it is a beautiful morning in buena vista
today and today we're gonna be doing a bike packing trip so me and my buddy ed
are down here i'm just getting ready to load up all my equipment on the bike
and uh we're gonna do an overnighter so we're heading up to a place called st
elmo it's kind of an old ghost town here in buena vista area
we're gonna ride up to hancock lake which is kind of this high alpine lake
camp out and then come back tomorrow morning so
so i'm out here i'm just loading up the bike and this is all the stuff that i'll
be bringing with me not a whole lot of stuff in fact most of it'll just be kind
of cameras and electronic gear for this video but
toe peak sent me these new tetra racks and we're going to be trying these out
on the bike normally i use like a roll bag on the
front and the handlebars and then a seat bag and you know what i've been
noticing is that i have this full suspension bike
and when you put one of those seat bags on the back you can't use the dropper
because the bag comes down and it hits the tire
so there's a couple ways around that but topek sent me these out to go ahead and
try so we're going to set these up now the tetra racks are designed for bikes
that don't necessarily have eyelets to put pen ears and racks and
that type of thing on the the tetra racks the m1 will go ahead
and it's designed to uh attach to like suspension forks um and
then we have the uh the m2 which will go back here got the
insulation done on the tetra racks both the front and the back are pretty easy
so the m2 which sits on the rear it's
pretty cool because they velcro down with a velcro strap and then
you tighten them down with this bolt right here so it kind of pulls it tight
and this rubber piece kind of holds it on there so i've got my tetra rack set
up with the mtx trunk bags these are from topeka as
well so it's kind of got like this expandable
top pouch up top we can organize things it's got some nice little mesh
pockets some bungee cords we can put stuff on
and then the sides fold out into panniers so those will kind of lock down
here like that and we'll be able to fill those up
all right she's all loaded up so we got everything i need in here
um i'll just kind of talk about where i put everything so i got the tent
um just some random stuff back here my food kit that type of stuff in here i
think there's also a sleeping pad um in the sleeping bag in here
some random electronics got the catandine water bottle
these are pretty cool with the mtx trunk bags they got these little bottle
holders on the front put a bunch of the electronic stuff up
front here and then in this one down here we uh put
all the clothes in here so i'm also using these toe peek bags that
can press down really well they got this vent so you can squish all the air out
of them and then tighten it back up so they can
get really small but yeah that all seems to fit
into the uh mtx trunk bags and uh so far those tetra racks look pretty
solid they're on there really good all right ed's ready to go we haven't
done a bike ride and probably a couple months the last
one we did was pretty epic which was down around
buena vista and salida that was a hundred mile plus
over a couple days lots of hike a bike and uh today we're doing the out and
back right lollipop lollipop so it'll be an
overnighter we're gonna go up through st elmo kind
of hook around through the alpine tunnel system
and then camp out on top of hancock lake which is
alpine lake ed's got his setup down here ed let's go check out your ride let's
let's see what you got going on you're still riding the uh the truck
right still in the truck rigid yep fully rigid kind of a mid-fat
bike he's got a cool setup so you're running
uh blackburn bags right blackburn salsa on the front yeah let's
take a look at those so those are pretty pretty sharp looking
bags that fit in there is this custom or can you just buy them stocks i fit in
there really well in the track and then he's got the the salsa roll bag
up front ed's bringing his fishing pole he's planning to do some uh fishing up
there in the alpine lake today so uh we'll see how that goes packed up
we're ready to go turn the music off let's go out front
get the bike ready
we just made it from buena vista down here to uh princeton spring so that's
the hot springs back here we're about to head up a little bit
further up the mountain here it's pretty much just
road uh all the way up to st elmo's which is a kind of an old
ghost town so we'll check that out place is pretty cool and then we're on our way
up to the alpine tunnel uh so the views start to get really cool up there
gonna start hitting those alpine views so yeah let's go
oh what is that what is that oh wallet that's pretty cool that's
crazy you never know what you're gonna find
out here there's a bunch of money in it and an id
so after we were riding along after we found that wallet
i seen this guy fishing in the river next to us over here
and i asked that i said who's that guy's name again he's like daniel i was like i
think that's him back there in the river and so we went back and sure enough
it was the guy that lost the uh wallet about a mile back he said he lost it a
couple days ago we're riding the bikes after we found
the wallet made it up a mile ahead about a mile a mile and a
half and i said i seen this guy down here fish said that's that's got to be
daniel so this is the guy who lost the wallet
and you guys have no idea how great this is i was freaking
out and my wife's been just going are you dumb i don't know what happened
it's awesome you got it we're glad we could do that
listen we're getting back you know i don't know how to reward you
there's no reward it's just uh don't fall catch some fish
you gotta be rewarded oh man happy that you guys get that you got it
on the side of the road you're kidding yeah
all right well listen thank you guys so much i can't tell you
let me like buy you a beer we wouldn't make it to wherever we were going if we
drank it right now daniel we got to go way up
there listen i i can't really thank you enough yeah
i'm glad we found it and found you yeah i'll tell you what we can do for
you it's like save your day anyways dip it in that pocket now so that's just
kind of one of those cool things where we're able to
get somebody back their property that you find that would suck to lose your
wallet and not get that back 150 bucks in cash yeah
ruin your weekend i mean he's out there trying to have a good time so
i was glad we were able to do that was pretty cool
so we're just pulling into uh st alamo and uh
it is an old abandoned mining town i believe
let's check it out so we're at the far end of saint elmo
and uh st elmo if if you guys aren't familiar with it is an old i believe
mining town it's a ghost town so this is basically
all empty buildings they've been here for a long time and uh
everybody kind of comes up here to check these buildings out and they're really
cool we're doing the last little bit up to
hancock lake and we finally hit probably about ten
thousand foot in elevation and we're starting to get a
lot of that beautiful fall color on the aspen trees check this
out lots of gold
it's pretty awesome on can't beat it
so we made it to hancock lake this is as far as we were going for today
and we rolled in about six o'clock so we're a little bit later the weather's
starting to come in because we're about 12
000-ish feet so we're alpine up here there aren't too many trees we're not
we're not really protected it's pretty exposed and so we decided to throw up
the tents really quick kind of get camp set
up we got lake hancock out here which is just
amazing it's really beautiful got ed's tent over here has a herakin a
nemo tent and that's a one person tent ultra
light super easy to set up super easy to take
down ed you like your tent love it yup pretty good tent right there
this is mine over here this is a norse face storm break and uh these are pretty
cheap i actually think i picked this up for just over 100 bucks it was on sale
i think it was last year's model but it's an ultralight one person as well
and uh the the tetra racks from topek i mean did
an outstanding job granted most of what we rode today was gravel riding that
type of thing tomorrow is going to be a little more
single track with the alpine loop and then heading back into bv so we'll
really be able to test those but yeah i think the rack system worked
way better than i expected them to um you know coming from using the the
handlebar bag in a normal seat bag on here to using a
rack system i thought it was going to be kind of
strange but really they held up so tomorrow we're doing the alpine loop
we'll probably try to get up kind of early
not too early because there isn't going to be a whole lot of sun and i guarantee
you being almost october and it's actually
starting to rain right now it's going to be probably pretty cold tomorrow morning
so we might sleep in just a little bit wait till that sun kind of pops up but
the plan is to do the alpine tunnel it's about another 30 mile loop
a lot more single track a lot of cool features out there
i think this is where we're going to cut it off for the night so we're going to
talk to you guys tomorrow
you