A Q&A With Steve “Doom” Fassbinder, Head Guide & Co-Owner of Four Corners Guides Packrafting & Bikerafting the podcast In this podcast episode, Four Corners Guides owners Lizzy Scully and Steve “Doom” Fassbinder discuss his packrafting history and his tips for beginners. They talk about how Doom got into packrafting and the process of becoming experienced packrafter. They also discuss the necessary equipment for packrafting, such as boats, PFDs, helmets, and dry suits. Doom emphasizes the importance of honesty and communication when paddling with others. And he offers adv ..read more

The post A Beginner’s Guide to Packrafting Podcast with Steve Fassbinder appeared first on Four Corners Guides ..read more

a guide to help you figure out which course you should be in What level packrafter are you? Please answer the questions in each of these sections honestly. We also have a pre-trip registration questionnaire we use to determine the course you should be in. However, please start here and self identify your skill level to the best of your knowledge! Please note that this “scale” applies only to Four Corners Guides courses. Other companies may have different criteria. Beginner Courses (B) Please don’t be offended if we decide you should be placed in a beginner course. We all have to start some ..read more

**Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the course schedule** Greetings from scullbinder ranch! Hola, Buenos Dias and greetings from Scullbinder Ranch, And it’s LIVE! Check out our 2024 bikerafting, packrafting and bikepacking courses and tours on our Course Schedule Page! We’ve still got some work to do to get each course up and running. But by November 7th, you’ll be able to register for all of them. And in other news… We’re launching international Expedition & Paddling Skills Courses in 2024 to Mexico and Chile. We realized that unless the Dolores River is flowing, we are lim ..read more

Story & video by Waldo Aguayo. Photos by Andrew Burr. rolling a packraft Most packrafters or people who know about these boats wonder if it is possible to perform the famous “roll” in packraft. As the owner of a guide service and an avid Chilean Packrafter (there aren’t many of us!), people always asked me this question. The idea of rolling a packraft certainly caught my attention when I first started in this discipline. Is it a party trick, as some claim? Or is it a valid technique that improves your overall packrafting experience? For older people with shoulder injuries or people who ..read more

What's the ideal bikerafting gear? How do you choose the bikerafting gear you’re going to use? Is there an ideal set up? These are tough questions to answer, especially considering there are dozens of bikepacking gear companies in the world today! There’s really no ideal set up, and what you use totally depends on the type of bikerafting you plan to do. As we wrote in the recent The Radavist article, “Now and the Future of Bikerafting: Unpacking the 2023 Bikerafting Guide Survey Results,” the sport of bikerafting is growing and evolving, if not at a breakneck speed, at a steady pace. And alo ..read more

Bike-Packrafting Gear, Part 1: Bikerafting Bikes What’s the ideal bikerafting bike? Yikes, how to answer that?! We get a lot of questions about what kind of bikes one should use for bikerafting. As always, the answer depends on a lot of things, which we highlight below. There’s really no right or wrong answer. But there are some guidelines you can consider. In this brief excerpt from The Bikeraft Guide, Doom talks about some of the options. And luckily, with the increased interest in this activity, there’s been a plethora of articles and vidoes published on the subject. Do your research! Wan ..read more

An excerpt from, “Hellbiking,” Chapter 1 of The Bikeraft Guide, by Steve “Doom” Fassbinder & Lizzy Scully, with additional photos of bikerafting on the Whanganui River provided by Deane Parker from his 2020 adventure, “Forgotten Highways.” The History of Bikerafting: Were the Kennett Brothers really "bikerafting" in 1988? While the Alaskan Crazies (i.e. Roman Dial and his buddies, according to Sheri Tingey, owner of Alpacka Raft and the inventor of modern day packrafts) were exploring the northernmost regions of the USA, across the pond, three Kiwis explored 150,000 miles of topo maps ..read more

Part #2, What is "The Culture of Safety" and why is it relevant to bikerafters? Plus Luc Mehl''s Safety & Rigging tips By Lizzy Scully, Steve “Doom” Fassbinder, Luc Mehl and Andy Toop. There’s much adventurers need to consider to safely start bikerafting. I won’t cover all points here, but I want to give you an overview. Plus, we’re including an excerpt from the safety section of The Bikeraft Guide, courtesy of Luc Mehl, author of The Packraft Handbook. This is part of a series of bikerafting safety posts we’re publishing on The Bikeraft Guide, on American Packrafting Association’s websi ..read more

Part #1, an Excerpt from The Bikeraft Guide covering How to safely packraft with a bike on your boat In 2022, Steve and I published the first edition of The Bikeraft Guide, a book we assembled during the pandemic. I interviewed dozens of people and read from dozens of obscure blogs to report the history. And we gathered stories, illustrations, poems and photographs from some of the most well-known adventurers in the world to people we thought were simply interesting and had a good story to tell. Most of the how-to section and a good portion of the photos come from Steve’s brain and his 12 ye ..read more