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So I headed out last Monday to bikepack the Alpine Bike having done a fair amount of bikepacking before (NC 500, Tour Aotearoa, ..) I thought I'd been fine. Well I was wrong.
My plan was to take the first 2 days easy as although I had done back to back 2.5 hr rides fully loaded locally I hadn't been doing back to back 5 hr rides like I did for the TA, so I needed to go steady.
Well it went like this.
Day 1 : Lovely and sunny day and I needed to do 35 miles. First mistake, was that it was actually 31km! So I ended up doing 2 stages in one day 44 miles / 7200ft elevation!
Day 2 : Exerted far too much on day one so didn't sleep and then was pretty wacked. 31 miles / 3100ft
Day 3 : Heavy rain and snow over 2000m. 40 miles / 4900ft
After that I checked the forecast and it was very unsettled with snow on the passes so I called it a day and came home.
I wanted to post as I would really recommend this route. I'm going to head back out next year in July / August when the whether will hopefully be a bit more settled. I was running a 22 / 36 cset / cassette setup but will try and fit a 20 as what blew me was the gradients of the climbs. I found it impossible to ride up them without putting me in the red zones. And as we all know if you do that on multiple day trips you gradually end up drilling yourself into the ground.
Aside from the lack of campsites like you get on the Tour Divide route I would say it easily compares with the Divide and the TA. I mean 7200ft in 44 miles 8-|