Survival Bikepacking by @cahlen on 3Speak
▶️ Watch on 3Speak --- Having a pedal-powered bicycle which can carry everything you need to survive allows you to go places nobody else can get to on foot or in a motorized vehicle. --- ▶️ 3Speak
Tags: #cycling #bikepacking #outdoors #lifestyle #survival
Hey everyone, Callan here, and I'm house-sitting for a friend right now, so I have access to a garage, and it just seemed like a good place to show you the bike that I traveled here on, and this is a new non-electric bike packing bike. So a bike packing bike is a bicycle, which is designed for carrying camping gear and going off-road. and basically being able to go long distances and keep everything that you need with you to survive on the bike itself, ideally without you even having to wear a backpack, okay, because wearing a backpack while you're biking is bad for several reasons. It's going to fall. Okay, it's bad for several reasons because, one, you've got all this weight on your back, and maybe you need to jump, you know, because you're about to get hit by a car or something like that, right? Or you need to evade a dog or something. Now, you're very top-heavy and not really able to handle things. And also, you can throw off the balance of your bike pretty easily because that weight is pretty high up, right? So, ideally, all the weight is on your bike, and it's on places which are lower down. So this is a place to put, you'd want to put a lot of weight back here. low on the wheel, getting more pressure down on this back wheel so it doesn't pop around and bounce and so you lose traction. That's actually adding this weight is helpful for that reason, okay? So if you can get everything on your bike, then you're free to move, right? And it gives you the added benefit of redundancy, because if you can get everything that you need on your bike, you can also carry everything you need in your backpack. Okay, this is something that you will not be able to stay around at all times. And so you have to consider something like this in a survival situation as I could come back and this will be gone. It doesn't matter how secure you think you've made it, right? Even if you've got a video camera or something on it, it's like, are you really going to go to the trouble to find this person and then deal with them, right? So you may have other problems and you can't deal with that. So if you had everything that you needed on here to survive, and it's gone, then you're screwed, right? So, if you can also have a backpack, then you've got a situation where, if this goes away, you're fine. Also, if for some reason you're out walking and something happens to your backpack, in a survival situation, people call them loot boxes, basically solo backpackers in a survival situation, loot boxes, because you're easy to take out, and you got a lot of good shit. Right, okay? So, a lot of people aren't going to, like, take you out while they take all your loot because they just don't want to, you know, take you out. They're just not into doing that kind of thing. So you may end up in a situation where now you've lost your bag, and you could have stashed this bike someplace where no one's going to find it, right? And now... you aren't even worried about the situation where you're getting mugged of your backpack because you're like, well, it's not, you know, I'm just going to go to this place that only I know where it is, and I'm, because of where I put it, it's a pretty low chance that it's not there anymore. And so you feel pretty fine, you know, with that situation and not making that situation violent because you didn't need to. Like, if you needed, if you need to take a bag mugging violently, It's probably because if you lose that, you're going to die, right? And therefore, you would need to get violent. But if you aren't going to die, if you lose your bag, then there's no need for that, okay? I'm not saying that you wouldn't have the right. I'm just saying, you know, I personally prefer to avoid that type of situation. Okay, so let's talk about the actual bike that I have at the moment. So this is a bike which several years ago, maybe five, six years ago at this point, I had a friend. who bought a bikepacking bike because we were both getting kind of excited about it together, and I had my solar e-bike, and he used it a few times, but he didn't, you know, end up using it hardly ever, and he just didn't want to have all this stuff, and he tried to sell it and did not succeed, and at least not for the price that you wanted, so he gave it to me, right? And this is it, and it used to be... It used to be a totally different color, okay, and I was not into the color, and so, you know, I painted it black, and I think it looks badass. I also put, like, some good wheels on here, some good tires, excuse me, and these are tubeless tires, and the type of tubeless, which, like, they don't leak, and they're going to survive, assuming you're keeping it filled with fluid, and they don't get, like, a knife attack or something like that, you know, like punctures from many things will self-seal, because of how tubeless system works, okay? Then it came with some bag, so it came with a bag here, but I also didn't like that bag, so I bought this bag, I bought this bag, and then it came with this thing up here, which allows you, just this part right here, it has some straps that go around, it allows you to put anything you want, and in here, so I can put my bed roll here, this currently is a waterproof... stuff sack basically, and it can hold, you know, all my clothes, well, I think probably all of my clothes if I want to, or my, all of my shelter, so my sleeping bag, and my bivisack, which is technically really all I need, or it can carry a huge amount of food, okay? And so this is all up here on this, this front thing here. The only problem with this one is that the shocks here, will sometimes bring the tire up and so if this gets too bulky and this is too loose or you're hitting too hard, you know, then you're going to rub against this, so you might have to think about protecting that in some way. So up here, it has a mirror, okay, and it has these two basically bottle carriers, and these will hold, like, those big Nalgene bottles, okay? So you can put two Nalgene bottles here, Or like for me, one of my bottles of that size is a titanium bottle, which I can cook with in a fire, and it also contains my spork inside, okay? So it's basically my kitchen, so I can have my kitchen in here, and then a water bottle here, right? Then here is basically the tool bag for the bike, and just keep a bunch of stuff for, like, refilling the hydraulic brakes. That's that stuff. Okay, I also put on these custom handles. And here's those things again. And another cool thing is that these are all, it's all orange theme. And I, like, I didn't even buy all this stuff, right? It just happened this way. So this, inside of these bags, I didn't buy these bags. Inside of these bags is all layered orange, right? This has got an orange thing. This thing's got an orange thing. It just happened that way, you know? And this is like my color, orange and black. So anyways, so I want to show you this thing. So this is a flashlight, basically. But it also is a stun gun. Well, not a stun gun. What do you call it? It's like a taser. And, you know, it's not something, like a tough guy would be able to take that, okay. But the main thing that's nice about this is I can just leave this right here. And if I'm riding by and a dog starts to attack me, I just push this button. Push it. It's not working. There you go. And just the noise by itself will scare the dog away. Okay, and then in the back of the bike, I basically have a rack, which I can place things on. So normally I would put my folding sleeping pad right here, and then I could put something else entirely right here. I could put another one of those dry sacks right here, so I could just get another one, and then just tie it with straps to this rack. And then on each side is a panier. which can hold a lot of stuff in it, okay? You can hold a lot of food in this one bag, and you have two of them. And what I usually do is I put my lower clothes, all of my pants and things like that, socks, in this bag. And, you know, I've got multiple layers of that, so that's going to basically fill up a lot of this bag. And then the other bag would be the tops, okay? So then I know where to go for which type of item I'm looking for. Okay, I flip the bike around so I can show you this side. This thing is where you'd want to keep heavier or larger and also longer items. And so currently it's got just bike tools like my bike lock is in here. Some extra fluid for the tubeless tires. That type of stuff, I can put my phone tripod, which I'm currently using in here. and then I would basically fill up about this far, and then I could put extra water bottles in here just to add the weight if I need extra water. So let's talk about some of the benefits of having this over a solar electric bike. So for many years I've been using my solar electric bike. It basically broke down recently, but I'll probably be able to fix it, and I'll probably continue using it. Right now, this is basically a backup. Like right now, my solar electric bike is broken, so I can use... this to go wherever I need to go. But beyond just the redundancy factor having a backup, in a situation where electricity is not available. And, you know, my solar electric bike would be fine as long as there's sun, but there's the downside of they're actually really bulky and they have a lot of weight. That's another thing about this, the solar electric bike is super bulky if you need to get up over a fence or something like that. it's almost impossible to get that thing over a fence. You can throw this thing over a fence, and you're going to need to go over fences a lot if you're outdoors during a long-term survival situation. So anyways, the solar electric bike could technically survive in a grid-down situation, but there are downsides, and another one being that it takes a long time to charge, and it might not be sunny, and you may have a time schedule, you know, you need to get somewhere within a certain amount of time. because maybe you're going to dehydrate or something like that, right? You can't be sitting around for days waiting for your bike to charge. Also, the solar bike has a limit in how far it can go on even a full charge, which is with my battery that I built, about probably 60 to 70 miles. Now, 60 to 70 miles for someone who's not used to pedaling is a pretty long distance, but it's definitely doable. And if you are someone who's experienced with it, that's like half a day of, you know, writing. You know, you're used to going, you know, maybe 100, 120 miles, okay? And there's no limitations. The only limitations is how long you're able to physically endure doing that, and how many, how much food can you eat, right? Because you're using up all the calories, that's your energy source. That's like your gasoline or your electricity. So basically this breaks you free under the condition that you can get into shape and you're able to use it, okay? So you can either get into shape beforehand, which, you know, I'm kind of doing by actually writing around, or, you know, you can wait for it to get bad and you're going to be forced to get into shape, and it's going to be really uncomfortable, but at least you didn't have to be uncomfortable earlier in your life before shit went to, you know, went to shit. Another nice thing about something like this is that you can learn to fix every aspect of it, and if you get the right parts, you can, it will be something which if you find other bicycles, which will probably be, you'll find them, right? You'll be able to just take things from them and put them on your bike, right? Like chains, every bicycle is going to have a chain. You know, there's a few different chain sizes, but, you know, you'll probably find, especially if your gear system is not unusual, then you'll probably find, you know, a chain. You find a bike, it's a pretty good chance. You find a chain, it's probably going to fit on your bike, okay? And the same thing goes for basically every single part, and you can carry all the tools that you need here, right? You can pretty much keep most of it just in this bag right here. Another nice thing about this situation is that even though an electric bike is quiet, you can still hear it coming. And while you could still technically hear a bike, you know, rolling across the ground, it's not nearly as loud as an electric bike, okay? So you can be generally fairly silent and more stealth. And on the stealth thing, bikes are set up... so that they have lots of reflector-type things on them, which is probably a good idea in a normal world situation, especially if you're riding on streets in the nighttime. But in a survival situation, you don't want any of that stuff on here, right? You may want to be biking and not have someone who's in a car be able to tell where you are, you know, if you got off into the forest, like, if they see a flash to the right, now they know you're to the right, you know, and that's not, you know. It'd be better if they didn't know whether it was left or right, right? Also, if you leave it stashed somewhere and someone's walking through, maybe at night with a flashlight, it's going to reflect and they're going to see it, right? So basically, you're going to want to remove all of that stuff. And also, I went to some effort to make this thing look less valuable. You know, the paint did that also, the tires, like I've gone over the... you know, the branding, right? I'm trying to basically get rid of the branding and stuff like that, because that can be kind of the stuff that gives it away as something valuable. So, like, for the branding, you can put, I think it's dynetrol, you basically, it's like a fluid that you can go over it, and it basically is black colored, and it pretty, I mean, you don't see any branding on these wheels, right? But there's definitely a large amount of white and different colored branding on them. Also, I took off all the stickers on the wheels and in different places. But, I mean, when it comes down to it, my bike looks pretty sweet, so I don't think I'm going to be able to really play that down. So anyways, if I'm going to have to be careful about this, and I do presume that this will probably be lost at some point. So if you're going to get yourself dependent on a situation like this, I would say that's probably a bad idea. But having it as something available to you, and maybe something you'll be able to keep for a long period of time, It's going to be a lot better than being on foot only. Anyways, that's my survival bikepacking bike. I hope you like, and I'll see you guys later.