I had recently gotten a new gravel bike, and I wanted to put it to the test in the Teanaway. Dan wanted to join, and so he snagged a bike and we grabbed all of the bike-sized bags we could find (as well as a bunch of straps!) and we took off towards the Teanaway. Work, traffic, and the general shortening of daylight meant that we took off from our car just outside of Roslyn at 6:20pm. With the sun setting promptly at 6:30. Oops! We rode along in the dark towards the light of our bike lights, and found that it made for really fun riding conditions. Though, to our surprise, and lack of proper planning, out of the four lights we brought, three died within an hour and none of them accepted batteries. Oof. Lesson learned. We eeked into camp to the dim light of Dan's lasting headlamp, and while it wasn't ideal, it was a fun challenge. Luckily the river crossing was very calm and uneventful.

Camp ended up being much busier than we thought at Indian Camp, and while we couldn't figure out why at 8pm at night, we found out the next day that our day two of the ride was day one of deer hunting season. We cozied up for the night, staked our tarp over our bikes so that at least if someone were to steal them, it would wake us up too, and went to bed.

In the morning, after a lovely breakfast by the river, we started to continue on our way until we encountered 4 guys dragging a big dead, bleeding buck down the road. They notified us that there were hundreds of hunters up the road, and Dan and I, looking down at our blue and brown shirts, decided to alter our route to avoid the hunters. We ended up cycling up and over the backside of the Roslyn bike trails and only encountered one broken chain for the ride. Bring a full repair kit folks! That is something we won't forget next time ;)

All in all, a fantastic intro to the sport of bikepacking!