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Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

It's just for the popular national parks and it's only about the popular seasons, and a lot of it has to do with motor vehicle traffic. My partner and I ride our bikes to most parks or we visit parks off-peak and we almost never bother with any of this.

EDIT: I've always wondered why more private companies don't create shared buses to help backpackers hit the entrance to the park. A lot of the times just getting to the entrance is what makes folks use their cars, and if you could park in a nearby town and take a shuttle in and start your backpacking that would go a long way. I know some parks run shuttles inside the park but I'm talking about a more backpacker/cyclist specific transport just to the entrance to minimize impact on the park itself.

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Do you ever check before you just show up? There's not enough rangers to go around checking permits on every trail, but if you're unlucky and get caught without a permit when you're supposed to have one, you might have to pay a fine (not the end of the world) but also might get turned around (ruining your vacation plans). And if the same ranger catches you twice on the same trail after turning you around... lol... they tend not to be too happy.

We don't, but we also check the hike-bike site locations beforehand, grab all the necessary backcountry permits, and also try to hoof it in early to maximize chances of getting a site. Of course since we're on bike we plan a lot more than most visitors in a car (since we plan out water stops, food, clothing changes, etc etc.) We've definitely encountered the occasional ranger but they're usually much friendlier to bikers than drivers in my experience.

That's good to know! Can't wait to try to my first bikepacking trip :)

Absolutely! I can't recommend backpacking through the parks enough. A petty part of me can get quite smug biking or backpacking past a traffic jam near the entrance haha. Also, the views you get on foot are absolutely marvelous and there's a sense of "earning" your mileage that I find unparalleled. You'll need to be more careful with planning of course (also don't forget things like bear-proofing food and accounting for wind if you're on a bike), and even the best laid plans will fail and you'll end up camping some place you didn't intend on, but it's all part of the journey!

I've done a lot of backpacking (from a car or shuttle), but never bikepacking or biking-to-backpack. Is the latter possible, like is there a good way to fit a backpacking pack, bear can, etc. inside panniers or otherwise tethered to a bike?

Absolutely. You can look online to see all sorts of cool loadouts that folks have, but the easiest way to do it is to just get a bunch of bungie cords and large panniers and stuff things inside. The trick is to distribute the weight evenly among your panniers so that you don't unbalance the bike. A huge loadout can have up to 4 large panniers (2 in back, 2 in front) along with stuff hitched to a rear rack up top. My partner and I tend to do 2 panniers each, where we each take our stuff and I take some of the heavier/larger common stuff (bear cans, tent.) There's a whole world of bikepacking and bike/backpack loadouts out there.

Great advice. Thank you!

> I've always wondered why more private companies don't create shared buses to help backpackers hofit the entrance to the park.

Don't they, though? I've seen these at Zion, the Lost Coast, the Cascades, Olympic National Park, etc. And around big cities, often the city/county itself will provide a direct-to-trailhead bus.

I'm only familiar with the Zion shuttle. I probably need to do more research here thanks!

Yosemite has YARTS: https://yarts.com/

> My partner and I ride our bikes to most parks or we visit parks off-peak and we almost never bother with any of this.

No doubt this is sometimes true, but all the permits & reservations I'm aware of in parks are for the hikes themselves, it doesn't matter how you arrived there.

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