Roundabout Manchester – Vermont bikepacking

We did a little 4 day trip in Eastern NY and Vermont (130mi, 11000ft gain). It was a step-up trip for my partner who graduated from the Erie Canal and Finger Lakes last year to some real gravel bikepacking. I had this trip planned for a few years in some form as either a day ride or a double metric century overnight, but for this step up, I settled on 4 (unequal, in every respect) days. In fact, day 1 was my usual throwaway day. 22mi, 500ft gained….that left 108 miles and 10,500ft for the last 3 days.

I call it the Roundabout Manchester (because there's a popular route called Roundabout Brattleboro and this route quite literally encircles Manchester, VT). The route was pretty wild in terms of avoiding most towns, but camping and resupply was spread out very nicely to make this a chill 4 day trip. As always, we carried most of what we needed for the 4 days just because food shopping is time and cost expensive on route.

The route overall was awesome, with lots of gravel and big climbs.

We still managed to do a little Class 4 Vermont roads (which are abandoned public roads) to make things a little more spicy. But overall the entire route was rideable with a mix of rail trails, public gravel and pavement. IP Road was the only really challenging section, and we did walk a fair amount of the first few miles. It was steep and somewhat rugged (although definitely not unrideable). Mud pits were deep in spots but few and far between in spite of a more than a half inch of rain preceding us riding it (we ended up with an inch of total rain on the trip). Overall it was a good stretch that would be mostly entirely rideable with unloaded bikes.

On paper the trip was 74% gravel but due to a missed turn (to start day 2 and a lack of desire to backtrack) and a mechanical we ended up doing 63% gravel. Still a ton of gravel over 130mi. We ended up doing someplace around 11000ft elevation gain on the route.

We did have a major mechanical. Despite my absolute love of Loctite (as both a anti-seize and a thread locker) I am suspicious I applied it to the red 7900 chain rings. Any mistake you make on a build is going to surface when you are on a fairly rural tour. And it did. Fortunately it was 5 minutes from a bike shop 10 minutes before it closed.