Last spring when the team behind 8bar introduced their newest adjustable geometry all-road Mitte bike, one of its key features was the flexibility to transform into an all-surface adventure bike. Developed to give themselves a bike to ride both the rolling gravel around Berlin and be ready to transition to proper all-road touring when the time came, they took the Mitte to north Africa to test it out. 8bar’s founder, its product manager, and a freelance photographer packed up the new Mittes and headed into the desolate gravel roads of the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Just now getting a wide release, their 8bar Adventures-Morocco trip documentary offers a glimpse into a place few cyclists pedal. Take another look at their loaded down aluminum bikes & watch their story after the break…
8bar already put together a quick two part blog back last spring detailing their trip, and we got a preview of their film earlier in the year. But now it has been given more of a general release so we can share it on Vimeo.
In the end they struggle at the start of the trip, not because of the bikes per se, but because they underestimated how rough, steep, and loose the climbing up would be and ended up doing some extended hike-a-biking with heavy loaded bikes. But the alloy bikes decked out in a SRAM Rival double, Blackburn bags, and DT Swiss R32 wheels carried them on their way, even if they got a little more adventure than planned for on the return to Marrakesh. The disc brake aluminum Mitte with its aluminum fork sells as a frameset for just 600€, or complete bikes from around 1450€.
8bar High Atlas Adventure
836km total over 8 days, and 11.986m of climbing
