We finally got our gear page set up, so you can see our equipment and trust and worries about it. You can see our stove, tent, water bladders, bikes, and panniers. There's even a video of a bear testing the bear bags. Check out the gear page.

We usually carry 3-4 of these Playpus 2-liter bladders. Most of the time they're empty (and light! and compact!). But they when you need them they're there to haul water. We can camp the night, fix dinner and breakfast, and start riding the next morning with about 6 liters of water, although that's pretty tight. When we know we're going to have a "dry camp" at night, we load up with water so we can do it.

We've also ordered a new item from Ortlieb: A 10-liter water bag (with shower fitting!). We'll use it for unfiltered water. It can be used to haul water before it's filtered with our Pur.
(Katadin) Hiker water filter.

Here's our old faithful (mostly) MSR Whisperlite stove. It will run on nearly any kind of fuel. White gas (coleman fuel) burns the best, but it's really quite hard to get an appropriate amount of white gas when you are bike touring, and it's really easy to get regular unleaded gasoline. So we just pull up at the pump and buy 50 cents worth of gas every 3-4 days. (It used to be 30 cents before the big gas price run-up!)

We use denatured ethyl alcohol to prime it - and never have to clean it any more. It's so much more reliable. See the article here.

Nancy did an enormous amount of research on bear issues for this trip, and of course she's still concerned about it. She found that these Ursack bags were the best combination of weight and value. The only problem we'll have in the treeless north part of the trip is figuring out how to secure them.

Here's Nancy inviting you into our Sierra Designs Lightning tent. No, it's not very big. But it works. You need to be very friendly with your partner to use this one.

Our criteria for choosing this tent: We wanted something light , warm enough on the cold nights, but not a terrible condensation machine. It's really light. Maybe not warm enough on the cold nights (although we've been out below freezing on two recent nights) and maybe not good enough on the condensation angle. We've had a couple of nights where the condensation was quite surprising. I think you probably can't have everything!

Randy has a regular Specialized Stumpjumper mountain bike with the heavy-duty Old Man Mountain racks and Ortlieb "Classic Roller" panniers. Total weight of the stuff in the bags: between 40 and 60 pounds, depending on how much food and water we're carrying.

For the Dempster Highway section we're planning to carry about seven days' worth of dehydrated food to get to Eagle Plains (which we estimate to be 5 days) and then we'll pick up another 7 days' food from the Eagle Plains Hotel - we'll ship it there in advance. Normally we don't use dehydrated food, because it's expensive, hard to get in most places, and probably not as good for you as real food. However, since the Dempster is 450 miles long with no services, and since it's at the beginning of our trip, we decided to go with the dehydrated stuff from Mountain House which we actually like quite a lot.

(This is Nancy's bike that she used from Inuvik to Denver. At that point she switched to a Stumpjumper mountain bike. See the current gear article.

Here's Nancy's beautiful redone bike. She spent an enormous amount of time and money retooling it since our New England Trip. This is a custom Serotta Rapid Tour. She has fairly standard racks and has Ortlieb Classic Roller panniers on the back, and waterproof Nashbar panniers on the front. The handlebar bag is new - it's from Ortlieb.

We are preparing for departure! Leaving Denver June 1, starting the flight north on June 2, and starting the ride south from Inuvik on June 9! My brother Collin and his wife Marisa of Parkwest Air are going to fly us up there in their Cessna! And they're leading a group of 10-12 more planes. We start from Grand Junction, Colorado on June 3.

Below this posting is a map of the first part of our route and here is the same map as a pdf and as a large jpeg - click to see all sizes (with all the detail).
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