The Radavist

Is it a gravel bike? A drop bar 29er? Or something else entirely? When it comes to the nomenclature surrounding these modern touring bikes, I often scratch my head, pondering an answer to this question. My usual inclination is to envelop these bikes under the umbrella of “adventure bikes” but then this bike landed in my lap. The Otso Cycles Fenrir is aligned with bikes like the Kona Sutra ULTD and the Moots Baxter but Otso did something different – i.e. better – than its competitors. The Fenrir took it up a notch and has utilized boost spacing wheels, which in my mind, put this in the drop bar 29er category.

I’ve had the Fenrir for a while now, have taken it on an overnighter, and have ridden some of my favorite mixed terrain routes here in Santa Fe with it. On washboarded sandy roads to singletrack, doubletrack, and gravel, the Fenrir is a hell of a bike and one that I really resonated with, so let’s check it out in detail below…

Today we’re continuing our coverage of the 2021 Bespoked UK framebuilder showcase with words and photos by Petor Georgallou…

Washboard roads, rocky doubletrack, creosote, cacti, centipedes, tarantulas, and vistas for miles. The Monumental Loop provides it all in a healthy mix, featuring the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, BLM, and state lands surrounding the town of Las Cruces, New Mexico. With the mighty Organ Mountains looming in the background, it’s hard to imagine a better touring or bikepacking route in Southern New Mexico. When you add in the delicious food on the route, you’ve got yourself a winning combination. To help celebrate this monumental achievement (tee hee), Matt Mason, co-founder of the Loop, throws a grand depart each year dubbed the Dangerbird which took a brief hiatus last year due to the Pandemic. With Covid protocols in place and our numbers remaining slightly elevated in New Mexico, Matt made sure the entire weekend’s events took place outdoors, so I felt safe to head down to experience this gem of the Chihuahuan Desert…

In the mountains of the State of México, about two hours by car to the west of México City, there’s a little town named San Simón el Alto; in this town, there’s a house which would pass as any other house save for the sign that reads “Bebidas exóticas”, exotic drinks, and an outdoor bar, a Biergarten if you will, with chairs in an inviting position. Wandering in the garden, a big turkey makes sure everything is in order and slowly approaches whoever stays idle for too long, be it dog, cat, or person. To the right there’s the house and one of the doors opens up to reveal two sewing machines, rolls of Xpac and Liteskin, and a few half-made bicycle bags. This is Peregrinus Equipment, the bike bag enterprise run by physicist, cyclist, and nature enthusiast Nicolás Legorreta.

I like to shoot the first frame on a roll of film no matter how carefully I load the roll I always end up getting something kinda strange and wonderful out of that first exposure – an effect yielded by the film’s interaction with light coming from two separate moments in time and space – the exposure of the film through the camera’s shutter, but also the light leaked onto the frame during the loading of the roll. One of my favorite photos ever is of my 17-year-old beagle/spaniel mix, Bucky, where he looks like he’s peeking out from behind a cascading sheet of liquid sun. The first exposure on this roll is of my friend, podcast co-host, and riding partner, Sarah rifling through overstuffed bikepacking bags outside of a country store in Damascus, Virginia about 15 miles into our 550-mile bikepacking trip through the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia. The image of her trying to squeeze a snack bar into a nonexistent empty space in the top tube bag is itself neatly constrained into the 2/3rds of the frame not devoured by light exposure obtained while the roll was being loaded.

My name’s Kuba, I make the bags at the Rambler Bags’ bag factory, and I made this weird bag called the Troubadour for banjo-packin. The Troubadour is a roll-top bag for carrying full-size instruments on a bike tour with a padded modular external harness that uses secondary load-lifter straps to raise the weight to the external dowel. The original Troubadour prototype was designed for a 4-month bike tour that included dirt and gravel from southern Pennsylvania to Chicago, riding the New Mexico Off-Road Runner from Santa Fe to Las Cruces, mountain climbs, wild descents, clay-like mud, hail, and a final jaunt from Tuscon to New Orleans.

I’m going to nerd out here. Fair warning. When I see a bike like the Kona Sutra LTD hit the internet, I feel mixed emotions. Part of that has to do with my love of the now-dead “adventure” category Specialized launched a few years back, beginning with the AWOL. I had some good memories on that bike and it feels like eons ago. If you remember, this was around the time people started calling bicycle touring “bikepacking”.

The AWOL was a touring bike in the sense that it had rack mounts, clearances for, at the time, big tires and it came specced in both its Poler and Trans-Continental limited-edition build kits with racks and panniers. Sounds like a touring bike to me! While this isn’t an article about the AWOL, I can’t help but see the face-value similarities between it and the Sutra Unlimited, or LTD for short.

Now, the AWOL came out in 2014, and in these past six years, a lot has changed in the touring or bikepacking world for me but one thing remains constant: I love fat tire tourers, and the Sutra LTD really impressed me. It pulled at all the heartstrings…

A little while back, our friends at Swift Industries worked with Kona to create a collaboration Rove ST Special Edition touring bike. If you recall this project’s release, it looked really appealing for those wanting a classic touring bike package with bags and everything, ready to hit the road.

My bud Kyle Klain picked one of these up from the Broken Spoke here in Santa Fe when they first dropped. It’s been his bikefishing mobile and commuter before upgrading a few crucial components this year. To test out my new camera setup (more on that later) I met up with Kyle at his office and took his bike for a quick shoot…

I’ll be honest, the thought of a new bike is not something that really gets me terribly excited these days.  The places it can take me and the people I will meet along the way?  Definitely!  But when a post pops up on this site or any of the other bike-related sites I visit that starts getting into new-fangled hub spacings or microscopic geometry tweaks and angles, my brain tends to glaze over and forcibly pushes my hand toward clicking on the next article.  The things I look for when selecting a bike for my next big trip are based almost entirely on practicality and reliability.  I just want a bike that I don’t have to think about.