Hi!

I've been lurking for a while, lots of good info here.  I'm in Arizona and went on my first bikepacking trip this past weekend with my bf Will. We started out in Payson. Our goal was to get on to the Rim from Payson and then on to some of the lakes off of 300.  We were thinking, we'd take 3 days.  It did not pan out. 

Our first day, we failed to get on the Rim.  The trail we were trying to find was impossible to follow.  I guess a fire a few years back destroyed the area and they didn't come in and clear out the trees so the trail is pretty much gone. We were hiking our bikes for hours trying to figure it out.   It was the highline trail to myrtle tr off of control road, FR 199- sorry don't know the name of the area.  So the first night, we made our way over to Washington Park to camp, nice area.  We thought we could get to the rim through Washington park the next day.  Nope, lots of down trees and the trail was hard to follow, I think we were just on the wrong side of the river this day, but anyway we decided to make our way to Pine to get something to eat and figure something out.     

In Pine we started asking around.  Turns out there is a way to get on to the Rim through Pine, but it'll be a hike-a-bike.  How hard could it be?  We'll HARD.  We hiked up the Donahue tr.  Well, we're both stubborn people, so 4 hours later, we finally made it up to the rim and to the Milk Ranch Pt area.  Turns out there was just a fire up there and all of the roads were closed!  We didn't know that until we reached FR218 where it crosses the 300.  Oops..   Oh man, it was super nice up there, the views were amazing!!  Sadly, I was so exhausted that I got very few pictures.      We ended up scratching our plan for a 3rd day and headed into Strawberry for the night!  The two days of pushing/pulling/ navigating up and over trees just did me in.  I was tired and I was throwing in the towel.   

It seemed like every route we tried we encountered down trees.  It became frustrating!       

Overall though, i had a great time and cannot wait to do it again! We learned a lot and next time we'll do a better job of making sure the trails are passable.  Oh and in our two days we only got about 100 miles in but we did 10,000+ ft of climbing.    Thats about 9999 too many feet of climbing for me!  LOL 

Tiffany
aka tiffanyinanthem on mtbr.com

I just did my first bikepacking trip this weekend and I'm already trying to figure out how I can go backpackless. I already have a seat bag, which carried most of my gear but I had to carry most of my water in a camelback. I have 2 water bottle cages on my bike.   Overall my camelback wasn't that heavy, but I think I'd enjoy it more without a camelback on.   

Tiffany