 Hello and welcome to insanely beautiful Moab, Utah. Now you might be thinking, wait, isn't this a bike packing video? Why is he running? He tricked us. Don't worry, I'm just coming back to retrieve my camera. And hey, do you see my buddy Java riding down the hill in the distance? Well, you're gonna love him. He's hilarious, but before we get into the video, I'm just gonna say that this adventure did not go as planned, not even close. We set out to ride a three day 170 mile loop, but we only made it 25 miles. Nothing catastrophic or dangerous happened, but we had a bit of an issue with some equipment that prevented us from continuing. It's really pretty dumb. And at the end of the video, I'll go over some lessons learned that will hopefully be helpful to everyone. All right, here we go. Hi, mister. Hello. Here we are in Moab, one of my favorite places on the planet. I love the geography, the canyons, the blue sky, the desert. The color of the rocks. The color of the rocks. I just love this place so much. And we're here. We're gonna go on a little adventure called Peaks and Plateaus. It's 170 miles. Looks like about 11,000 feet of elevation gain. Are you ready? Do you think you'll be plateauing while I'm peaking? Probably. That's how it works. I'm peaking! Yeah! And I'm here with my good friend. His real name is Tom, but he goes by the hiking viking. And Jabba. He does a lot of long distance hikes, all the big through hikes you've ever heard of. He's done them one or two times, right? Yeah, for sure. For sure. And then a lot, you haven't done one or two times. Yeah. Or heard of. And I got him into bike packing a couple of years ago. He's done the Great Divide, the Western Wildlands, but this is our first adventure together. And I'm excited! Oh, we're gonna have so much fun. Put some deodorant on, dude. Put it down. Yeah. We're not gonna have any fun out here. We are in the desert, which means there's not a whole lot of water out here. Luckily it's springtime, so there might be some little creeks or rivers that we cross, but this route, as far as we know, we don't have water for the next 130 miles. So we're each are carrying a lot of water. I think I've got five and a half or six liters, and I think you've got four. Yeah, something like that. I don't drink as much water as you do. Yeah, he doesn't like to live like I live. Yeah, I think showers. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, we've got a lot of water. We've got our bikes all packed up. He's riding the Priority 600X, of course. The same one that I beat up on the GDNBR and the Western Wildlands, so it's ready for its second maiden voyage. All right, and look, we're gonna go into those landscapes right there. Oh, and you might have noticed, this doesn't look like my typical 600X. I'm testing out a new prototype secret. I'll let you know later what it's gonna become. You ready? No. Come on, let's go. Okay. I'm excited. Me too. We're leaving town. We won't be back here for three days. We'll be out there for two nights. You ever see a 240 pound beast man on your Priority 600X adventure before? No, man, you're rocking that thing. I keep it all in my belly. Wait, I forgot something very important, buddy. No crashes. No flaties. No whammies. Yeah. This is a nice way to start the morning. Little pavement, little flat. How are we feeling? All good? Oh man, I was born for this. Yeah, you were. Let's go have some fun out there. Look at that. You know what I love most about these canyon walls? The echoes. Hope you can hear it, but it's cool. I started coming to Moab back in the late 90s to mountain bike. It was the mountain bike capital of the US, essentially. And I would ride these trails, going right by a massive back right now. And I've always loved this area, especially for biking. Also for running. Everything is beautiful. There's like no ugly part of this area. Let's see who has a louder echo. All right, we're 10 miles in. How are you feeling, homie? Feels like I'm one mile in. I'm amazing. I feel amazing. Feels amazing. I'm amazing. You're definitely amazing. You're amazing. I'm sweating. You're sweating. There's something magical out here, man. There really is. And it's not just you. I mean, you're a piece of the magic. I feel very fortunate to always, to any time I'm here, I feel very fortunate to be here every time I'm here. And I've been here plenty. Like, and it's my first time biking right here. So, new adventures. Same old me. New friends. Yeah. Look at that car cruising through there. There's some water if you want to filter. Free chocolate milk. We are now heading up Hurrah Pass. My kind of pass. Very enthusiastic name. Hurrah! Oh, we got echoes. We're just gonna ride around for 170 miles, screaming at canyon walls. Lose our voice by day two. Don't go off the edge. This is pretty sweet right here. Are you taking a photo of me? Working on it. You're gonna take a photo of me? You're so sweet. Working on it. Boom, buddy. You know, one of the things about riding bikes in this area is that you get distracted a lot and you go out to all the overlooks and that's why you go slow. Cause you want to see all the beauty. And check it all out. That's why we're here. Yeah, stop when you see something. If you see something, say something. Have you want to see something? Yeah, that's good. I think that's where the airport's got that. All right, let's continue riding, my man. And why those cars need to be so loud. I mean, you can hear them from miles away, but it kind of ruins the peaceful nature of things. The only loud people out here are louder. You and me. All right, my buddy. We're almost to the top of Hurrah Pass. Our first big climb, Hurrah. Hurrah. Oh, look at this. Wow. Woo. Whoa. Hurrah. Hurrah. Woo. Yeah. So you're from the East Coast. You're not used to this. Central PA, literally a mile outside of town, is Amish Country, Amish Farms, Dairy Farms, Corn Farms. I couldn't possibly have fathomed setting my eyes on anything like this growing up, because I'd never been west of the Mississippi in my adult life, or well, until my adult life. Excuse me. So, and it took me, I think, until maybe like 2009, 18 till I was out in Moab? No, 2016 till I was out in Moab for the first time and seeing this for the first time. And I was just blown away. Like, there's no red rock in Pennsylvania like this. You're going to hear a lot of whooping and hollering in this series, because I just get so excited. Woo. Makes me so happy. Woo-hoo. So my break started squeaking like crazy on that downhill. And I was like, wow, there's a lot of wet stuff in the front of my bike. I went through a puddle. Is it that? No. Check this out. My bottle cracked. I've never seen that before. And I was trying to conserve water, because there's not a lot out here. So I'm just going to have to chug this. Want some water? If you don't, sure. Yeah, take some chugs, man. Worthless water bottle. Actually, I've had this one since my first Baja divide trip in 2017. So it's been through a lot. Yeah, look at that guy. See what there's not water in that. I know. They could show it with water for us. They just lost the whole bottle. It's blue. It should have water in it. That way. Chicken corner. Yeah, buddy. I'm getting water. Water of opportunity. Puddle water. Yeah, baby. It's not all muddy like the other stuff. I hope that's why I decided I was going to get it. That's why you bring a scoop to the desert, by the way. Because these clops of bottles, it's hard to fill that little spout right there without having one of these little scoopers. And I am trying out a new piece of equipment. It's called extract. And it goes on the lid of any specialized type water bottle. And then it just screws right on the water bottle so you can fill up the bottle. And it filters right here. This is the filter. So it seems pretty awesome. I have not used it till right now. So I'm going to chug, chug, chug, and be over hydrated. Because we don't know what's coming down the road. And to give you an idea of where we're getting the water, it's just this little trickle that is pooling down here in a puddle. It's my first time. We are in this chunky zone now. Which is kind of fun, but it's also, it's harder. We're earning our pedal strokes now. This is so cool in here. A little mini canyon. This is crazy. Man. So for the past half an hour, and actually more times earlier in the day, we have been messing with this brand new arrow rack. And I usually like the arrow rack. It's very robust, but there are lots of moving parts. And his came, I don't think these bolts were fully tight. And so this little cylinder here protruded down and pulled this up. And we started cranking this tighter and tighter because it kept getting loose. This thing kept moving from side to side. We're like, let's make it tighter, tighter, tighter. So now we think that we've tightened it too much and we've broken some sort of apparatus in here and it can't be tightened anymore. And it can't hold weight. If it can't hold weight, it can't hold the gear and we kind of need that gear, right? Yep, it's water. It's a lot of water. Shit, I need my tent. So we put our heads together. We're like, we can't really keep going. We can't finish this without that working. So we're gonna, you know, make our way back to Moab. He's gonna put these two- It's nothing all my water except Moab. He's gonna put these two bags that were right here into his backpack that he was carrying. And hopefully they will fit. You think you can get- I'm not gonna be sticking out the top. I'm not gonna be able to close it, but I'll ride back like that. I don't care. So this is the problem. It won't even tighten down. It's- It's broken. It's broken. We can't tighten these enough anymore. Something's stripped inside this and we can't even get them tightened down. So it's super loose. And look, we're in this beautiful area. We could not have had a mishap in a more stunning landscape. Look at this. Look at that. Is that real life? It's time to use your hiking prowess here. You've probably packed a few backpacks in your life. Oh, thousands. We're gonna do it. It's gonna work. We're gonna do it. We're gonna make this work. When I talk about Whammy's in the morning before I head out, this is for sure a Whammy. Whammy's are kind of those problems that you can't really fix. This is a total bummer. Don't mistake our smiles and laughter for us being okay with this. This sucks. We're not gonna do what we came out here to do. We drove a long way. We spent money. We got a hotel. But the good thing is, we're both safe. Our bodies are fine. Imagine this could be so much worse if we had actually injured ourselves or broken bone or something. It's a bummer. It sucks. But we're gonna be okay. We're gonna have one full day of adventure. You're still smiling, right? Yep, that's my smile. Kind of. This feels like the walk of shame. Marching back to Moab. Wah, wah. All right, now that I'm home and I've had time to think about this, it's still a bummer, by the way. I want to think about what I can do in the future to prevent something like this happening and hopefully this will help you as well. The number one thing we should have done, we should have dialed in the rack before the adventure even started. We did not put on the arrow rack onto his bike until the night before the adventure in the hotel. And you know what that feeling's like. You're kind of scrambling around. You're getting all your gear together. Maybe you're not paying quite enough attention. And I think maybe that's what happened. I don't know exactly. 9.9 times out of 10, you could buy a new piece of equipment and put it on your bike the night before an adventure and it would work fine, but not in this case. So this is the arrow rack. I've been using it for about a year and a half now. I like it because it's strong and robust, but it is also fairly complicated for a rear rack. Here is a normal rear rack. See the props I brought you. A normal rear rack has a hole right here and these right here. And it goes on to the back of your bike super easy and quickly. You bolt this one in, you bolt this one in, it's on and it's ready to go. The arrow rack is a bit more complicated. And the good thing about this rack is that this rack can go on essentially any bicycle, a full suspension bike even. It attaches here. These are the two things right here that attach to your rear triangle. And there are four, can we see that in there? Kinda, yeah. Four bolts in total, one on each side. And then there are these little pieces of webbing that go around the bolts to attach it to your frame. And I take mine on and off my bike a lot because I travel with my bike and a lot of times my bike won't fit in a cardboard box with the rack on it. So I take it on and off. And there was one time where I lost one of these things and it totally put me in a position where I couldn't even use the rack. So as much as I love this rack, there are things to think about. If you lose one of these, you are completely out of luck. I'm guessing that most people who buy this rack will put it on their bike and never take it off. And in which case it will work just fine. So what happened to us out there? We put the rack on his bike and these four bolts here, I don't think were fully tight. And so this support bar came through right here and started pushing against the frame and adding stress to this area. I'm guessing, I don't know. And we kept on screwing these bolts down and it just never got tight. And that was the main problem. This rack can hold 35 pounds. You heard earlier in the video that he was carrying about four or five liters of water. That's not, that's like 10 pounds total. So it wasn't over-weighted by any means. We stripped the bolt in here to the point where something inside of this apparatus in here was stripped and broken and we could not tighten this down onto his bike. Big bummer. We should have dialed that in weeks before this adventure so he could have tested it out with weight and different types of things. Get it dialed in just right. Make sure all the bolts were super tight. But we didn't do that. We put it on the night before and we learned a lesson there. So if you ever buy new stuff for your bike or really anything for that matter, test it out before you go on an adventure. That is rule number one. We should have done that. We're both pretty experienced in the outdoors and we still just didn't do it, you know? Some people live and learn, I just live. Oh, and you might be thinking, well, if he could get all of that weight into his backpack, why didn't you just continue on the adventure like that? Well, it was very heavy and there's a reason why bike packers don't wear backpacking backpacks with all of their gears because it just puts way too much strain on your shoulders and your back. We have all the weight distributed throughout the bike with bike packing bags. So, you know, we could pull it off for another 25 miles to get back to MoLab but it just wasn't feasible to continue that way with all the weight in his backpack for the entirety of the route. So thank you so much for watching. Sorry this didn't turn out to be a happy ending but I'm smiling. Jabba's still smiling. We'll head out there another day. Stay tuned for some new adventures. Cheers.