I want to be a bikepacker. I want to ride off into the wilderness with only a bivvy bag and a Trangia and explore moody highlands and cool off in hidden pools and watch the sun set gloriously behind rugged alpine peaks.
But, honestly, I cannot be bothered. Job, kids, hoovering. You know the deal. So instead, I found a route to do with my nine-year-old in a single day – long but not too long, accessible but remote, hilly but not vertical. My plan was for us to take the train to from Pitlochry to Dalwhinnie and then ride back along the same route. It would be about fifty-five kilometers, with more downhill than up. Easy for me, I thought, and challenging but not impossible for him.
We got to Pitlochry in time to grab a coffee and a sausage roll. The station is small, with a nice little charity bookshop on platform 1. Speaking of platforms, it seems that trains can arrive and depart from either platform – neither one is dedicated to northbound or southbound trains. I panicked for a moment until I figured this out, having wrongly assumed that our northbound train would leave from the opposite platform to the southbound one which had passed through a few minutes earlier.
Mindful that bonking can be averted by eating (who knew, right?), I’d packed sandwiches, apples, cereal bars, gummy bears, a couple of emergency gels and about four litres of water between us. I’d also popped half an electrolyte tablet into each of our bottles, unsure whether it was a good idea to give my son a full dose, but also sure that he’d need more than just water.1 Bottles aside, all this went into a bar bag, a stem bag and a backpack.
The ride started out quite gently. There was a short stretch on the road out of Dalwhinnie, but then it was onto the cycle path beside the A9 for mile upon mile. Our route followed NCN 7, with most of it on that same cycle path, separated from the road, and a few sections on the old, abandoned A9. And it was, as promised, mostly downhill – after we’d crossed the Drumochter pass, at least, which occasioned a stop for photos, a sandwich and a few celebratory gummy bears. For twenty blissful kilometers after that, the path sloped obligingly downwards and the scenery kept us entertained.
We got to the House of Bruar in about two and a half hours. The weather had warmed up a lot since the morning and the two of us were commensurately sweaty and grimy, so of course we got coffee and cakes and sat, reeking, among the farmers and tourists in the café. It was all going very well, I thought.
Then we left the House of Bruar, and things immediately got much harder. I was still absently following signs for NCN 7, but the cycle path had given way to a road and I wasn’t sure we were on the right track. And, sure enough, we weren’t. We backtracked, following the directions on my Wahoo, and ended up at a gatehouse with what looked like two locked gates. The smaller one was open, albeit with no signs to say whether we were allowed to use it, so we took a chance and headed off into the woods beyond along a well-worn double track road.
We emerged into more open farmland after a while, and then, a little farther still, we passed Blair Castle.2 (The gatehouse must once have guarded one of the entrances to the Atholl estate.) Shortly after that was Blair Atholl, then we crossed the River Garry onto a deserted B-road on the river’s south bank.
I figured we’d soon be done. Pitlochry was only eight or nine kilometres away and, although the sun was now quite fierce, we were making good time along this shady riverside road. Suddenly, my Wahoo insisted that we needed to turn off onto an insanely steep road up and out of the valley. I was ready to ignore it and follow the road we were on, but my son wouldn’t hear of it, so up we went. After a couple of hundred meters my son climbed off – I can’t really blame him – and so I was soon pushing both of the bikes. Then the tree cover disappeared, and I was pushing both of the bikes in the blazing sun. The gradient didn’t relent for a kilometer or more.
I’d planned our route with Komoot, and, honestly, I should have seen this coming. It has a habit of throwing spanners into otherwise reasonable rides: a private road, an unrideable path, or, as we’d encountered earlier, an unsigned route past a forbidding gatehouse. That this pimple on the elevation profile at the end of our route was an hors catégorie monster was not surprising, but it was certainly disappointing.
We eventually crested the hill and rolled back down into the valley, brakes squealing all the way. The route continued to frustrate, taking us past a series of “Private! No Entry!” signs, and then onto a steep, rooty walking trail that forced us off the bikes a number of times. The only consolation was that Pitlochry was, finally, very near. One last short climb took us up onto the main road, and, with that, we’d made it.
I can’t be too sore about the last few kilometers. Aside from Komoot’s exasperating side quests, the route was easy to follow and easy to ride. Our gear worked fine: my son was on his Islabikes Luath, I was on my Trailblazer (both with cantis), and neither one gave us any problems. My geriatric first-gen Wahoo Elemnt, close to ten years old at this point, managed to record our five-hour ride with more than 50% left in its battery. And, routing issues aside, I’ve finally found a mapping solution I like: plan with Komoot; sync and navigate with the Wahoo; and capture the ride on Strava. Free plans all, except with the need to purchase mapping packs for Komoot.
I did learn a couple of things about packing for longer rides.
First is that a little extra weight on the front of a bike may help to calm down its handling. The Trailblazer has always had a lot of wheel flop, which, by rights, a loaded bar bag and stem bag should have made worse, but I found the opposite. My working theory is that the extra mass increased the angular moment about the steering axis and so resisted the bike’s tendency to self steer. (Needle-bearing headsets, which introduce a bit of friction into the steering, are supposed to have the same effect.)
Second is that backpacks are not great for this kind of ride. I had maybe a few kilos in mine – a 2-litre bottle of water, some extra food, and a couple of rain jackets – and it was far too much. The bike needs to carry the load, not your back or your shoulders or your hips. A saddle pack would be the bikepacking choice, although perhaps not the best one for very heavy loads; an old-school Carradice is probably a better, more flexible option if you can get on board with the aesthetics.
Our bottles came from these High Five starter kits, which seem like exceptionally good value for money. For £7 you get a 750ml bottle, two drink mixes, two gels, and two electrolyte tablets. It’s cheap enough to just buy one as a matter of course before each big ride, and kids are nothing if not good at losing water bottles. You’ll be glad to always have a spare one around. ↩︎
Fun fact: Blair Castle is the ancestral seat of the Duke of Atholl, whose Atholl Highlanders are the only legal private army in Europe. ↩︎