The Wisconsin bikepacking route has earned top honors from Bikepacking.com, a website that publishes routes and information about packing a bike, essentially backpacking on a bike.
Route, Wisconsin Falls Loopwas awarded best novel weekly route via website. To win the award, he completed routes in New Mexico and Switzerland, which the site’s editors awarded based on originality/intent, quality of documentation and the route they would most like to travel.
The 582-mile route circles northern Wisconsin, passing 28 waterfalls along the way, and will take six to eight days to complete. About 85% of the route runs on unpaved roads.
The route begins in Cable, travels east through the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, and then turns north to the Wisconsin-Michigan border in Hurley. From there it heads west to the Bayfield Peninsula and then south back to Cable.
In addition to the waterfalls you can see along the way, the route includes suggestions for restaurants, accommodations (mostly campsites), and other intriguing places, such as venerable Civilian Conservation Corps camps.
Dave Schlabowski, the tour’s creator, said he always tries to include local restaurants, taverns, convenience stores and other unique stops on his routes because stopping at these places is part of what makes bikepacking in northern Wisconsin so great. Excellent.
“It’s not just a field experience,” he said.
Schlabowski, who moved to Seeley from Milwaukee after retiring in 2020, previously served as executive director of the Wisconsin Bike Fed and Milwaukee’s first pedestrian bicycle coordinator. He calls himself a “proud son” of Wisconsin and all the outdoor adventures it has to offer, especially when it comes to biking.
He said that while driving around northern Wisconsin, he often came across waterfalls he didn’t know about, and he came up with the idea of creating a route that would pass some of them. He first tried to plot a route starting appropriately at Dave Falls in Marinette County and then heading west to the falls around Superior. But he felt the route had too many bad connections – paved sections with destitute visibility and narrow shoulders that made for unsafe driving – and it was a point-to-point route that would require shuttles.
Instead, he started the route in Cable, not only because it’s close to his house, but also because the town has a free municipal parking lot with bathrooms and water where cars can be parked overnight.
“It’s a great place to start little adventures,” he said.
The city is also at the center of the CAMBA trails, a 300-kilometer network of trails that the International Mountain Biking Association has designated as a bronze-level riding center, a prestigious designation “recognizing the pinnacle of the mountain biking community.”
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The novel (and final) Waterfalls Trail starts on these trails and offers a variety of terrain, from hilly sections with “little head” rocks (that is, rocks the size of a child’s head), to flatter, more classic gravel roads, to sandy sections that Dave’s friends came up with “Davement” – which sometimes doesn’t even look like a trail.
“If possible, I try to avoid anything involving motor vehicles,” Schlabowski said. “I want to have the most off-road experience possible, the most relaxing experience where you don’t have to worry about sharing the roads with cars and trucks. To do this, sometimes I could choose a paved road, but instead I choose an old logging road that may not have been maintained in the last five years, so you may have to push your bike for a mile.
Schlabowski said such hiking and biking sections are now part of bikepacking and many cyclists are accustomed to them.
“A bit of adventure and orienteering is part of the fun,” he said.
Basics of packing a bicycle
Bikepacking is one of the newer additions to the list of cycling adventures. Schlabowski said it’s basically backpacking, meaning carrying all your camping gear, clothing and food yourself, but on a bike rather than on your back. It differs from cycling, which people have been doing for decades, in the types of bags in which equipment is carried and the routes you take.
During bicycle touring, equipment is usually carried in panniers (bags) that are attached to racks bolted to specially made touring bicycles. However, unless these racks are of particularly high quality, they are prone to cracking due to constant vibration on more challenging roads and trails. Therefore, bicycle tourists usually stick to paved trails.
“It kind of limits you on where you can go,” Schlabowski said.
To tackle more challenging routes, cyclists began producing bags that could be attached to their bikes. Soon an industry developed around the novel bags that attached to handlebars, seats and frames. The novel equipment opened up a novel world of backcountry exploration by bike.
“It’s the same ethos as backpacking,” Schlabowski said, in terms of finding routes that are off the beaten track. While you can backpack on the partially paved Glacial Drumlin State Trail between Milwaukee and Madison, for example, most people go backpacking to wilder places like the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
The same applies to bikepacking. This can be done on any road, but most cyclists try to make the most of the unpaved sections of their routes – not only for the sake of experiencing wildlife, but also for the sake of staying unthreatening away from cars and other motorized vehicles.
This can be done on almost any type of bike, although gravel bikes (a type of hybrid bike) and mountain bikes are usually preferred, especially on routes that include sections of single-track trails. Some people employ fatbikes, i.e. bicycles with huge tires that are inflated to a lower pressure, which makes it easier to ride on sand and softer surfaces.
Summer and fall are the best times to go biking, especially since most mountain bike trails are closed during soggy weather and freeze-thaw seasons to prevent bikes from falling out of ruts and causing enduring damage.
And while you can’t get to places as wild as if you were on foot, you can still find remote experiences and reach more places.
“I like it because it provides the right amount of speed,” Schlabowski said. “You can cover more distance than backpacking, and you can see more things and visit more places than on your feet.”
IN 2012 Bikepacking.com launched and put the sport on the outdoor adventure map.
But Wisconsin wasn’t on the map yet. When the site launched, it had no routes in the Midwest. Schlabowski wanted to change this and in 2014 the website published his Chequamegon TowerA 177-mile route around Cable that is also a guided ride that takes place every fall.
“When this tour was announced, it brought a lot of people to our little town of Cable,” Schlabowski said. While most of these people are likely from the Upper Midwest, he said he has received inquiries about the route from all over the world, including from cyclists from Belgium and Japan.
And on a summer Thursday or Friday, the city parking lot in Cable — behind the Brick House Cafe on Randysek Road, where the Chequamegon and Waterfall trails begin — is packed with people going on a bike ride, Schlabowski said.
Bikepacking in Wisconsin
The Bikepacking.com award will undoubtedly bring even more cyclists to the Cable area, but it’s not the only place to bikepack in Wisconsin. Although most rural roads in the state are paved, especially in southern Wisconsin, the Driftless region offers good biking opportunities, Schlabwoske said.
So does the Wausau area, which is home to a growing community of bike enthusiasts led by advocates like Shane Hitz, director Ironbull red granite grindera series of bikepacking races held in October in central Wisconsin.
Hitz has developed several routes in central Wisconsin, which he shares on his website (shanehitzadventures.wordpress.com) and his Facebook page (Gravel and Bike Packing in North Central Wisconsin).
Among them is the Tour de Nicolet, a 500-mile point-to-point route from Wausau north through the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest to the Wisconsin-Michigan border north of Land O’ Lakes. The route includes sections of the single-track Jack Lake and Nicolet-Roche mountain bike trails in Langlade County.
While itineraries through Wisconsin’s pine forests aren’t as dramatic as those through mountainous landscapes or as exotic as trips to foreign lands, they still have their benefits, especially during a pandemic when people are more reluctant to travel to distant lands. destinations.
“I’ve always tried to create an accessible adventure for people,” Schlabowski said. “I think the Driftless region and northern Wisconsin is like the Loire Valley of French cycling. We are not the Rocky Mountains, we are not the Alps, we are not Kyrgyzstan. You don’t need a passport, but you can get lost, it’s still an adventure.”
More information: For more information about the Wisconsin Falls Bike Trail, read this article bikepacking.com/routes/wisconsin-waterfalls-loop.
The Tour de Chequamegon 2022 will take place from September 23-25. The ride includes meals, guides and support from Wheel & Sprocket. Participants must bring their own bicycles and camping equipment. Registration ($495 per person) is now open. Tickets regularly sell out. More information can be found in the article tourdechequamegon.com.
Contact Chelsey Lewis at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @chelseylew AND @TravelMJS and Facebook at Ranger’s Travel Journal.
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