Bikepacking - a viable alternative to racks & panniers

I will just copy something I wrote previously -

I was met with my first river crossing of the day, I had thought my feet were cold before, but several crossings barefoot through a knee-deep glacial river with my bike and belongings held above my head thoroughly froze them. The cold and (hurricane force?) wind made sure my feet didn't warm up, but just as I was starting to get used to it the rain started falling. Sideways.

No matter what the salesman tells you about your jacket, horizontal rain will always find its way in somehow. I found myself soaked to the bone, despite my waterproof jacket and trousers, and seriously regretting not having brought water- or windproof gloves. The terrain wasn’t helping; the road surface, gradient and wind were so extreme that cycling became impossible and I was forced to get off and push over the loose ground. It took all my strength to drive my bike up the steep inclines, six inches at a time.

By mid-afternoon I came across multiple cold water crossings: the runoff from a nearby glacier. At this point I was so cold and wet that I decided to just plough through it on my bike.

The trail I had been following was no longer clearly visible. It had been completely washed away by the run off, and the only indications of where it had been were regularly spaced 3-foot-tall yellow poles, which would have run along the side of the road. Ordinarily, spotting these would have been easy, but the rain had reduced visibility to 10m.

I was aiming for an emergency mountain hut, about 80 miles from my starting point. After a few false alarms where, in the fog, I mistook large boulders for the hut, I managed to find it. 30 vertical metres up the side of a hill.

As soon as I got into the shelter of the hut I completely stripped to crawl into the warmth of my sleeping bag, hoping to restore circulation to my extremities. Standing naked, with frost-bitten hands, in my mountain chateau, I simply couldn’t understand why all those mums keep going to Iceland. (and why Peter Andre kept lying about how cheap things were there.)

Both photos were the morning after. I thought I would wait out the weather for a couple of nights in this hut, but woke up and the sky was clear so went for it. Wind was still ferocious

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