Really it’s more like Santa Fe, NM to Anchorage, AK to Fairbanks, AK to Deadhorse, AK, to D2D, to Inuvik, back home to Santa Fe: I really want to cross the Arctic Circle twice in two weeks, just because I can. (if you count up and back its four times, hum.) Its really only 40 days of riding, only 40… did really just say “only” ha.
I started this to keep track of everything that I was doing to get ready for this trip, because I’m just a tad excited to be able to be able to go on this journey. The funny thing is that I never really appreciated the splendor of Alaska when I was growing up there. It wasn’t until I had been in New Mexico for some time that I realized just how different it had been for me living up there. Yeah, there was all kinds of things I guess I missed out on, like TV shows, or large malls or Disney land road trips. But, how many people have gotten to catch a 150 pound halibut as an 11 year old? I do wish I had found motorcycles when I was much younger. I’ve covered a lot of ground on them though in the past 11 years.
Background: I guess I’ll start with some background as to how this trip came to be, since that is the section heading. I’ve never done any trips like this. I started riding in Sept of 2005 Labor Day weekend to be exact, I took an MSF class. I had never ridden a motorcycle I was intrigued by them and thought they looked like fun and something that I would like. It was the start of an obsession; I bought a brand new bike that afternoon and never looked back. At one point in 2006 it looking like I might be part of a RIF so I got to thinking about riding around the US for a few months, while looking for a new place to live. I didn’t get laid off so the longest trip I’ve ever done was some long weekends where I covered 3,000 miles or so in a few days. This is going to be the first time I’ve camped off the bike for more than 1 night, too. Lots of things to learn, so far it’s been great fun reading up on things. I also know from a past life with horses that you can’t become good at things just from reading up on them. It doesn’t hurt to have some book knowledge but that doesn’t really cut it when you are out in the middle of nowhere trying to figure things out.
This trip like a few of my other really Epic adventures I place the “blame” on others for coming up with the bad ideas. I’m not going to be held responsible for going along with or even running with the bad idea. Otherwise, how would I end up having so many great stories? Okay. Back to how this trip came to be, I’m going to “blame” the whole thing on Jaime. Below is a of us with a couple of our racing buddies starting from back to front Lance, Myself, Scott, and Jaime at our SMRI 2015 Awards Banquet. I met Jaime two years ago when she decided she wanted to start racing. I spent a lot of time working with her last summer working on getting her to go faster and drop time at the track. So we’ve gotten to be pretty good friends. She, Lance and I went to Miller last year to race with the club there. Road trips with racing buddies are always a great time! It was a shame that Scott had to drop out of the trip at the last minute. You’ll notice I get side tracked easily. I usually do make my way back to the original train of thought, I promise. Jaime has done long trips a number of times and she has camped out and she also has been riding much longer than I have. So it’ll be nice to have her along on this trip. At least that’s what she tells me, right before she tells me that I have to help her go faster on the race track. Lol. Or that I have to show her how to put new farkles on her new Tiger. We each have things that we’re good at. Between us, we can figure out things. I say that now…
Once Jaime learned that I was originally from Alaska, she told me that she had always wanted to do a road trip on a bike up there. It was the topic of many talks we had at the track and the reason I think that we got to know each other.
She toured around the Pacific North West a few years ago on her 2012 Tiger, with the original intent to go to Alaska but and had to come back to New Mexico I’m still not clear as to what happened. I know that she has diabetes, with that she has a number related the health issues that go along with it, like RA, she also had to have disc in her neck fused last year, she’s has neuropathy issues, she has an insulin pump that she rides with, there have been a few times that I’ve had to ask her to check her blood sugar while we are at the track, as she wasn’t acting like herself. She has been through all kinds of treatments; I don’t think I would even dream of doing some of the things she does just so she can keep riding, like injections into her eyes… ick! Never. Not to mention she on some really strict anti-inflammatory diet. I predict that I’ll be dropping some major weight on this trip… Yippee! (I’ve already been working on that) Not to mention she’s older than I am. Yet she still is riding with those health issues, and the challenges that come with a spouse and two kids. I’d say that she’s an amazing woman. One that I’m happy to call my friend, as another friend of mine has said many times… I’ve gotten to do so many really awesome things, meet so many people, and have great adventures, why? …. “Because Motorcycles”
In 2014 I flew home (to Anchorage) to do a fly and ride with my BFF (Lori) from high school. We spent 4 days riding the Denali Hwy and camping. After I came back from that trip and talked about the fun we had. Jaime was more determined that she had to do the trip up there and it had to happen in the next few years, as her health wasn’t getting better and she is worried that she might not be able to do the trip if she waits much longer. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I’m pretty much up for anything to do with two wheels. So she asked me if I might consider doing part of the trip with her.
After my short ride around Alaska I was game for doing a ride up there. Now not long after I got back from my trip I had a pretty nasty crash on the track where I cracked some ribs, a broke a couple bones in my right ankle, and just about ripped my right thumb off my hand, along with some great bruises the cherry on top was a nice concussion. I had to have surgery on the hand to reattach the ligaments to make my thumb work again, and then just about when the hand was healed I got the pleasure of spending a week in the hospital with a ruptured disk in my neck. Talk about agony! It took a week just to get the pain under enough control so I could lay flat for the MRI. I had to have surgery on my neck to fuse two vertebras in order to fix the ruptured disc in my neck. Thanks to nerve damage from that, I still can’t really feel three fingers on my left hand.
After that crash and a 9 month recovery from all of that I was left wondering how much time I’ve got left to really do all the fun things I really want to do in life. It got me thinking about doing all the really epic trips I have thought about doing. Like a trip riding to Alaska. So now I’ve committed myself to this trip. There was no half way about it. I knew that there was no way I could do it with the street bike I had that time. Since, it wasn’t comfortable after the disk fusion (and at times it was downright painful) for me to ride more than a hundred miles, so I went out and bought a bike just for this trip. Not really, just for this trip, but it was a great excuse to buy the bike I had been lusting after for a couple of years now. Not to mention perfect timing, since Triumph came out with an improved version that took care of a number things I was going to have to modify if I had bought it a year earlier.
Even though the trip was months away, I figured winter was a great time to start working things out. I’m planner of sorts; I don’t like to work out the minor details, just the big picture.
However, I figure for this trip it’s a long time to be on the road, it’s a great number of miles to cover, especially alone or with two women who are okay at working on their bikes. Originally I thought I would be doing most of the trip on my own. Jaime and I had started out planning this together, but she and I both had different things we want the trip to be about. It looked like we will meet up in a couple spots rides some miles together and then go our separate ways.
Well, with life being what it is, àa messy clusterf*ck, which never goes as you think it is. Jaime ended up with a few family problems now get in the way of her plans. Her mother who’s been suffering from Alzheimer’s had a stroke around the end of March. So she moved her home to let spend her last days with family. Her last days ended up being just over a month. Taking care of a dying family member who is at home is a lot of stress. I ended up having to take her bike, and ride it so that she could get enough miles on it to get the first service done. (It’s rough having to ride someone else’s brand new bike.) She’s been so preoccupied with family that she’s not had any time to prepare for the trip. Luckily she didn’t need to go out and buy all kinds of new stuff like I did.
Jaime’s Tiger, on its break in run up to Antonito, CO. Yes, that’s snow in the background; it was rather chilly in the passes over 9,000 feet. In spite of the cold and the less than clean roads it was a great ride. I of course think my bike is prettier than hers. But don’t let her know I said that.
With everything going on Jaime has pretty much now decided that she is just tag along with me. I’m okay with that; bedsides, it’s making my mom feel better. J That way I’m not all by my poor lil’ self, I mean after all, I’m just a helpless little girl… Sigh. Oh Mom. I was actually looking forward to some alone time to do some thinking about my life. pft. On the other hand, maybe, I should do too much of that… LOL. Things really are just fine the way they are. I couldn’t ask for things to be better, unless of course someone wants to leave me a few million. I’ll take it, then I could do some more racing at different tracks. Or say I find some really hot rich boyfriend along the way, who wants to go with me to the tracks… pft…
I’m going to see about getting Jaime to join ADV so she can post pictures up as we go along, she’s a photographer, I’m definitely not one, I do like to snap pictures with my phone, but I don’t even own a camera anymore. I’m not count my old 35mm film Minolta camera that I bought after college, which is collecting dusk in a closet. Now I’ve met the two main players, there is Lori. She is supposed to join Jaime and I in Fairbanks. Lori is going to ride from Fairbanks to Deadhorse and back with us and then over to D2D with us. She’s one of my best friends from high school in Alaska. She is also likely the reason I became interested in motorcycles. She started to ride when we were in high school; she stopped and started riding a few times over the years. She started back again the last time when I dragged her kicking and screaming out to ride dirt bikes…. You can see that she hated every second of it.
So much so that went out a bought a small bike that similar to that TTR in the truck bed. (XT250). She rode that when we camped along the Denali highway in June 2014. Our hunt for firewood, cuz after living in NM for 20 years I’m no longer able to take the cold and I was freezing. We still had two more nights of camping left, so finding more wood for a fire at night was critical, as you can see we found a stash to haul back to the campsite. She played firewood Tetris for about an hour before I got to snap this picture… We had wood stuffed in everything that we could. 
I’ll have ya know that wood stayed in place for the 30 mile ride back to the campsite.
Preparation:
Route Planning: So I used Furkot to plan out a route. Than imported it to Google Maps to get this:https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?…0&authuser=0&mid=1ehoHH1eiTFBC2P25Qthc7l3IQkM
Total Distance for this route is 11,170 miles with 230 hours of riding. Daily Ave: 287 miles riding 6 hours a day.
The only thing I can say for certain is that it’s a sure bet that we won’t stick to the daily mileage maybe not even the route, but it at least was a place to start. I’m kind of figuring on the earlier days being much longer and higher mileage days, especially while we are in the US. Then we’ll likely slow it down and do more of a stop and smell the roses kind of ride. She and I both have reasons though to be in Anchorage before June 3rd. You can see that this schedule doesn’t let us do that. I have another map that does, roughly the same but we cut out Prince Rupert and ride bit more each day. With the Delorme, it’ll be easy enough for those who want to track us along the way. Jaime has my SPOT3 so her family is going to be tracking her too.
Bikes: à We both picked up brand new 2016 Triumph Tiger XCAs. I got mine just before Thanksgiving. Jaime picked hers up toward the end of January, after she sold her 2012 Tiger. We’ve done a number of similar things, to our bikes. The only mods I’ve done to my bike for the trip are:
· H&B upper crash bars
· DSBP Raid Toolbox
· Laminar Lip windscreen
· 20 mm Fender riser
· Stash Box Lockable License Plate Storage Box By Twisted Throttle
· Headlight protector
· Wiring for electric Vest
· Fuze Block
o Hard wired in TomTom Rider 5
o Hard wired in Delorme Explorer
· 3.5 litre Jerry Flex fuel bladder (attached to side of top box-side toward me so it’s between the top box and the tail bag)
· Wolfman tail bag
· We both have Sena 20S comm systems
· Both bikes have the rear wheels converted over to Tubless by Woody’s Wheels Works.
Gear: à I basically had to start from scratch for this trip, dang it’s expensive to live like a hobo. I had some camping gear, but camping out of a truck is really different from camping off the bike. Also the gear that I had used when camping off my bike in the past wasn’t ideal for long trips. Or for cold, windy or wet weather, so there was some upgrading to be done there too. I have an Excel spreadsheet with everything listed out, (See This) if anyone is really curious. I’m still not sure if I’ve over or under packed at this point. I’ve been working on how to pack the bike for what seems like months…because it has been months. I like to plan, but I’m also really quick to deviate from my plans. Kind of like figuring out how to pack all the camping gear. I started with that in February, but haven’t finished with the final packing list yet. I’m more a big picture kind of planner… not a small detail planner.
It starts out like this…
Then gets sorted out to be more like this….
From top left to bottom right: Mess kit, sleeping bag, maps, towels, Jet boil pot, jet boil, pillow, sleeping pad, jet boil fuel (2), chair, Misc Bag(slime air pump, powerlet to usb, pen light, bug dope, tent repair kit, and para cord) bike lock, and hatchet. (Note: I’ve ditched all but two of those maps now. Decided I didn’t need all of them.) Total weight including the pannier = 34.6 pounds. It’s a bit heavier than I wanted. I’m still figuring out how to shuffle some of it around. The rest of it is almost as heavy, so I’m looking at more than 50lbs of gear from what I’ve weighed out so far. I haven’t weighed the work laptop or tools yet. The tools are the heaviest part, of course.
That’s just one of three, saddle bags…
Of course, it’s not going to stay that neat. The next question is do I really need the stuff that is in there? Does it all work like it should? Do I need different things from what is there? I haven’t even tested some of that stuff yet…. Yikes!!! This means I need to do some test camping.
So off to do some testing, but with it still being winter, I opt for some indoor test first before I move to the outdoor testing. I set the tent up in the living room with the sleeping pad and sleeping bag. It can’t be too bad; I fell asleep in the middle of the day playing around with it all. It might have helped that I was sick with, but I did sleep great for a few hours, until the cat woke me up wanting into the tent. The fear of her putting holes in it made me get up in a hurry. Next I wanted to do a test out doors to see how it all worked. Kind of a dry run, pack up the bike with everything I intend to take on the trip to see if I use it on a daily basis or not. Then reevaluate if I should take it with me. I had hoped that I could do that in Moab with my ADV Brewsday family, but I ended up having to work on Thursday and Friday. So it looks like I’m going to have to settle for an overnight trip some place closer to home.
This brings my story up to date; I’m planning on head into the Jemez, this weekend which is going to be much colder than going to Moab. Since I’ve committed myself to working for the race club for a few hours on Sat in addition to going into work for a few hours. I’m not going to leave until the afternoon. Jaime and Heather (whom you haven’t been introduced to yet) are going to meet at my place we are going to ride up to the Jemez and find a place to camp for the night. Should prove to be an interesting night, I plan to bring some hard cider along just to liven things up.