Hyder, AK

STEWART ACCESS ROAD

I woke up in the barn the next morning, relieved to find that neither my food nor I had been eaten or even nibbled at by the Bear. Perhaps it had taken the night off. I unpacked my Ursack and put the contents away back into my panniers. We ate a rude breakfast of fruit and protein bars before getting an early start out. It felt good to be back on pavement again. We only needed to ride about a hundred miles this morning to get to our destination for the day – Hyder, AK. Yes, we would finally be in Alaska, and we would enjoy one day of light riding and plenty of rest. Now that we had put enough distance between ourselves and our homes, we felt entitled to do this.

It was brisk morning’s ride. The weather was crisp and a little cold and foggy. Enough that I broke out the winter gloves for the first time, which performed superlatively. My heated vest and the gloves kept me warm and toasty as I whizzed through the mostly straight beginning end of the Cassiar Highway.

Before long, we had hit the intersection with the Stewart Access Road, a 40 mile long stretch of road that led to the little town of Stewart. Little did I know then that this road would also turn out to be the twistiest, most scenic and delightful road through all of our Alaska travels.

We turned west onto the Stewart Access Road and within a few miles we were greeted by the sight of the most enormous snowcapped mountains amid gorgeous scenery. After the first few twisties had passed, I pulled over and told Sarah that I was going to have to take a much more spirited pace and I would meet up with her at the end. She nodded and said that she would probably take a more relaxed pace. That decided, I took off and roared through the landscape, leaning the bike over as much as I dared to and gradually warming up to this brilliant road, the remoteness only occasionally broken by a few meandering RVs that I impatiently overtook, and reveling in the scenery that unfolded before me. This is where I reached pure riding nirvana becoming one with the road, dancing with it, taking on each exciting turn, ripping through it and looking excitedly forward to the next one, and the next, and the next, until…

Until I turned right onto a downhill corner and was slammed in the face by the sight of the first enormous glacier I’d seen in all my life. I did the only thing I could do – pulled off the road, slowed to a halt, stopped, ripped my helmet off and stood and gawked. A quarter of an hour later, Sarah turned up and pretty much did the exact same thing and we screamed in delight at each other at the breathtaking sight in front of us.

We took quite a few pictures here, but no pictures could do justice to the sight and presence of this – our first landmark in a journey that would bring forth many wondrous sites.

THE SEALASKA INN

When we had finally had our fill, we rode the last few miles to Stewart. We stopped here briefly to fill up our tanks with gas. I went inside trying to find a connector to my tire pressure gauge but didn’t have much luck.

From Stewart a mile long gravel road leads into the town of Hyder, AK. A dead-end town as it were, and this is also the road that leads out of town. This was our second border crossing back into the United States, although curiously enough we did not have to go through customs to get in. We were finally in ALASKA! This was of course a minor triumph because no roads lead from Hyder to the state of Alaska, and you have to come back out and ride north for about a thousand miles north before getting to Alaska again, but even so, it was something. The only reason for us to go here was that we had consistently been told by riders to visit here and get “Hyder-ized”. We didn’t really know what this entailed but were keen on finding out. :)

Half a mile after crossing the border, I pulled in at the first inn I saw that had motorcycles parked outside it – the SeaAlaska Inn. It was a modest affair with small, clean, affordable, ancient rooms. We walked into the bar to talk to the bartender about getting a room and got one on the ground floor.

The bar is where we ended up being Hyder-ized. I am unfortunately not allowed to say any more about this outside of the fact that I was in state to do any more riding for the rest of the day after we were done. We also ordered some of the most delicious pizza I have eaten and devoured it like we had been starving for days. I believe this was the first real meal we had had since we had started off.

Fed and watered, we now looked to the other bikers to socialize and exchange notes. As with most riders we had met, they too were travelling south and had already ridden through all the terrain coming up ahead of us. I pulled out my map of Alaska and they gave me copious amounts of information on the conditions of the roads ahead and what we could expect in the days to come. What we heard was not very good – they had been rained on for the past two weeks and had been cold and wet and miserable. They hadn’t been very much impressed by Alaska and were glad to be leaving it for warmer climes. They had ridden through most of the country and the fact that this had been their least favorite stretch didn’t bode much good for us. They had also made it to and back from Prudhoe Bay – that holy grail of destinations for adventure riders – worth riding to just to say that you had done it, but not very much fun to and back. Much like the riders who had ridden to Inuvik up the Dempster Highway, these riders described the Dalton Highway as wet, sludgy and with slick, dangerous mud. They had had an encounter with a herd of caribou, which fortunately had ended well for both man, machine and caribou in question.

Our bartender told us about a spot up the road where one could go look at salmon in the river and bears that came to catch the salmon. They had had a bear sighting earlier in the day, so there was a good chance that there would be more. Seeing as I was still not keen on riding, I hopped onto the back of Sarah’s KLR, resolving to keep my eyes firmly shut and imagine happy thoughts until we reached our destination. We stopped a bit earlier than we had intended, when she saw another rider on an 08 KLR. As she pulled over next to him, he turned out to be a kid of about seventeen years of age who was traveling with his dad. This was the second father-son pair we had encountered in this town. We told him where we were headed and he cheerfully agreed to follow us and come along.

Before long, we got to the salmon watching site. The ride itself wasn’t too bad except when we came onto more and more loose gravel.

We dismounted and paid for our tickets to go onto the observation deck and lo and behold – another first for me – the sight of enormous salmon swimming through the river or resting. We waited for quite a while, but the bears never showed up though.

Sarah and the other dirt bike riders, in the meantime, were hatching plans to ride the dirt roads to go see another glacier. I opted out of riding along, choosing instead to hitch a ride with another ride to go back to the hotel and rest.

I got back and took a long shower, trying to feel clean again. I then went back out to the bar and sat with a group of riders (Miles and ?). We got beers and pizza and proceeded to spend the evening exchanging riding stories, embellish some details and fabricating others from scratch.

Sarah rolled in later in the evening with Andrew, Jody and Derek with stories and pictures of the gorgeous sights they had seen and a video of a grizzly they had encountered.

We stayed up for a couple more hours before I decided to go crawl into bed for some much needed rest. Sarah – in keeping with being Sarah – partied into the small hours of the morning.

LEAVING HYDER

The next morning I woke up feeling refreshed and rested. I got out of bed, yawned and stretched, and got cleaned up before heading out to the bike with the first armload of things that needed to be packed away. I also took the opportunity to give the bike a once-over and it was probably a good thing that I did because I found that my rear tire pressure was almost 20psi, well below the recommended 35psi. I splashed it thoroughly with water to check for a slow leak, but it didn’t uncover anything.

We rolled out of Hyder that morning to cross the border back into Canada. I had a bone chilling moment there when I realized that my passport wasn’t in my jacket pocket as I had expected. It turned out to be in the innermost pocket under the waterproof lining though and I was able to breathe again. The customs officer looked at the passport and informed me that my visa had expired. Umm… no, it hadn’t, I said. It expires on the 6th of November. No, we use month/day/year here, he informed me. No, you don’t, you’re Canadian – you use day/month/year. Apparently, the good folks in Stewart are used to using US standards instead of Canadian, leading to this misunderstanding. Thankfully we were able to clear this up and I was soon on my way, looking forward to once again riding the twisty goodness of the Stewart access road back to the Cassiar.

We stopped at Stewart first to get some much needed food. This was the best breakfast I had had in a long time and I wolfed it down hungrily.

Outside the hotel in Stewart, we saw a BMW parked with an ADVRider sticker on it, which excited us considerably. We met the riders and chatted excitedly with them. All we had in common was that we posted on the same discussion forum, but out here in the middle of nowhere, it was enough to forge a bond of kinship. We talked and exchanged email addresses and promised to establish contact when we got home.

Leaving Stewart, we were finally ready to tackle the next leg of our journey – the mighty Cassiar Highway.

The Cassiar Highway

ON TO THE CASSIAR

I had heard about the Cassiar Highway almost a year ago from my next door neighbor – a guy who went up with the fishing boats in the winters and I’d heard that it was by far the more treacherous way to get into Alaska with a lot of unpaved sections and ripped up roads from the bad winters.

We stopped at the intersection with the Cassiar for a quick break and were shortly joined by a group of KLR riders. As we stood and chatted, a passing hitch-hiker came up to us with a gigantic watermelon, which he offered to share with us. Not questioning the surrealness of the situation, a knife was quickly produced and we proceeded to slice open and divide it amongst us. It was disposed of very quickly, after which we dispersed and went our separate ways,

After this brief, magical interlude, we saddled our horses and took off – up north on the famed Cassiar Highway. After months of dreaming and mixed expectations, there we were finally on it. If any road in the United States could be considered to be a destination in itself, this was it.

Time was when travellers would need to pick which route they would need to take to get to Alaska and the choice lay between the Alaskan Highway and the Cassiar. The former was by far the popular route – scenic and safe, a straight line path through thousands of miles of wilderness that stretched between Dawson City to the east and end at Fairbanks, AK in the north west. As a popular tourist destination, it was better maintained and fixed at the end of every winter. There were more rest stops and towns along the way.

The Cassiar on the other hand had a reputation for being the more treacherous one. It stretched from south east in Hazelton to north west to the border between BC and the Yukon, where it met up with the Alaskan Highway. It was 350 miles of a narrow, twisting road with few stops for gas and food along the way, very few turnout spaces and next to no shoulders for stopping in. I had heard that it would get really torn up each winter and be ravaged by frost heaves. Travellers on this road needed to make sure that their vehicles were primed and have plenty of spares in case of eventualities. Rest stops were few and far between and there was at least one 200 mile stretch where we would encounter no gas stations.

As far as road conditions went, we were in luck. By July, a major part of the highway had been fixed. We had been warned of one bad stretch about 40 miles long towards the end of the Cassiar, but that seemed very far off now.

It was almost mid-day by the time we got on the highway, so our hope of getting to the end within the day was alas not to be. We hoped to make it as far as possible before energy started to fade and hoped that we would find a place to camp down at at the end of the day. I had packed some of the leftover pizza from the SeaAlaska Inn for lunch, along with some fruit. I had also filled up my extra gas can and strapped it down to the pannier. I knew this time it wasn’t just insurance – I was going to need it. I was a little worried about my tire pressure from that morning, especially with not having my air compressor working, but there was little I could do about it.

The weather that day was brilliant, as it had been from the start of our journey, and for this I was grateful. We set a good pace when we started off as we were eager to cover a lot of ground. The Cassiar was narrow but well kept and we flew through the miles.

The highway stretches for a good 350 miles, so we didn’t have much hope of finishing it that day seeing as it was well after noon, but we were determined to cover as many miles as we could. It was beautiful, remote, complete wilderness with barely any traffic. This is where we started seeing bears and elk.

As usual, I had tunnel vision and I focused on nothing but the road ahead, while admiring the scenery in my peripheral vision. Sarah on the other hand saw every black bear, deer and caribou there was to see on the sides of the road. When she was in the lead, she’d point them out and even take pictures, while I had a mild stroke at watching her comfortably steer the bike with one hand, while looking off to the side and focussing to take an image, all the while going 70mph.

I remember one surreal moment when I happened to sense something in the distance and I braked gently. A few seconds later, a gigantic elk cantered out across the highway and disappeared amidst the trees to the left. It was almost a magical moment, fraught with danger on one level – if  hadn’t braked,  wouldn’t have seen it in time and it would have been a head on collission. This was when I started to feel like I was almost in a fairy tale.

The one memory I have of the Cassiar is that it was littered with lakes, amidst its gorgeous wilderness. At first I had the urge to stop at every lake and take photos, but soon I found myself getting blase about them. This was of course in part because we needed to keep going.

We did stop a few times at the more scenic ones when we needed to take a break for a snack, only to find that taking our helmets off for too long was not a good idea as we were swamped by a deluge of insects.

We passed few cars and were passed by even fewer. There were few RVs that crawled along at a snail’s pace, as is their nature, but they didn’t hold us back for very long.

DEASE NUTS

Our energy started to flag towards late evening by when we had covered about 250 of the total 350 miles and we neared the first major sign of civilization – Dease Lake. As we neared town, I noticed that Sarah wasn’t behind me anymore. I pulled over to the side of the road to wait for her to catch up. As I turned my engine off and looked around, I happened to spy a movement on the other side of the road. My eyes caught sight of a black bear and I froze as I tried to recall every piece of advice I had ever read about what to do when within the vicinity of a bear. Should I stay put? Or start the engine and take off and risk it chasing me? They say that bears are surprisingly nimble for their size and can get up to 35mph. I knew that it would take my fully loaded GS at least a couple of minutes to get up to that. After a few minutes of indecision, I snapped the ignition off and took off down the street like my life depended on it and didn’t stop until I came to civilization – or what passed for it up in these parts anyway.

Thankfully the bear had had other things to do and hadn’t given chase. I recall seeing a couple out for a walk about 50 paces from the bear and wondered to myself if they were all quite mad up in these parts. Perhaps bears hanging around the town outskirts was such a normal phenomenon that they’d just walk past it and possibly tip their hats to it as it grunted back.

As these thoughts passed through my head, Sarah pulled up beside me laughing and asking me why I hadn’t pulled over earlier. As I pulled my helmet off, a little irritated, she showed me a picture on her camera. Apparently someone had spray painted over the “Welcome to Dease Lake” sign to make it read “Welcome to Dease Nuts”. It has amused Sarah enough that she had turned around to go take a picture, and I believe she was giggling about it for days later.

I told her my bear story and suggested that we might want to camp in a more populated part of town.

We stopped at a restaurant to eat where we met a woman called Frida. She belonged to a First Nation tribe and co-incidentally also used to ride an F650 GS. It was her birthday and she invited us to meet her later at a nearby pub for drinks. She said that the food there was good too.

Since the restaurant we had sat down in looked to be a little on the expensive side, we shamelessly got up and left and went in search of the pub she had menti0ned. She had been right about the food – we ordered some salmon and rice. It turns out the salmon had been caught fresh from the neighboring river and it was the tastiest fish I had ever eaten. Hunger might have added to some of the taste, no doubt, but I realized now that  previously frozen salmon from the neighborhood grocery store would never quite satisfy me.

Frida turned out to be a lovely person – intelligent and knowledgeable, and she told us a great deal about the town and its politics. We spent a good couple of hours talking before calling it a night.

We asked Frida if it would be okay for us to camp on the police station lawn. There had been nobody inside for us to ask permission from. She said that it probably wouldn’t be a problem, which is all we needed to hear.

We were really tired by now and decided to just pitch Sarah’s tent and go to sleep.

I slept well that night.

THE END OF THE CASSIAR

Day6: 37N, Yukon Border, Gold Nugget, 97W (Alaskan Highway), Teslin, Whitehourse (Beezkneez Backpackers)

We woke up the next morning to the sound of pouring rain – not the most pleasant sound to hear from the inside of a tent. I walked to the gas station across the street and used their bathroom for a good long time to clean up and look somewhat presentable. A bit of a losing battle because this marks the point where we started looking permanently bedraggled, unclean and unwashed. I hadn’t changed my clothes in at least a week and the reek was beginning to settle in. It was so much a part of the adventure though that at some point I stopped fighting it. In a way, it felt like my own little rebellion against society and the images of perfectly made up women we get bombarded with day after day. I stank, I hadn’t washed in days, I was muddy and filthy, but I felt glorious and was having the time of my life!

I scrounged for something edible in the store attached to the gas station and sadly settled for a couple of Power Bars and trail mix. Sarah and I ate while loading up the bikes and gearing up in the drizzling rain. A police car pulled in just then and the cop got out and walked towards us. We weren’t in any shape to make a run for it though, so we just stood there with sheepish expressions. He was rather pleasant though, in spite of finding out that we had camped on his lawn without permission.

We did the final unpaved sections of the Cassiar in pouring down rain and got the bikes well and truly dirty for the first time. I was a bit apprehensive about this stretch because of my complete lack of experience in dirt but it was pretty easy and we went a good 60-70mph clip.

In a few hours we found ourselves crossing over from British Columbia into the Yukon.

The Yukon! We were finally here. We were still too tired to truly exult but my word we had ridden our bikes from Seattle to the mighty Yukon!

Alaska

Prologue
Heading North
Hyder, Alaska
The Cassiar Highway
The Alaskan Highway
The Glenn Highway
Anchorage
The Seward Highway
The Richardson Highway
Stopping in Slana

Puget Sound Safety Adventure Camp

Someone mentioned that I was on the Puget Sound Safety Adventure Camp webpage and sure enough I am. Makes me feel all mushy looking at the photos and seeing the guys I hung out with there. I’m still in touch with a couple of them. :)

Wish I had taken the class on the snowy day though. O.O That looks like quite something.

South Coast and Volcano Region, WA

Day 1: Towards Copalis Beach

Day 2: Astoria

Day 3: Towards St. Helen’s

Morton

Days travelled: 3
Miles covered: ~650 mi

The Palouse

Shall we call this the Motorcycling Adventure From Hell?

Let’s backtrack though to the beginning, especially to the part where was I was having jitters about riding again after a two week break. I was worried then that I was riding like a n00b all over again, and I stubbornly decided to follow through on my Palouse plans to prove myself wrong. Matter of fact, what I did was prove myself right in a big way.

The one thing that I realize now is that riding a bike isn’t about just planting your rear end on the seat, taking off, and steering. What it is is an intricate process, where every muscle in your body is participating and moving in response to stimuli from your environment, without your mind actually spelling out the actions required. When you go 80 mph with cross winds trying to blow you into a semi, your body sub-consciously hugs the machine close, so that you are one with the machine. When you are racing through the twisties at 5400 ft with an asshole in an F350 tailgating you, your mind learns to block our aforementioned asshole, and lets your past experience effortlessly guide you through the twists and turns without so much as breaking a sweat. When you need to make a sharp right-hand turn into a gas station, you subconsciously know when to slow down, how much to slow down, turn your head, lean into the turn, roll and smoothly pull up near the gas pump, without actually registering that you are performing several very distinct actions. Hindsight is 20/20 though, and I realized how rusty just two weeks of not riding had made me, everytime I had to deal with every one of these situations in the past three days.

Day 1 – Ride To Lewiston

As planned, I started out at about 8AM on Saturday morning. I had planned my route the previous evening, and it was roughly to be:
Leave Bellevue and get on I-90E
I-90E past Ellensburg to Vantage
26E to Othello
17S to junction with 260E
260E past Kahlotus to junction with 261E
261E to Starbuck (Destination Highway)
12E past Pomeroy to Clarkston and finally Lewiston in Idaho

Everything went well in the beginning. I spent what seemed like a lifetime on I-90, stopped briefly at Cle Elum for breakfast, and then continued past Ellensburg and Vantage. It was still early morning, so traffic was relatively light and within a couple of hours I was nearing my halfway point. When I got to Othello was when the horror of the journey began. I was a bit tired and decided to stop at an A&W for lunch. As I waited in the left turn lane for traffic to go past before turning left, I started feeling the bike slip away from me. Mind that I had recently had the bike raised and still wasn’t used to the new height. I could have either tried to stop it falling and pulled it back up, risking injury to several back muscles and possibly failing anyway, or to just let it go. I did the latter, but instead of letting it down gently, it slammed down. The frame sliders on the bike might have had something to do with my laziness, but this time they failed to work. When I got the bike back up (with the help of another girl who was stopped behind me) I realized that the tip of my gear shifter had completely snapped off. I think I was in complete shock and just stood there looking at it for a few minutes in a “I cannot believe I just let this happen.” kind of way. I pushed my bike into the parking lot and tried going through my options.

I called a friend to ask him what I could do and whether I should just go back home. He suggested I continue on my way and just shift gears by turning my foot inward toward the shifter (thankfully the entire shifter wasn’t broken – just the tip with the rubber grommet on it). He suggested I ride around a block and try it. Apparently this is a common mishap on the track and people just deal with it. A workaround that some racers use was to drill a hole through the tip of the shifter and run a bolt through it.

I decided to go get lunch and calm down, hoping things would make more sense after I wasn’t dizzy with hunger. After lunch, I tried riding it to the gas station and shifting the hard way, and it was like I thought it would be – pretty unnatural and difficult! I didn’t know if I could go any distance in either direction of my journey while riding that way. Oh, and I realized that the tip of my clutch lever had also broken off. Damn aluminium!! I filled up the tank, and walked back to the Scene Of The Crash to see something shiny still lying in the left turn lane. As expected, it was the broken end of the lever. Miraculously no one has run over it in the past half hour.

As luck would have it, someone had informed the local police about the incident, and a cop car pulled over next to me as I walked back to my bike. The cop asked me if I was okay, and whether anybody had hit me and made me crash. Nope, just my own stupidity. I asked him if he knew anyone in the area that could fix the lever, and he said he’d find out. He asked for my id and then started making some calls on his car radio(?). Finally, he hung up and told me of an auto mechanic called Doug and gave me directions to his shop. Nice cop!! I’ll never make donut jokes again!

I found the mechanic without any difficulty. He turned out to be this really sweet guy, covered with grease thereby increasing my confidence in him. He confided that he owned an old Goldwing although he didn’t get to ride it much. He rolled my bike into his shop (Doug’s Pit Stop, I later found out), and when I explained what I needed done, understood immediately. He drilled a hole through the shifter, found a bolt that was the perfect size, threaded it, wound it through the hole and sealed it with LocTite. He even took the rubber grommet off of the old shifter and slipped it onto the bolt! When he was done, it looked good as new! :) He said he couldn’t really do much with the broken clutch. I suggested that maybe we could try superglueing it back and then wrapping it with layers of duct tape. We tried this (with black tape) and it worked just fine!! While he was working, his kids were playing around the shop, and the little boy in particular kept talking to me, showing me his Superman backpack and telling me about his father’s motorcycle. Hehe… funny kid. I thought to myself about what a simple life they must lead, here in this one horse town in the middle of nowhere, that I just happened to chance through. And how charming and seemingly content they were. He charged me next to nothing for the excellent job he did too. Incidents like these are what make my motorcycling journeys so worthwhile. It’s a pity I had to meet these nice people because of my absurd idiocy from earlier on, but perhaps it was meant to be?

I left Othello with many good feelings. What I had thought to be a crippling first blow to my plans, was fixed in a matter of merely an hour, thanks to the kindness of a few good people in this “hick town” as what most of us snobs from the cities would call it.

From here on, I made my way toward Idaho like I had planned. So, during most of my journeys, “the road is the destination”, but in this case it turned out to be a destination that continued FOREVER. What I had envisioned when I had planned this journey was “rolling hills”, “a vast prairie” and “the endless greenery of the Palouse”. What I got was miles upon never ending miles of dry, arid desert, passing through brief little ghost towns to break the monotony. Even passing through two Destination Highways did nothing to make the road cheerier. Yes, the highways were wonderful with many twisties and the like, but it was stiflingly hot (a near constant 100 degrees throughout), I could barely breathe through the heat, I was low on water, and I was the only person on the road, which made me the tiniest bit paranoid after my unfortunate episode in Othello. Oh, and I kept thinking of horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Devil’s Rejects and imagining a madman with a chainsaw standing in the middle of the road around the next turn. When they say that deserts drive people nuts, they’re really not kidding.

I stopped briefly in Starbuck and went to the only cafe (no pun intended whatsover) I saw, to rest a little and get something to drink. The couple that ran it were surly and brusque. When I tried to make conversation with the man, he started talking about the forest fire that had been going on, and how the government was doing nothing to stop it, letting people’s properties go up in smoke. That was one angry man. Not loud, yelling angry, but quiet, festering angry, in the manner of someone who has a Grudge against life, and if he was one small man against the government, and couldn’t do anything to change anything, by gum, he was going to be angry and make sure every one of his customers knew it. I was glad to see the last of that dismal place, and made a mental note to ride around it on my return journey.

The rest of the ride toward Lewiston was more plod, plod, plod, and mile upon mile of dried, dead grass, and a haze of smoke enveloping the horizon. I longed for the occassional mountain lion or chainsaw wielding madman to wander into the path and break the monotony a little. Alas, to no avail, I was doomed to keep rolling, adding miles, and subtracting minutes, until I finally rolled into the twin towns of Clarkston and Lewiston.

The place I had a reservation at – the Guest House Inn – was a dumpy little motel at the edge of town. It had obviously seen better days, but had since fallen into ruin for lack of patrons. The receptionist – who seemed to be Irish – was nice enough, and she cleared up a spot near the entrance for my bike, where it would be in sight of the night clerk. I went up to my room and just lay on the queen size bed with my eyes closed, wishing the tiredness to fall away from me. Even taking my gear off seemed to take a world of effort. The room was super-chilled by a noisy, ancient air-conditioning unit. The window looked out onto railroad tracks, and the Snake River, and what looked like a refinery in the distance, on the other side of the river. Depressing as that may sound though, it was oddly pleasing, and I imagined myself to be living an adventure again.

After cleaning up a bit and changing, I headed down to the motel lobby, which had an Irish pub attached to it. A stay at a rundown motel warranted a drink in the bar, I reasoned. And the thought of a pint of cold Guinness cheered me up considerably. In keeping with the rest of the day though, the bartended announced that he didn’t stock Guinness because nobody drank it, would never stock it again, and he would change the name of the pub from Mulligan’s to a good American name if only the management would let him. I sighed, ordered a Fat Tire, drank it up quickly and left when the locals started thronging the place for the night’s karaoke. A spot of dinner at the Italian restaurant across the street (mmm…. pesto+pizza+Guinness), and I was ready for bed.

Day 2: Leaving Lewiston

When I woke up the next morning, I was still exhausted, and aching, and my body was crying for more sleep and rest, after the 8 hour ride of the previous day. I got breakfast (waffles that you had to make yourself, and some bad coffee), and checked out. I had originally planned to do a bunch of Destination Highway roads on the Washington side, like the ones from Pataha-Pullman, and Pullman-Rockford, not to mention the Spiral Highway in Idaho, and go south toward Walla Walla at the end of the day. I tried finding the Old Spiral Highway on the map, which showed some vague squiggles instead of a concrete path in the general direction of WA-12. What I did successfully accomplish was to get completely lost in what seemed like the increasingly hideous ghost town that was Clarkston. When I finally hit upon what I thought was the right way, I was conscious of a bad smell, not unlike human shit. My hunch was dead on, as within a few minutes I passed a Solid Waste Disposal Facility. What an excellent way to start a day of riding! A few more wrong turns later, I ended up on 12E. I was originally going to end up on this highway after having done a few runs of the Spiral Highway, but by this time I was so tired and annoyed that I just said screw it, and continued onward. What’s worse is, I didn’t have the energy to do any of the rides I had originally wanted to do. Once again, it was another day of 100+ degrees, not a soul on the road, scenery consisting of vast empty plains of dead, dried grass, and the roads weren’t even rated that highly in the book. What I did do was to just keep riding in the general direction of Walla Walla.

By the time I reached Dayton, the air was heavy and murky in the distance, and I could smell the smoke from the forest fire. I stopped at a rest stop and got a bottled frappuchino, and heard people talking about the fire. Apparently a high alert or something of the nature had been issued, on account of the fire, the high temperatures, and unstable climate conditions. Glad that I was riding away from the fire, I set off again. The ride to Walla Walla was pretty uneventful, but you probably already guessed that. I reached the motel absurdly early for what was supposed to have been a full day of riding. They let me check in, so I did, and went to sleep. I slept all afternoon.

This motel was even dumpier than the previous one, although you wouldn’t know it if you looked at their website, which was all I had to go on when I had made reservations. It was one of those places where you can park your vechicle outside your room. Unfortunately, it was also one of those places where the bathtub looked like it had inhabitants, the shower curtain stank, the water kept running so that you’d have to deal with the sound after having turned off the noisy air-conditioning, and the traffic sounds from the neighboring highway are loud and clear well into the night. In other words, quite charming. I woke up at about 5:30 PM. Too late to do any wine tasting like I had originally planned. I decided to ride to the downtown area anyway just to check it out, but it seemed like even the ghosts had taken the evening off. I managed to find one cafe with any sign of habitation, and settled down into a comfortable couch with a coffee, to plan my escape route back home the next day.

I decided that I’d probably die of old age before getting home, if I went back the way I had come, and I had to go down some interesting roads to salvage this weekend. I-90W was definitely out. I figured I could go to bed early, and leave at about 7:00AM to get on the road to Pasco via 12W, which then went on to Yakima. There were some good rides in the Yakima region, and depending on my state of mind by the time I got there, I could decide which ones I wanted to do. There was one especially from Naches to Packwood which was highly recommended by the book – great engineering, good scenery, lots of twisties, remoteness, character, all the good stuff. From there, I could follow 123N to Enumclaw, take 169N to Renton, and finally good old 405N to Bellevue. In theory anyway, it sounded do-able.

I left the cafe with a plan in mind and decided to go scavenging for food. Some 10 year olds on bicycles passed by when I was unchaining my jacket from my bike, and an interchange followed:

One Kid: Hey, is that your crotch-rocket?
Self: Yup.
Aforementioned Kid: That’s bad-ass!
Another kid, not to be confused with aforementioned kid: No, it’s not!

Huh, he was just jealous.

Dinner turned out to be delicious takeout from McDonalds. Figuring I had reached the lowest point possible, I showered and watched some TV, just to re-assure myself that I wasn’t missing anything after having stopped watching it a year ago. American TV was still exactly as bad as I remembered. I did stumble upon Ella Enchanted, and just had to watch the whole thing through. After that, it took me a long time to fall asleep, although I did wake up at about 5 in the morning when I heard my bike make the sound it makes when someone “accidentally” touches it, displeasing my newly acquired Gorilla alarm, and giving a warning beep. Swearing under my breath, I got up and took a peek through the window to see my next door neighbor scrambling into his truck and driving off. Hmmm…?

I managed to fall asleep again, only to wake up at numerous intervals in the night by the sound of his truck revving and just running the engine for no apparent reason. You meet the strangest people in cheap motels.

I returned the favor in the morning when I left at 7:30 and let my bike’s engine run for a while. Just to warm it up before I got on the road, you know.

The journey to Pasco was….. exactly like the rest of my journey had been. I broke several speed limits and didn’t get caught, while other poor blokes got pulled over by various sheriffs from assorted counties. From thereon to Yakima, and then to Naches, and along the Destination Highway that was supposed to make it all better. Which it did, in a manner of speaking. It was much, much cooler because of the shade, the speed limit of 50 was most annoying and hence disregarded, but it seemed like the whole world and his uncle had decided to ride the route that day too, and I was constantly stuck in traffic. The ride up 169N was a bit disconcerting, to say the least, especially the steep, high, unbanked bits triggering off my severe vertigo, where one part of my brain was going, “Don’t look! Just don’t look! It’s high!” and another part was offering the sane counterpoint of, “You have to look! If you don’t look, you will go over, you know.”

And do you know that you have absolutely no idea what speed you are going when riding through a dark tunnel?

To cut an extremely long story short, I made it to Enumclaw, then to Renton, and then back home. Perhaps I should have gone north from Yakima, hit I-90 and then gone home. I hadn’t counted on going so slow on some of the roads I took, what with the traffic and the idiotic speed limits. But I did find some nice routes for a future date when I wouldn’t be so tired and suffering from just-want-to-get-home-itis.

Total Miles: ~700 mi

Hood Canal

The Cascade Loop

DAY 1 – SOUTH OF THE CASCADES

The river outside Leavenworth.

Teanaway to Peshastin – a great ride!

I stayed at the Haus Rohrbach in Leavenworth.

The view was magnificent!

Downtown Leavenworth

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DAY 2 – EAST WASHINGTON

Leavenworth to Coulee City

Coulee City to Chelan

Chelan to Winthrop

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DAY 3 – THE OKANOGANS

Winthrop to Oroville and back

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DAY 4 – THE NORTH CASCADES AND WHIDBEY ISLAND

Winthrop to Rockport

Rockport to Oak Harbor to Langley

The ferry home…

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Miles covered: ~880 mi

Destination Highways ridden: 6

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Suspension upgrade

Just got off the phone with Dave Alexander from Fluid Suspension Science and he gave me a quote for upgrading the SV’s suspension.

Rear
$100 – 2005 GSXR 750 shock (a used one that he has from a crashed race bike, this seems like a good deal)
$110 – new spring for the shock (he said that even a brand new shock would need to be re-sprung for my light weight)

Front
$170 – Cartridge emulator (not sure what brand)
$328.58 – All the front end work (I guess this involves installing the emulators, messing with the spring, fork seals etc.)

I already have Progressive springs in there, which he said should be okay although they feel stiffer than the stock springs.

He has a good reputation in the biz, so I agreed to get it done as soon as I could get the bike in. He works out of Renton and says that he can get it done in a day, although he needs to order the spring for the shock which could take some time.

$700… erk! This had better be worth it.

(Of course, after this is done, I’m going to get greedy and want a new exhaust and a custom seat and a nicer windshield…)

Bikes from the past