Prologue

I would like to say that my ride to Alaska came about from an impulsive desire where I woke up one morning, got on my motorcycle and took off. The reality though is that it came about as the result of a few months of calculated planning and preparation. While I knew a few things about motorcycle touring, having spent most weekends in the past year on short road trips in my native Washington state, I realized that doing a three week road trip in the wilderness would call for a lot of research and preparation.

THE BIKE

The first step was acquiring the right bike. While my naked sv650 had tided me over many thousand miles on tarmac, I wanted something that was comfortable for longer rides and capable of being ridden on rough terrain. My choice of bike is limited by my height and short inseam and I shortly zeroed in on a BMW F650GS. It was a popular bike among women due to its low ride height and it had proven credentials for being a good adventure riding machine. I scouted around on the local classifieds to find a likely candidate and after a couple of months of looking, found one that was in the right price range and was already rigged out to be a touring bike, so that the work I’d need to do on it was minimal. I bought the bike a week after I first went and inspected it.

In the following weeks, I proceeded to customize the bike for me. I swapped the seat for the BMW low seat and lowered the handlebars.

The bike rode very different from my sportsbike and it took me a little getting used to. In spite of the low seat, it was still a tall bike and it took me quite a bit of riding and a few drops before I got somewhat used to it. I brought it to a dirtbike class where I practiced riding standing up on dirt and gravel. For someone who had never ridden dirt before, this was really challenging and I found myself wondering a few times exactly why I was doing this and how anyone could call this fun. I was stubborn though and I had a goal in mind. Riding on dirt was just one of the survival skills I would need to have in my pocket if I wanted to achieve my dream.

[As the plans for the Alaska ride got more concrete, I realized that my naked SV650 would not be the ideal bike to bring on the journey. While it has been done before, I discounted the idea for a number of reasons.

The lack of fairings and the lightness of the bike meant that I got easily tired out on longer rides. I found myself needing to stop and take a break every 60 miles.

The smaller gas tank meant a smaller range, which would not be very safe in Alaska and the Yukon where the riding distances between gas stations were occasionally more than 150 miles.

There would be a lot of construction areas meaning unpaved roads with gravel and grade slurry, mud if it had been raining, and a few off-road highways. Even the paved roads were known to have a lot of frost heaves and potholes.

It appeared that I would be much better off on a bike that had off-road abilities, had a larger gas tank and had an established reputation as an adventure bike. I decided on purchasing a BMW F650GS, a bike that I had fallen in love when I sat on it at the dealership. It had everything I would want in an adventure bike – German engineering, a fuel range of 150 miles, fuel injection, dual-sport abilities etc.

I ended up purchasing a 2002 F650GS, which came with all the possible farkles one might need for a trip like this – 40liter Touratech panniers, extra exhaust storage, Fatbar handlebars.

I wasn’t very pleased at its power in comparison to my SV650, but it more than made up for it in terms of comfort. The seating position was comfortable enough that I felt like I was sitting on my couch at home rather than riding 70mph on the freeway on a two wheeler. It chomped up miles and I found myself being able to go longer and longer distances before I needed to stop for a break. The fuel injection meant no need to warm the bike up – start it up and it was ready to go! Initially I had some trouble with it because it handled very differently from my sportsbike.]

CAMPING

My planned route was intentionally routed to go through territories least populated by humans and far from the tourist hubs. In my rides, I’d been used to living cheap and staying at the seediest, cheapest places I could find on the road, but it seemed like even this would be a luxury in some of the places I would be riding to. I was also trying to keep the overall costs of the trip down. All of this pointed towards motorcycle camping – a phrase that until then had made me shudder a little for a multitude of reasons – my camping experience was limited to the point of being non-existent, and the thought of loading the bike down with all sorts of extra equipment was a little contrary to my philosophy of riding light with just a toothbrush and a change of shirts and underwear.

It was time to change all that though and so back I went online to read up on what equipment I needed and the following week found me at my local overpriced sporting goods store, clutching a list of everything you need to have while camping out in the backcountry where I proceeded to spend an entire paycheck. My list of essential purchases that I absolutely had to have to emerge alive from the wilderness included an ultralight tent, a sub-zero rated sleeping bag, a cartridge stove, dry bags, a saw, a headlamp, rope, emergency mirror, a water filter, water carrier…

MAINTENANCE
My biggest fear of being out on the road was having to deal with a emergency like a flat tire and being able to handle and fix it on my own. This is a desirable skill for motorcyclists in the best of conditions, and an essential life and death skill in a place like Alaska. While I had tinkered a little with my bike in doing basic maintenance, due to lack of time, knowledge and a place to work on, my bikes had always been serviced by experienced mechanics.

This is where my friend Jasen came in. An experienced mechanic who had worked on bikes for twenty years, there was very little about motorcycles that he didn’t know or couldn’t figure out. He proceeded to coach me on working with my bike and I slowly started learning basic maintenance like changing the oil, adjusting the chain etc. and proceeded to learning how to change and patch tire tubes in case of a flat.

FLYING SOLO OR NOT?

I am by nature a loner. I found an instant affinity with motorcycling because it allowed me to spend long stretches of time by myself. It allowed me to decide when I was ready to interact with people and be social. A short stint of riding never fails to rejuvenate my sense of self and validation. After a few years of riding though, I have often found myself wishing I had a like-minded companion. Someone like myself who needed their own space but with whom I could share the wonders of travel and kick back at the end of the day with a beer and a cigarette, resting and thinking back to a good day’s riding. I didn’t like the prospect of riding with a group of riders very much, but a couple of other people to go with would be perfect.

Finding a riding companion seemed like the hardest part of the preparation. It was easy to go to a store and purchase material things and it was easy to prepare myself mentally and physically. Finding someone who was also enthused about taking on a mad journey like this, who could get time off at the same time, who could afford the expense associated with it and had an up for anything attitude was difficult, to say the least. To be fair, I didn’t look very hard because a part of me hoped that nobody would come along and I would have to ride alone by necessity. And then I happened to have a phone conversation with my friend Sarah.

SARAH

Sarah Adkins lives in Portland, Oregon. We had been introduced by a mutual acquaintance a few years before and I had been struck even then by the combination of fresh faced innocence and youth combined with a worldly wise knowledge of the world. The soft spoken quiet kid had gone on to become an EMT. She had read the account of my first road trip across the Olympic Peninsula and had written to me about how that had inspired her to go get her own bike. She had quietly acquired a dirt bike and started kicking around on dirt roads. We talked on the phone on and off over the years always making plans to meet up and ride together, plans that never quite materialized.

I jokingly mentioned to her that she should take a few weeks off and ride with me to Alaska to which she said that it sounded like a good idea and she would see if she could get the time off. I never expected anything to come of it until she called back a week later saying that she had gotten the time off and started looking for an appropriate bike. I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it. Here I had been dreading being forced to ride with a stranger. Instead I would ride with someone I liked, whose company I had enjoyed and someone who could hold her own in a tough situation. She didn’t have as much touring experience as I did, but what she lacked in experience, she more than made up for with her stolid up for anything attitude.

She acquired a brand new KLR650 and used it as her commuter over her weekly one hundred mile commute and started gradually outfitting it for the ride.

We met up in Oregon to sit and down and hash out details for the very first time. Together we planned the route and essentials. We joked that we were only really riding with the other person so we would have someone to help us pick up our bikes if it ever went down.

 

Anchorage

The Motorcycle Shop

Alaska Leather

Downtown Anchorage

Toward Seward

The Seward Highway

Leaving Anchorage

Turnout

Lake

Rolling in to Seward

Down by the water

The Glenn Highway

TOK TO GLENNALLEN

We woke up the next morning in Tok, AK to the sound of pouring rain. We  got dressed and parted ways for a bit while she went off to dry her overpants in the campground’s laudromat, while I tore down camp and loaded up the bike. The next hour was a Spinal Tap-esque comical experience wherein we kept trying to find each other in the maze of roads and RVs all of which looked exactly alike. Eventually we did manage to meet up and walked together to the campground kitchen to get breakfast. They had a buffet – the though of which excited me having been starved of real food for a while, but it turned out to be mostly all you could eat pancakes with some dodgy looking syrup and fruit. I did get to try reindeer sausage for the first time, which was exciting for the entire five minutes of the experience.

We managed to make breakfast last for about an hour as we took the time to relax and finish the pancakes and coffee.

As we rode out of the campground, we realized that it was consistently pouring down rain. We stopped at the local gas station to fill up our tanks. A couple of adventure riders were filling up near us. They told us to be extra careful out on the roads due to the pouring down rain and the danger of hydroplaning.

The first ten miles or so of the route was bad. Shortly after, it reached truly epic proportions of miserable. Riding in pouring down rain isn’t fun in the best of times, but it’s even less exciting when you know that you have about 350 more miles to go. Before the first 50 miles were up, I found that I was shivering violently from the cold and I couldn’t feel my hands anymore. For the first time in the journey I realized that being out in complete wilderness also meant that I couldn’t just pull over, go indoors to seek shelter and get warm. Most of the highway didn’t even have much of a shoulder to pull off on, should I inexplicably have wanted to do so. I was pretty much in auto-pilot mode and all my numbed brain could think of was to keep going, ticking off the miles until the next sign of civilization. Sarah pulled over a couple of times to take pictures and this was one of the few times on the trip that I truly wanted to shove her off a cliff, as I pulled over and waited for her and got rained on and froze some more.

After what seemed like a lifetime, I saw what looked like an oasis – a lodge in the distance with an honest to goodness parking lot. I rolled in, parked and barely managed to stumble in. My heated vest had stopped working and I was freezing cold. Everything we were wearing got soaked and I think I was very close to hypothermia. We couldn’t stop there though – it was either turn around and go back to Tok, or keep going to Anchorage. I chose to keep going although I was near frozen and exhausted from the effort of riding in the now near zero-visibility rain.

By the time we reached a town called GlennAllen, I was all but ready to give up. I pulled in at a building that appeared to be the visitor center. I have no idea how I managed to turn the bike off, get off it or walk up the stairs to collapse into the warm shelter because my body had now stopped having any feeling, my clothing was completely waterlogged, and my hands were frozen so stiff that I didn’t have any feeling in them anymore.

At the visitor center we were told about the Caribou Hotel where we could find a room for the night. It was only the middle of the day but I knew that I was done riding for the day.

THE CARIBOU HOTEL

As we stood in the hotel lobby waiting to be checked in, we observed with mild amusement biker after disgruntled biker walking in looking harassed and defeated. We nodded at each other in solidarity, no words needed.

At one point, I counted a total of 17 bikes parked under the front of the hotel lobby.

The room turned out to be a complete ripoff – an unbelievable $120 for a small double bed room where the heating didn’t work right and the toilet kept running. I didn’t care though. I was grateful at the thought of getting into a hot shower, thawing out, and climbing into a real bed.

We hung out all our wet things in an effort to get them dry. Unfortunately the hotel didn’t have a dryer that we could use and we had to resort to air drying. We even borrowed a little space heater and tried to use it to dry out our waterlogged boots.

TOWARDS ANCHORAGE

We left the town of Glenn Allen the next morning eager to put as many miles as possible between us. Anchorage was a mere two hundred miles away and the thought of finally reaching the capital city of Alaska was exciting. We got off to a spirited start, feeling spoiled by the dry roads and warm sunshine.

Perhaps many others leaving Glenn Allen had had similar thoughts and provoked the ire of the local authorities though, because before long I saw what looking like a gleam of red and blue in my side mirror. I slowed down but Sarah was far ahead going well over 80mph. The red and blue lights overtook me and then her with an alarming rapidity and pretty soon we were both pulled over on the side of the road, sheepishly climbing off our bikes and wincing like schoolchildren as the cop walked over to us with the inevitable jaunty swagger. He asked us where we were going and why and whether we knew how fast we had been going. We looked appropriately confused and innocent and tried to bullshit our way out of it, to no avail. My heart sank as he pulled out the ominous book and started writing out a ticket.

“Umm… aren’t you going to let us go with a warning?” Sarah asked him at what I can only describe as spirit of undying hope in the face of adversity. I threw her an exasperated look which she answered with a shrug. The cop looked at her and said, “No.”

He then looked at both of us and said – “You were both going 79 in a 55 and you could get into big trouble for this. I’m going to write it up as a 72 though and I’m going to write out just one ticket. You can decide which one of you gets it.”

I looked at him with a look of amazed disbelief and imagined myself being on a reality tv show where this was the test complete with dramatic tense background music, and the decision would decide the course of our friendship for the rest of the journey.

“I’ll take it,” I said in a spirit of heroic sacrifice.

“What? No, I’ll take it!” said Sarah, not to be outdone with the heroics.

“Now wait a minute…” I started, ready to list all the downsides of having a speeding ticket on her record, when she interrupted me with – “Oh wait, I could lose my job if I had a ticket, seeing as how I need to drive an emergency vehicle around.”

“Okay then…,” I started, a little deflated.

“Hold on, let me call my boss!” she said and whipped out her phone to call her supervisor in Oregon and proceeded to have a chat with him while the cop and I patiently looked on.

“It’s okay. He said it won’t affect my job. I’ll take the ticket.” She said beaming, as she ended the call.

The cop walked back to his car to pull up her license and write out the ticket.

Touched by this act of magnanimity, I turned to her to express my gratitude when she said – “You’re splitting that with me.”

“Oh. Right.”

I decided to make good use of the time and took my camera out to take an incriminating photo of the bikes with the cop in the background. When he came back to us, I asked him if we could take some pictures with him for our family albums. He said yes, but we couldn’t post them on the internet. Busted!

As we got ready to get on our bikes, he warned us to be careful and not get caught again. “We wouldn’t dream of it, officer!” we said meekly and rode off.

Where we had been doing a good clip of 70+mph throughout our journey, we were now slowed down to the regulated 55mph. I wanted to go at least the accepted ten over, but Sarah wouldn’t hear of it. Given that she had just taken one for the team, I respected her decision and kept to slow, snail like pace. We kept our heads low in shame as we were overtaken by RVs and semis. The shame, oh the shame! That was the slowest one hundred miles of the journey.

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The Alaskan Highway

THE ALASKAN HIGHWAY

Into the Yukon and onto the Alaskan Highway! Brilliant weather! Gorgeous scenery. It felt as if we were riding through the pages of a calendar. Everything was scenic and picturesque and perfect. The road was now wide and smooth. Where the Cassiar had seemed like a little secret winding backroad, the Alaskan Highway was huge, straight and perfectly engineered.

We went through cities like Jade City, Nugget City and Teslin. Teslin was home to our scariest encounter thus far – riding on a long metal grated bridge behind an RV that was driving 5mph and occassionally braking for no apparent reason. I think our hearts must have stopped beating during that entire stretch, and I could hear Sarah screaming – “DON’T STOP DON’T STOP” all the way. When we finally got across, I think we were both mad enough to shoot his tires out from under him.

And finally at the end of a too long day, we entered the city of Whitehorse. After day upon day and hundreds of miles of ridng through wilderness and little one-horse towns, the sight of a real city with parks, houses, well manicured lawns, traffic lights and shiny Harley riders made us laugh with delight as we pulled in to the parking lot of a park and pulled our helmets off.

WHITEHORSE, YT

We ended up staying at a delightful place that night – the Beezkneez Backpackers hostel. They were full but they let us camp in their backyard. They had clean showers, internet access, kitchen, a cozy living room, and interesting travellers spending the night. The perfect place to rejuvenate our spirits! I try to retain this memory of Whitehorse in my memory, rather than the dismal one from ten days after.

KLUANE LAKE AND DESTRUCTION BAY

Day 7 saw us waking up from a good night’s rest at the Beezkneez Bacpackers. We ate breakfast, started loading up the bikes and doing some routine maintenance. Sarah decided to adjust her chain and something went wrong so that the wheel made a creaking sound every time we rotated it. It took us a while to backtrack and sort it out, but it got her really frustrated. We then set out to go find some parts at an Auto Parts store only to realize that it was a Sunday and most stores were closed. After riding in the wilderness for most of the week, the one time we hit a major city turns out to be the one day when everything was closed! This could only happen to us.

We hit the road a bit late – around noon – and were hoping to at least cross the border before the end of the day. There were many construction zones on the way with loose packed gravel which slowed us down, but overall we kept up a good pace. We passed through the Kluane Lake area, which was gorgeous.

ENTERING ALASKA

As we reached the end of the Yukon and neared Alaska, the weather changed dramatically. We rode a pretty consistent 90mph trying to outride a big, angry thunderstorm. The ominous clouds bearing down on us combined with flashes of lightning (scary in this barren remoteness) and the first few showers of rain made our entry into Alaska every bit as dramatic as I had hoped it would be. The last hundred miles riding into Alaska were almost like riding through some Tolkein-esque fantasy – completely remote with no vehicles out on the road besides us, misty mountains in the distance, bleak stripped down forests; and I especially have a chilling memory of passing a huge muddy angry marshland that reminded me of Isengard. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see an army of orcs emerging from it onto the road.

We crossed the border at around 7 in the evening – my first real border crossing from Canada into the US. The customs officer was really nice and chatty. He recommended that we take advantage of the recent dry weather and the fact that construction didn’t happen on Sundays to make it through all the way to Tok rather than stopping at Border City as planned. I was really tired by now, but what he said made sense, so we pushed on. I think we made it all the way to Tok on sheer willpower alone. We went through that dreaded stretch that every biker on the road had warned us about until now – about fifty miles of construction in rain gathering darkness. . The picture most people had painted of “The US side of the road is completely torn up.”, “Be very, very careful and go slow.”, “It’s fifty miles of the most miserable roads you will ever ride.” etc. had led us to imagine the aftermath of an apocalypse with dead bodies strewn all over and wailing infants crying out our names. The reality though, was quite a bit different because we pretty much sailed through it. It was slow going in some sections but nothing unmanageable. After we stopped for the night and exchanged notes, we resolved to never trust other people’s descriptions of road conditions again.

In hindsight though, we had been extraordinarily lucky with the weather – the rain ensured that there was no dust, but it has also not rained long enough for it to get slippery (as we found out when we went through that section a week later and my heart was in my mouth every time we went through a slick muddy section).

TOK

Sarah had promised me at the border that if I would consent to riding another 60 miles to Tok that day, we could stay at the best, swankiest place I wanted to instead of camping. I had given in at that thought and as we finally entered Tok, I pulled in to the parking lot of a somewhat fancy looking – for that area – hotel.

We turned off the bikes and walked into the reception… and stopped. Inside was a gigantic Christmas tree with presents piled around it, a TV playing Christmas carols and people walking around in Christmas sweaters putting up ornaments and decorations. It was July. We looked at each other and left.

Outside we tried calling the number of a hostel in that area only to be told that they were closed for a week because a moose had gotten in and destroyed all the beds.

Lady luck was really not on our side that night. We finally managed to find an RV park called the Sourdough Campground. It was raining steadily now and we pitched a tent in the rain, ate a rude meal and clambered into bed. This had been our longest day riding and the strain of the journey was now beginning to tell.

I was too tired even to grasp the thought that we had made our destination – we were in Alaska and tomorrow we would be in the capital city of Anchorage. All I wanted was to sleep and rest and I soon drifted off to sleep, the steady sound of rain lulling me into oblivion.
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