SUL BikeRaftFishPacking (BFRP)

I didn't start backpacking only to walk trails.

My very first wilderness trips, in the 1970s, to remote places by foot with my dad nearly always involved the quest to fish some out of the way stretch of river, or an alpine lake. Bushwhacking and other forms of suffering were part of the recipe for these early trips.

So was catching large trout.

The reward at the end of my line, perhaps more than any other, kept me backpacking in my youth.

As my interests expanded in the 1980s to include packrafting and mountaineering, so too did my desire to minimize my pack weight. In the 1990s I got serious about mountain skiing, and I started dabbling with mountain biking. I feel like my approach to backcountry biking, however, didn't get refined until I began to apply SUL principles to it a few years ago.

Now, nearly all of my remote trips to wild places involve multiple modes of travel (foot, ski, bike, raft) and many (if not most) still involve a quest to catch large trout in remote places.

Such has evolved my favorite (sic) multi-sport backcountry endeavor: BikeRaftFishPacking (BRFP). In its purest form, this wonderful sport involves biking long distances to a remote lake, blowing up an ultralight packraft, and catching trout via tenkara.

Of course, this article really isn't about this little tiny niche of wilderness travel. It's about how to apply the principles of SUL ("SuperUltraLight") across a variety of activities and contexts.

Here's how I do BRFP.

ARTICLE OUTLINE

• Introduction
• 1. Multi-Sport Lends Itself to an SUL Approach
• 2. SUL Biking: Single Speed Skinny
• 2. SUL BikePacking: Frame Bags & Mini-Packs
• 3. SUL Fishing: Tenkara
• 4. SUL Packrafting: Just Keep Me Dry(ish), OK?
• Conclusion

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