Have you ever noticed how sometimes hiking downhill can often be more painful than going up? The stress on your knees and quads can really add up on a long downhill hike but fortunately this little invention can help out: a bike in a backpack.

The Mountain Monk is a foldable, full-suspension mountain bike that you can carry on your back while hiking up a mountain. The bike doesn’t actually have pedals (just foot pegs) so you can’t ride it uphill or even on flat sections but it looks like a very fun way to get back down the hill after a summit attempt.

The bike itself weighs about 21 pounds which isn’t bad for a full suspension mountain bike and it even comes standard with disc brakes for slowing down on steep descents. Although the Mountain Monk is  just a prototype, the inventor is currently looking for a manufacturing partner so hopefully we’ll see something in the next year or two. Sweet!

Via Singletracks Mountain Bike Blog via Wired Blog.

Related posts:

1. New Giant OCR Bike
2. Training for a big hike
3. Christmas hike, New Year’s camping PLUS Santa goes rock climbing
4. A challenging hike in Virginia: Old Rag
5. Getting lost on a hike

Tags: backpack, mountain bike

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 6:59 am and is filed under hiking, other activities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.