Bikepacking Arizona’s Sky Islands Odyssey
We celebrated the end of 2021 with a “Goodnight 2021” bikepacking trip in southern Arizona called the “Sky Islands Odyssey”. 2021 was the very first year my partner Sagar and I took on bikepacking (and actually, biking!) and pursued it wheely, wheely earnestly (bad pun intended).
Our first year of bikepacking included a comedy of errors, as we fumbled through Arizona’s Fools Loop on our gravel bikes for our first bikepacking trip last January; explorations closer to our home in Alaska in the temperate rainforest of Prince of Wales Island (a bikepacker’s paradise) in June; magical hot-springs and tundra rambles along Nome’s insular road system in September; and, for Sagar, a butt-breaking journey from Prudhoe Bay back home to Anchorage in July. We learned through trial and error which bag to put which thing into, how to consolidate our food items and other “smellies” into a singular bear bag when traveling in bear country, and how incredibly awesome caffeinated goos are when biking with numb fingers and toes in cakey mud into a headwind of freezing rain.
Our Goodnight 2021 trip followed a variation of the beautifully researched Sky Islands Odyssey loop to fit the time we could take off work. We dropped our gremlin chihuahua at a friend’s house, drove to Patagonia, Arizona, and started a multi-day loop up and out of town, passing quivering cottonwood trees, schools of quail, and trickling streams. The days riding were sunny and brisk, and the early nights and cool desert temperatures enticed us into our sleeping bags at dusk each night after ooh’ing and ahh’ing over the spectacular sunsets. The loop includes passage through a number of different state, federal, and private lands, and it was fascinating to compare differences in land management depending on the agency’s mission. The loop also travels fairly close to the U.S. border with Mexico, and we frequently sighted border patrol agents on the less-traveled gravel roads.
What was most rewarding about the trip was the prevalence of the Sky Islands themselves: a series of isolated, forested mountain ranges that the route weaves in and out of, providing essential habitat for an astonishing amount of biodiversity. Initially, each sky island was an unknown entity on the horizon, but as we rambled in and around each island, it was incredibly satisfying to be able to point to a range in the distance and recall biking through it just a day before.
We ended our trip riding into a staggering headwind back to our car in Patagonia. Stripping down to our skivvies on the main street of town, dusting the dirt off of our sock lines, and slipping our sore feet into flip flops we had waiting for us in the car, we laughed about our deep dive into our inaugural year of bikepacking and gave thanks for all those who provided us information, advice, and encouragement to take the plunge. Cheers to many more bikepacking adventures ahead in 2022!
