Salsa Anything Cages

For my current bikepacking setup on my Salsa Fargo I am relying on two Salsa Anything Cages as key parts of my kit.  Since I am currently travelling during the winter months, the larger bulk clothing required makes it particularly challenging to carry all the incidentals that are required for life on the road, you know, like Food!!

The 8 day micro adventure that I just took, cycling through the English countryside, saw me using two Anything Cages mounted on my front forks.  Since I have a 1st generation Fargo, Salsa does not recommend using the water bottle braze-ons as mounting points for the Anything Cages.  Instead they recommend the use of pipe clamps as a mechanism to safely mount the cages away from the tires and frame.  I believe the reason for this is that with larger tires, this mounting position puts any size bag very close to the tires and the frame, thus leading to potential dangers.  I encourage you to follow Salsa's instructions for mounting the AC to a first generation Fargo.

However, I am currently rigged for road riding and that means that with my Schwalbe Marathon Supreme 2.0's  I can mount the cages using the existing braze-ons and still have a good bit of clearance between the cages and the tires/frames.  I planned to use one cage for my cook kit (snow peak stove, ti pot, canister fuel, small spare canister fuel, spark tool, and sea to summit spoon) and the other cage would be used for food.  I would have liked to use 5L dry bags but could only find 3L (Exped Dry Bags) ones, so I opted for these instead.  They actually worked quite well from a size perspective although from a durability standpoint I will stick with the Sea to Summit bags or custom made bags for the future.

On one fork, the the cook kit sat very comfortably and worked perfectly.  I must say that for half the trip the food bag on the other fork worked well until it was loaded a bit strangely from of all things, 'fruit', and I then had my first accident with the cages. I had just loaded up with 2 apples, 2 oranges, and a couple of bananas, all relatively odd sized items.  These items had the affect on my dry bag of making it lumpy and non-uniform around the edges.  As I set off from the super market, I hit a bump, which dislodged part of the dry bag and let it play into the spokes.  A quick thud and my fruit had exploded within the bag, the force of which caused the dry bag itself to explode!  Needless to say I was a bit concerned, but after looking things over, the wheel was fine and all that was damaged was my 3L dry bag and a bit of pride.

At that point I opted to switch things up, recognizing that structure is an important thing to have in these dry bags that are mounted to the Anything Cage. In essence, you really want to maintain a rigid cylinder like shape to the bags to make them fit comfortably in the cages.  With this in mind, I moved my tarp/ropes/stakes bag from my handlebars down to the Anything Cage.  This worked quite well the rest of the trip and their were no more incidents, even though I was travelling over a wide range of road and trail surfaces.

You can watch my video on how the entire bike was setup here.

The lesson from the trip is that first and foremost the Anything Cages really are awesome.  They allow you to put small, fairly light, and somewhat bulky items down on the forks and out of your bikepacking kit.  The issue with older generation forks is that you definitely have to be conscious of where the cages are located and how they are packed.  Had I been bombing down a hill when I had my mishap, things would have been a lot worse for both the bike and me.

I continue to think that anyone who is out touring and especially those with an ultra light, bikepacking style setup, should definitely give the Anything Cages a good look. While 3L bags work well, the problem with most dry bags that size is they are not shaped in the right way.  What I mean by this, is that as you fill them up, they balloon in a circular fashion in all dimensions.  What you really want is for the bags to balloon out away from the cage in more of an oval shape.  I have some very specific thoughts on a new custom bag that would fit the Anything Cages and remove the chance of items or bags slipping out and causing some form of catastrophic failure.  I have conveyed these ideas to Scott over at Porcelain Rocket and hope that he does something with them.  If not, I think I may have to find someone in the industry that can build me a couple of prototypes for trial use.