Field notes 4 MIN READ
Bikepacking routes over several days
Four days of riding is four files and one journey. How to draw it as the second thing, and why the overnight gaps are worth keeping.
A bikepacking trip is several recordings and one journey, and the difference between those two framings is the whole print.
One route, not four rides
Bring every day at once. They are drawn together, in sequence, at one scale, from the start of day one to the end of the last.
Four separate prints of four separate days is a set of rides. One print of the whole thing is a trip, and the trip is what happened.
This is the same logic as a Camino and it applies to any multi-day effort.
The overnight gaps
Each day's recording starts in the morning and stops in the evening. Between them is nothing — you were asleep in a field or a hotel or a bus shelter.
Those gaps appear on the drawing as small breaks in the line, and they give a multi-day route something no single ride has: a visible rhythm. You can count the days without being told how many there were.
Some people expect us to close them up. We do not. The gap is where the day ended.
Gravel routes draw differently from road
A road route inherits the road network: straight sections, right-angle junctions, the geometry of engineering.
A gravel or off-road route inherits the land. Tracks follow contours, forestry roads switch back for gradient, trails wander because a person walked that way first.
Drawn side by side, the gravel route is visibly less designed. That is worth something on a wall.
When a map earns its place
Most of the time we would say clean line. A long point-to-point through country the viewer does not know is the exception.
If the route crossed a mountain range, followed a border, or connected two towns anybody would recognise, the map underneath turns an abstract shape into a journey with a geography. That is the whole appeal of a multi-day trip, and it is the one thing a clean line cannot convey.
Size
70×100. Multi-day routes are long, and at 50×70 several hundred kilometres compresses to the point where the day structure stops being visible.
Questions people actually ask
- Can several days be one print?
- Yes. Bring every day's file and they are drawn as one continuous route, which is almost always the print you want.
- Should each day be a different colour?
- Not currently — the route is drawn in one colour. In practice this reads better than it sounds, because a multi-day route is one journey rather than four outings.
- Do the overnight stops show?
- As small gaps where the recording stopped and restarted. Those gaps are where you slept, and they give the drawing a rhythm no single-day route has.
- Is a map underneath worth it?
- Often yes. A long point-to-point through unfamiliar country is a route where where matters, and place names give it a geography.
YOURS, FROM A FILE, IN 90 SECONDS
One effort. One sheet of paper.
Bring the file and every choice is yours: treatment, colour, which numbers come along. Museum-grade 250 gsm matte, printed in Denmark, shipped in a tube with a nail taped inside.
Print it. FROM 349 kr