typically required working with others. These methods were not accessible to all, particularly women. When bicycles were introduced, they were a remarkable technical accomplishment; however, they were transformative as a sociocultural force.
Bicycles concretized uncountable possibilities for movement across landscapes and places, for seeing what could before only be dreamt, for learning about a wider world. And right from the start were conceived the biggest cycling trips. Thomas Stevens, an Englishman living in the United States, set out from San Francisco on a ‘round-the-world pedal on a high-wheeler in 1886. He completed his monumental journey a few years before the ubiquity of safety bicycles, but it was the ascent of bicycles with two equally sized wheels and a rear-wheel chain drive that accelerated and made vivid bicycle travel. Safety bicycles are our bicycles. They don’t merely bear a family resemblance but are nearly the exact machine we ride today.
Logan Watts, the founding editor of BIKEPACKING.com (2012), offers an evocative phrase: he proposes that bikepacking is having a dirt intention on a bicycle.7 What he means is that, to go bikepacking, one departs with a specific mindset. The mindset isn’t composed of specific goals since there can be as many reasons for pedaling further as there are wheelers. The mindset is a broad attitude about what is valuable or meaningful about cycling experiences and how those specific kinds of experiences thrum with resonances of understanding and well-being. Bikepacking is an intention toward the appreciation of landscapes, the chance to interact with strangers, a qualified but genuine self-reliance, a quietude of spirit, an escape from hyper-constructed environments in favor of trees and mountains. Bikepacking is a self-aware contrast with bicycle touring on paved roads or mass-start bicycle racing. Bikepacking is a lucid aesthetic with forthright values, and “dirt” is a metaphor for these values.
Intentions always require enabling potentialities. We need to be able to see the world in a certain way in order to form an intention to be in it with a particular stance. So, the history of bikepacking is the history of those conditions, and that makes it possible to extract specific threads from the overall saga of the bicycle. That’s my aim here. Don’t read this as a comprehensive account of bikepacking, as that would inevitably be fraudulent in its selectiveness. This is instead an invitation to join in unearthing some of the inspirations of our dirt intentions and, ideally, to leave us poised to generate new ones.
PACING TARMAC
Historians mark the 1890s as the first great bicycle boom. The legendary tales of a wide world made available come from then. Bicycles were on the minds of everyone in industrialized Western Europe and North America. By around 1920, however, the bicycle was descending from its exalted place in the imagination. Many factors are likely contributors: the natural ebbing of early infatuation, the rise of motorcycles and motor carriages, and — perhaps ironically, given the inventors’ background — the way that the airplane stole the sense of fantasy, even if flying was not in the slightest bit accessible the way cycling was. The role of the bicycle in setting the essential travel ethos of these motorized methods of motion shouldn’t be underestimated. Bicycles couldn’t keep up, however. In Europe, bicycles hung on more robustly and longer than in the USA despite the horror and privation of the First World War, yet the siren call of motorized transport was hard to resist, even in the original cycling-mad countries of England and France.
This is not to say that there were no notable bikepacking milestones happening during the first half of the 20th century. Crossings of Australia expressed a new level of rugged determination, given the difficult and remote conditions. Frank Birtles’s exploits started with a ride from Fremantle to Melbourne in 1905, and then extensive ‘round Australia journeying gained him considerable fame and notoriety.10Tellingly, in 1912, Birtles would shift his attention to automobiles and long-distance driving feats.
In 1935, Evelyn Hamilton — repeatedly barred from competing in the Tour de France — rode from London to John O’Groats in a little over four days. In 1938, she rode 10,000 miles in 100 days. Fred Birchmore achieved fame for his 1935 ride around the world.11 His bicycle is in the Smithsonian. Also in the 1930s, Kazimierz Nowak from Poland traveled extensively, first in Europe and then in North Africa. His meticulous documentation and striking photography are landmarks of the bicycle travel genre, though they also highlight the othering and exoticizing of the places he visited, implicitly colonialist attitudes.12 That was always present — there’s no reason to believe that Nowak is unusually culpable — and arguably, bikepacking wrestles with the same challenges today.
It’s true, too, that bicycle racing remained an active spectacle in spite of the rise of motorized travel. The 13th Tour de France and the 7th Giro d’Italia were raced mere months after the WWI armistice and continued well after Hitler’s annexation of Austria and the invasion of Poland. Bicycles were powerful sporting symbols, and racing is an indelible aspect of the story of bicycles.
Still, this was a span during which bicycles drifted from their previously central place in technology and culture. In the USA, they were viewed more as children’s toys, while in Europe, they became increasingly invisible as a result of utilitarian familiarity. It wasn’t until the years after the Second World War that bicycles would recover a broader cultural relevance that could gesture at the fever of 50 years prior.
There was a postwar growing sense of leisure and the prosperity of free time in the middle of the 20th century. France saw the heyday of the great constructeurs, bicycle builders who set out to create technically and aesthetically complete functional bicycles with fenders and lights and fittings for long randonées. Such bicycles were also exquisitely suited to more attainable camping trips, and French camping bicycles remain, in the eyes of many, the most beautiful two-wheeled forms ever. This is the era that produced the Rough-Stuff Fellowship in England (1955), a club of riders united by their like-mindedness for riding and carrying their bicycles on farm doubletrack and mountain walking paths.13Dervla Murphy recorded her incredible exploits on a bicycle, including her 1963 trip from Ireland to India.14 The sense of possibility in riding big distances was once again front and center.
The bicycle resurgence was real and crucial, but it was trailing behind another set of enthusiasms, namely the enthusiasm to pave roads. Paved road building had reached a stride starting in the 1930s in the USA, and in 1956, the Congressional Highway Act provided unprecedented millions of dollars for creating a road network. From the perspective of many cyclists, this was not necessarily unwelcome. At the end of the 19th century, cyclists were the first major political constituency to advocate for better quality roads, and paved ones made for quite excellent cycling.
Probably somewhat to the chagrin of those cyclists, however, once paving roads became widespread, riders more or less immediately came into conflict with car drivers for space and priority on streets and byways. Cycle touring had the interest and material bicycle technology to thrive, but its position was only marginally tenable. Cyclable roads went to many desirable places, but the capacity of these roads and, more importantly, the perception and rhetoric around them, was that they were for cars and trucks.
It’s a testament to the appeal of cycling that all disciplines of riding grew in those less-than-ideal conditions. Indeed, by the late 1960s and into the 1970s, bicycling managed to lunge toward a second boom. Touring-wise, this is the time of steel 10-speed bicycles with nylon panniers. It’s the origin of Bikecentennial, which would later become Adventure Cycling Association. Conceived by June and Greg Siple, the audacious Bikecentennial plan was to organize a mass ride across the country in the summer of 1976. The 1970s even originated the word “bikepacking,” which a National Geographic editor coined for a May 1973 article reporting on a trip across Alaska and Canada by the Siples along with Lys and Dan Burden.15 It was the initial leg of their “Hemistour” from Alaska to Ushuaia completed in 1975. Ian Hibell had ridden this journey from south to north from 1971 to 1973,16 and such a ride of the Americas in either direction remains as iconic as any in the world of bikepacking.
Though plenty of people rode their 10-speed bicycles on dirt roads, the imagery of the time referenced open lanes and smooth asphalt. It may not have been a sustainable image, but it provoked and inspired. Around the mid-1970s, it was exciting and meaningful to look at a paper road atlas and trace a finger from end to end across a county or country or continent. Many people gloriously and ambitiously set out on such trips, but a dirt intention hadn’t yet catalyzed.
The following sources were cited Joe Cruz’s “A History of Bikepacking,” which was originally published in the 10th issue of The Bikepacking Journal (pages 124–139) in 2023.
