All you need for your bikepacking trip in Scotland
We are thrilled to be running a bikepacking workshop and a guided ride at this year’s Braemar Mountain Festival in the beautiful Cairngorms from Thursday 1 March to Sunday 4 March. And we are event more thrilled that adventure cycling is one of the major focuses of the event in its second year, with a great selection of more guided rides, skills sessions, talks, workshops and film screenings on offer.
Continue reading “We are at this years Braemar Mountain Festival in very good company!”
We are happy to announce that our latest video Wild About Argyll is now also available in German. You can watch the video below, the original English version is available here as well. Thanks to everyone for watching, we are really looking forward to see your pictures and video once you have ridden the Wild About Argyll Trail yourself. Add us on Twitter and Instagram and tag us or use #waat to share your memories! The route can be found here.
And for everyone in the DACH region, the next issue of Bike Adventure will include a long feature on cycling in Scotland and the Wild About Argyll Trail, find out more on their Facebook Page.
Argyll and the Isles, Scotland’s Adventure Coast, provides an awe-inspiring setting for bikepacking. With funding from Argyll and the Isles Tourism Co-Operative, Scottish Natural Heritage and Forestry Commission Scotland we have recently added another trail to our routes, and just released the new short film ‘Wild About Argyll’ to showcase the route. At 655 km (407 miles) the Wild About Argyll Trail is a long-distance cycling trail that was designed specifically with gravel bikes in mind.
To be honest. My feelings about gravel bikes were mixed. Although I am proud that my picture decorates one of the walls at the Radius Brewery in Emporia, the start of the famous Dirty Kanza, mother of all gravel races, I never warmed up to the idea of owning another bike. Drop bars and off-road, this combination only offered limited attraction to me. For me the days of drop bars were gone, and while I sometimes wished for a bit more speed on my Ogre, so far I thought there was simply not enough to make a gravel bike stand out from my trusted rigid mountain bike round the world companion.
I knew that I was wrong shortly afterwards. I worked on a project for Glasgow City Council and it was the first time I seriously thought about the idea of skinnier tires and drop bars again. The interesting thing is that my thinking had nothing to do with bikes, but somehow a rigid mountain bike wasn’t really what I would have expected in pictures advertising city cycling routes. For some reason it felt wrong. Continue reading “Gravel joy.”
Looking into Glen Ample last night, I couldn’t hide my excitement. I had been here once before, and waited ever since for the right opportunity to return. Today was the day, and I was everything but disappointed. I was happy. After two long days riding trails over and over again, this was the last crucial bit missing to release the provisional route for the Central Belter.
After I returned from cycling around the world it was my dream to create a trail that combines the three great bikepacking loops in Scotland, the Highland Trail 550, the Capital Trail and the Cairngorms Loop. And with the Deeside Trail providing another great bikepacking opportunity in the North East of Scotland, this was well worth including as well.
My aim was to create a route that is perfectly worth riding by itself, including parts of the four trails, but also provides the opportunity to create a mega bikepacking loop, like the Tour Aotearoa in New Zealand. I haven’t added all number up yet, but riding the Capital Trail, Central Belter, Highland Trail, Cairngorms Loop and Deeside Trail in one go will be a journey of more than 2,500km. And one of the best in the world. Continue reading “The Central Belter”
After the wonderful feedback to our first video of the Reiver Raid, which has now been watched almost 3,500 times on YouTube, this new video is a follow up to give you more of an idea what the route is like. Filmed and edited on an iPhone, it is the first of two videos to describe the route in more detail. We have now ridden the full loop at least twice, made changes, and made more changes, and we are pretty confident that the final route will be one thing – fun! This is why we changed the musical theme a bit from our first video while sending Markus with his Surly Ogre around the course, with one gear.
The Reiver Raid is a new bikepacking route in the Ale Water Valley in the Scottish Borders, which has been developed by round the world singlespeed bikepacker and Capital Trail founder Markus Stitz. Since his return from the epic 34,000km singlespeed trip last September, Markus has focussed on setting up Bikepacking Scotland with the aim to develop new bikepacking routes in Scotland.
Continue reading “The Reiver Raid – Our first short film is now online to watch!”
Bikepacking is adventure. No matter if big or small. And our home Edinburgh is full of inspiring adventurous people. This is why we created Adventurous Edinburgh, a new series of events at Craigdon Mountain Sports in Edinburgh. To give those inspiring people a platform to share their stories. A platform to inspire you!
Continue reading “Adventurous Edinburgh is back tonight to inspire you to find your next adventure”
It’s been a bit quiet here, but we are happy to announce that you can register to take part in this year’s Capital Trail ride on 3/4 June soon. Entries are open now and places are limited to 100 riders, so get in there soon. If you would like to know what the trail is like, best watch the video from last year.
Continue reading “Entries for the Capital Trail are open now”
We spent the weekend on a trip through the Lammermuir Hills, starting an finishing in Edinburgh. Here’s a teaser, more details and the packlist will follow soon. Here are more pictures from the trip on Flickr. The GPX of the route can be downloaded here. Continue reading “Bikepacking in the Lammermuir Hills”