Shelltowee Trace Trail Bikepacking

This past weekend, the Troll got called into bikepacking duty for a journey along the Shelltowee Trace Trail. I emailed the director of the trail and got his tip on the best place to go bikecamping and riding. He sent me to London, Kentucky (about an hour drive from Lexington).

There was a total of four guys on this trip. Justin, Jeff and Dock joined in for some sweaty camping fun.

I wish I had a good photo of Justin's framepack he made the night before the trip. He stayed up late on the sewing machine making a custom bag for his GT. He did a great job. I will certainly commission him to make one for the Troll.

The heat was intense but we found a couple waterfalls to cool off under. It made all the difference in the world. Temps were in mid 90s. There was certainly a benefit from the thick tree coverage, though. The trade-off, on the other hand, was that there was zero air flow. The air was thick when the trail hugged those rock cliffs or dipped into deep valleys.

After a good bit of riding we were starting to get desperate for a place to set up camp. In a last ditch effort, we found this suspension bridge and thought it may lead to our oasis. We were correct.

The bridge opened up to a huge campsite with plenty of flat ground for the two guys sleeping on the ground and plenty of trees for the two of us in hammocks. It was perfect. We set up camp as the sun set around 9pm and were eating dinner in no time.

 The wood was a little damp for a fire, but we made it work.

Toad.

Lots of sitting, joking, laughing and goofing off around the campfire. I love times like this.

The next morning wasn't something we were looking forward to. Our journey to the campsite was primarily downhill. It was a couple hours of riding the brakes and navigating our momentum through tough rocky terrain. That meant our return trip was a climbing.

It went much faster than I expected, though. We stopped a lot and drank lots of water. All of my weight on the bike was pretty much food and water. So the return trip was much lighter being that I had consumed most of my cargo. But it certainly wasn't easy.

This is my second trip riding the Shelltowee and we had a blast but it may be my last on this trail system. It's a great trail for hiking and camping. But the conditions for riding are less than desirable. Perhaps I'm not a skilled enough rider. But the climbs and descents are littered with huge rocks that make it almost impossible to stay upright. The photo above shows one of a few sections you could just ride outright. Sections like this may last for 20 yeards before you'd have to get off the bike for trail debris or rocks. For this trip, I barely had a load. I ran small panniers with food and hammock, so my load didn't really affect my riding ability at all. But there was still quite a bit of walking the bike. My last trip was about 100 miles away, too. So I probably got a pretty good look into how the trail varies. But I wouldn't recommend it for bikepacking. If anyone has a better spot on the STT, be sure to let me know.

Lots of bikes on my poor little Subaru. It struggled with all those men and bikes :)

Get out there.