Myself and Ed Oxley went bikepacking last week. Three days in the Lake District, including an overnight stay in a mountain hut.
Bikepacking is like backpacking but on bikes. You carry everything you need for the multiday trip on your person and/or bike.
We’d both been talking about doing such a thing for quite some time but we wanted to do it differently to all the other bikepacking things you see online and in magazines.
Basically we wanted to do some bikepacking on our ‘normal’ All Mountainy kinda bikes. And ride the same sort of technically demanding tracks that we do normally.
Most of the bikepacking you see is (understandably) wide wilderness tracks being ridden on fully rigid 29ers.
Which is ace. But we wondered if you could take the bikepacking ethos and combine with modern full suspension bikes and some big flip-off gnarly mountains.
So that’s what we attempted.
You can read all about our (mis)adventures in an upcoming issue of Singletrack Mountain Bike Magazine.
BENJIMEDIA 
Look forward to the read, need to do something similar!
Magazines should do more of that kind of articles. Looking forward to it!
Are mountain huts easily found and free accessible in the UK?
I did a week bikepacking in the sometimes also technically demanding black forest of Germany. Probably not a rough as the Lake district but demanding enough for me! Not on a fully, neither on a rigid 29er, but on my Genesis Alpitude. Long travel hardtails make for good climbing (you don’t want too much extra weight either) and nice descends.
I found it possible to pack all my stuff in a 48l backpack. That includes tools, survival gear, sleeping gear and clothing. One of my best experiences ever related to mountainbiking.
(Here’s a video if anyone’s curious: http://vimeo.com/44949832)
Peter – there aren’t many (free) huts in England or Wales but there are quite a number of them in Scotland (called bothies).