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Non-luxury gravel near Mansfield, WA:

Questions: What is your overall fitness and endurance? What kind of terrain and surface are you riding on? Steep unpaved roads and singletrack trails will consume watt-hours faster than flat pavement. How many watt-hours does your bike have now? What kind of drive system does your bike use...

More crunch (that's Mount Rainier in the distance):

CRUNCH!

That all misses the point of a heart rate monitor. In practice you’d never use it to make sure you aren’t exceeding your maximum heart rate (in practice that is harder than you think). The Big Reason is that you can build endurance quickly with about two hours of Zone 2 (60-70 percent of max...

Believe me, if you make a campfire to cook a hot dog during a total fire ban or try to fit pvc pipe together with an oxy torch you will be held responsible. Both of those idiots caused major fires near my home. Property was destroyed and lives were lost. I leave it to your imagination what...

I rarely need to access my phone on a ride. If I need a particular app I can sideload it onto the Karoo 2, which runs Android and can even have a SIM card.

If that works for you, great! How do you keep dirty and wet velcro sticking, though?

About that. Every now and then the NPS (the National Park Service is the principal landowner there) would try to haul away abandoned old cars. What they discovered was that because so many of them were not licensed and were out of title (meaning they had no record of who actually owned them)...

All of my tracking and data needs these days are provided by a Hammerhead Karoo 2. Which is pretty much the best such head unit on the market in terms of capability and usability. Though it does have a few quirks. For a long time I used a Polar HRM Watch. I'd still heartily recommend them...

I was riding in the wet and soggy woods over by Darrington and thought I had a major blowout and sealant release. Turned out I ran over a slug. Yuck!

The new configuration:

I'm not so lucky. Since April when I did my tubeless conversion I had three flats -- all of which were resolved by airing up the tire and spinning the wheel. There was also about six weeks of teething while I got the rim tape right. Mainly that meant I had to air up the tires every morning...

One thing I think gets missed in this discussion: 99 percent of punctures in a tubeless tire can be replaced without removing the wheel Given that a lot of e-bikers aren't able to remove their wheels while on a ride, and perhaps even at home or in their garage, I'd make the argument that even...

Got the Pinnacle Soloist II kit today. The "Foon" will not be traveling with me. Cooked a can of black bean soup over the Pocket Rocket with this cookpot. Didn't scorch on the bottom and came clean with hot water and a wipe from some paper towels. So it looks like it is a good solution, at...

We're all different that way. Back in my younger days, my motto was, "at either end of the economic spectrum, there is a leisure class." I take perverse pride in having spent most of my life at either extreme and rarely much time in the middle of that spectrum. I was (and still am) a proud...

The Sim Works EX Loader arrived yesterday: All this stuff just barely fit into it: I had to put the tarp and tent stakes in the mesh pocket. Which is fine for these purposes. My own feelings right now is that, yes, I could make this work. But I think I like the Link II Pannier better...

Okay, here is the new REI Link II Pannier empty and mounted on the drive side: It is mounted on the lower pannier rails because (A) it fits there, (B) it gives me a lower center of gravity, and (C) it frees up the top rails for strapping an overflow bag and other stuff (e.g. soggy wet...

R&M makes pretty high quality bikes. If properly cared for and not grossly abused they will last you a long time. My own opinion is that most of their bikes seem to fit best into the city commuter niche. In particular if you have a secure place to park and store such an expensive bike. Most...

I'd go further and say that any bike that isn't at least minimally weatherproof is a joke and a waste of good money.