S1E118 - Spencer on Bike Packing Pt. I

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Spencer and Inmn talk about bike packing and how cool bikes are. What is bike packing? Where can you ride? What do you need? Find the answers here.

Guest Info

Spencer can be found on IG @spencerjharding or at www.spencerjharding.com

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Spencer on Bike Packing Pt. I

**Inmn ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Inmn Neruin, and today we're going to be talking about something that I've been wanting to do an episode about for a really long time because I really love to do it. And I think what I'm going to learn in this interview is that I have been doing it really wrong. Or not wrong, but making it so much harder for myself. And it's just going to be...it's going to be a lot of fun. And today we're gonna be talking about different ways that you can travel long distances, or short distances over strange terrain, on a bicycle. And we're gonna be talking about bike packing. But before that, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Net of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo. [singing]

**Dissident Island Radio ** 01:27 You're listening to Dissident Island Radio, live every first and third Friday of the month at 9pm GMT, check out www.dissidentIsland.org for downloads and more.

**Inmn ** 02:15 And we're back. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and just a little bit about what you do in the world? And what you're here to tell us about today?

**Spencer ** 02:32 Hi, my name is Spencer Harding. My pronouns are he/him/his. I do a lot of things related to bikes and I have for the last...oh, at least 10 or so years. I'm currently a photographer, writer, and editor for a website called theradavist.com. We do all manner of cycling related articles and content reviews. I've worked as a bike mechanic at local community coops and full on bike shops a like, and I've been traveling by bike since 2009 pretty regularly. And that's been a huge focus of my interest in bikes and kind of my forte in bikes.

**Inmn ** 03:18 Cool, cool. Um, it's funny because I know you real life and we, you know, we like play dnd together and I actually didn't know that's what you for work. And I just knew you knew a lot about bikes. So cool, great.

**Spencer ** 03:40 I don't love that I'll know people for years and years and years and I think in a lot of the communities I've been in for years, no one really asks what anyone does. And it's not really important because we're all just doing these weird niche activities or hobbies together. And it's kind of fun.

**Inmn ** 03:55 Yeah. I'm going to immediately go offer a little script. How did you get into bikes?

**Spencer ** 04:07 I got into bikes right on the verge of the huge fixed gear craze that happened in like the early aughts.

**Inmn ** 04:18 Oh yeah, I remember.

**Spencer ** 04:21 So I was in school at Long Beach State in Southern California. I saw some people riding around bikes. It was the begining of my second year of college. I was moving off campus and I realized that I could buy a bicycle for the same price as a parking pass. And it took me as long to ride from my apartment to my classes as it did to walk from the parking lot to my class. So I took the, what, $130 that that parking pass would have been and I bought an old Schwinn off Craigslist. And it's been all downhill from there.

**Inmn ** 04:59 [Laughing] I'm sure it has not been all downhill, but I appreciate the pun. We'll get into this later, but I did a big--introduction to me and biking--is that I have always just really loved bikes. Like similarly I had this thing in high school where a car became suddenly unavailable to me. And I lived in like a suburb of a suburb of a suburb. And I was like, can I take my dad's old Schwinn that's in the in the crawl space and ride it to the city? And the answer was, yes, I could. But like, fast forward many years to going on my first bike tour, and we like went over the continental divide and I was like, "So it's all downhill from here, right?"

06:00 [Laughing] That's one of the things. You never trust the elevation profile. There's always more up somehow. You could be on top of a mountain and somehow there will be some more uphill.

**Inmn ** 06:11 Yeah. Always uphill. Always. Um, cool. Well. So yeah, let's just kind of happen to it. Um, what is like...what are the different kinds of scopes of bike travel? I feel like there's like a lot of words that were new to me as of a couple of years ago where I was just always "bike touring." But now there's all these kind of other words that people use that maybe seem like little subsets of bike touring, like gravel bikes or bike packin or r maybe there's other words that I don't know about.

06:50 There's so many buzzwords, and most of it is marketing, and like an ever smaller niche-ification of bikes. When we talk about bike travel, I think the word that comes to mind is bike touring, like, everything is bike touring. You're touring on a bike, you're riding, you're exploring, you're traveling by bike. The buzzword of the last decade has been "bike packing." And there's a lot of arguments about what that means, what that constitutes, what's bike packing, what's not bike packing. I won't go down a huge rabbit hole. I feel like the word bike packing ushered in a more modern sense of ways to pack a bicycle as opposed to what was classically bicycle touring. But if you're traveling by bike and you're strapping shit to your bike, you're going bike touring, Call it bikepacking. Call it gravel biking. You can call it...there's a multitude of other things like that. But when it boils down to it, it's all bike touring in my mind.

**Inmn ** 08:09 Yeah. Okay. Um, golly, I'm going to immediately go on another tangent because I... [Spencer encourages it] It's reminding me of like.... I suddenly found myself thinking about like, wait, I wonder if Spencer knows the history...like what the history of the development of the bicycle was? This is a question I should have sent to you yesterday. And I mean, maybe you do, maybe you don't--

08:39 I'm not super familiar. It popped in my head like I should probably do some sort of research. I mean I know the vagaries of it. But nothing specifically. I couldn't sit tell you names or dates or anything like that.

**Inmn ** 08:53 Totally. But it's like, it is something that people have...like people have been riding long distances on bikes since bikes were invented, which is something that I find really interesting. Like there's.... Which I know you could take like a rewritten fairy tale and call