Bikepacking Gear Packing Update: December

nocellajoe
Dec 12
1 min read

718 Outdoors is a 1-person operation that has remained small, local and independent by design since 2008. If this resonates with you, your support is welcome and greatly appreciated! If not, that's cool too.

The Concept:

My 2 goals this off-season in terms of my packing for our 2026 season are:

Reduce overall bikepacking gear weight and volume
Redistribute bikepacking gear load from the rear of bike

Gear Weight and Volume:

I am currently testing out the following bag setup:

Front: Jack the Rack, with Swift Zeitgeist Bag
Mid: Oveja Negra Half-Frame Bag
Rear: Arkel Rollpacker (with mounting bracket)

With this new arrangement, I figured I just weigh all of my gear in a preliminary pack and get a weight and distribution baseline. Here is the table of my Gear Weight

I plan on reducing the weight of the following kits over the offseason:

Tool Kit
Straps kit
First Aid Kit
Electronics Kit
Snacks
Personal Hygiene Kit

Gear Redistribution:

With the gear weights taken, and gear preliminary packed, I got this baseline for weight distribution:

My 2025 numbers were most likely 75% rear, 12% mid, 13% front, so this is a step in the right direction.

Final Note:

For better or worse, I do not use AI to create my posts. This is all me, with my misspellings, questionable grammar and tangential thoughts. I didn't get into this line of work to hand over my thoughts, expertise and experience to AI to spit out blog posts.