Dempster Highway – The Mud-Beast Bares its Fangs
So you want to motorcycle the Dempster Highway to Inuvik, NWT? If you we’re smart you’d wait for a couple of nice dry days, but we never claimed to be smart. We head out onto the fabled road in the rain to experience its worst as we ride beyond the Arctic Circle…
Stark Places – The Dempster Highway
By the term “highway”, don’t confuse the Dempster with the paved varicosities that strangle our modern world. A product of its environment this is a filament of the south sent out like an infection, and the land does its best to fight it off.
Challenges
On a good day the road from Dease Lake to Telegraph Creek, BC is an ethereal dirt cavort through scenery composed of precipitous canyons sheered into lava by erosive rivers. Add one night of rain and it goes from being one the world’s greatest driveways to one of the most terrifying.
Off Course
We’re off course, and we don’t need a map or GPS to tell us so. We’re headed south-west rather than north-west thanks to a wrong turn off of the Blackwater Forest Service Road and onto Batnuni, above the sky is darkening and the sun diminished to a glowing red-orange ember. Below me the BMW F800GS [...]
Departures
With a personal riding history is littered with a disturbing pattern of rough departures, the OWD team heads north for the Arctic Circle, after a very slow start.
Learning from the New Rider
How quickly do we forget what it’s like to be a new rider? The accumulation of experience can eventually drown out the novelty of riding and wonder of what a motorcycle can do and represent. We kick ourselves for not throwing a knee down in the corner, we twiddle suspension settings looking to eke out [...]
Packing Light – The Best Gear for Adventure Part II
Back-country enthusiast, lifetime rider, mountaineer, hiker, and outdoor retailer, Jayson Faulkner, offers advice to save wayward adventure motorcyclists from being buried under an avalanche… of their own gear! Here’s how to travel light without forgoing comfort be it for a weekend or for months on the road. This week the evil that is cooking.
Packing Light – The Best Gear for Adventure!
Back-country enthusiast, lifetime rider, mountaineer, hiker, and outdoor retailer, Jayson Faulkner, offers advice to save wayward adventure motorcyclists from being buried under an avalanche… of their own gear! Here’s how to travel light without forgoing comfort be it for a weekend or for months on the road.
Ambassadorial Exercise in Dirt Riding
A Globe and Mail article on the health benefits of Dirt Riding leads to a thread of comments underlying the prejudices of self-propelled trail users against responsible motorcyclists. We think the solution may start with being better ambassadors while on our workouts.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – A Parting of Ways
Clear, the morning starts at freezing and is slow to warm, as I ride into the jagged boundary between Alberta and British Columbia. The ying to Newfoundland’s aged, rounded and spare yang, the Rockies complete Canada’s parenthesis of spectacle. Climbing the 93 into gray skies we reach Continental divide, the split of North America’s lopsided [...]
Coping with Ice
It’s the first big spring ride and you’ve been out on your middle-weight adventure bike for a few days. Now after a hard night in your 4-star tent you’ve awoken to snow and ice. Catastrophe? Well, no. Let’s say we learned a bit about riding on unexpectedly icy during our F800GS test and video shoot, [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Alberta
It’s the West, home’s backyard, and Alberta feels like an old friend. The border between provinces continues to be startlingly accurate. Behind me is the wide sky and roll of the prairies, ahead the dinosaurs, oil and ranches, the Rockies, British Columbia and finally home.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Finding Forget
The sign for Saskatchewan is a harbinger of prosperity. Pump-jacks line the roadside fellating like 50’s cartoon mosquitoes pulling congealed crude from the earth. David & David’s “Welcome to Boomtown” drifts through my mind. If there is a place to let your mind roam while riding, this is it, a wide openness painted in blue [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Holland… Manitoba
Pickups charge down side-roads towards the highway, plumes of silica fog hanging in their wake. They are driven with the impunity of those who know they will never come across an unexpected corner. Those drivers are right. Welcome to the prairies. The gentle rolling wave of the prairies is in full effect now. Pointed toward [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Finding the North Star
My original plan was to push through Winnipeg, but my blind servitude to the Garmin Zumo GPS carries me into the downtown core. Then architecture grabbed me, the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank, the Via Rail station. A rail hub and the former central point of the fur trade Winnipeg has maintained a sense [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Jennifer and Joezs Dream
Just for reference, Ontario is large enough that when the provincial government decided to protect 222,000 square kilometers (56 million acres) of boreal forest from development in July of 2008, comparisons were drawn. For example, 222,000 square kilometers is equal to the entirety of the U.S.’s road-less areas, half the size of Texas, or the [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Signs of Travel
That’s the last Inukshuk, Highway 17 has been lined with them the past two days. These human forms, some classic in design and others more avant-garde, have been my constant companions as I cross Ontario. Whenever I’ve been feeling a bit low I glance up the highway’s stony embankments, and there is an Inukshuk. My [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Marathon
Sometimes a ride is just a ride, there’s no deeper meaning or context to be provided. These are the rides magazines never show you, the hard slogs. Magazines are all about peak experiences, not the troughs. Leaving Sault Ste. Marie, Highway 17 hasn’t been what I expected. I was told to brace for mind numbing [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – The Man in the High Castle
Mattawa, Ontario – At the Valois Restaurant and Motel, in Mattawa Ontario, churchgoers have flowed in, nearly filling the restaurant. Worship done they sit at tables craving cold meats on over-processed bread, served with a side of fries and consumed with a dash of Sunday morning righteousness. They are looking askance at the stranger in [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Community
Heading out of Trois-Rivieres, the Ducati Multistrada and I arc slightly south and skirt the edges of Montreal. The morning starts with something novel and surprising for a wet-coaster like myself, a new type of rain. I thought I’d seen it all, but Quebec serves up something new – a cool, penetrating drizzle. I’m not [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – On the Run
On the back roads of New Brunswick, the fall colours are gathering; greens transforming to oranges, yellows and golds. They would make a tremendous backdrop, except right now they’re making a tremendous blur. The road quality is horrendous; we’re diving between potholes, ruts, wallows and severe frost heaves that compress the rear suspension and the [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Transitions
Nova Scotia is built for motorcycle touring. I’m sure of it, provided you hit the right speed to skim over the roads of the Sunrise Trail, which run from smooth to brutally potholed. They are gently winding and combined with late fall light and a warm day the ride makes for motorcycling satisfaction.
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Meet the Smallwood
Under pallid florescent light and surrounded by clinical décor, people pace; sallow, tired, arms folded and tense. In the corner a man braced against the wall rocks to-and-fro. Elsewhere, another sits on a metal bench, staring blankly forward at nothingness, his legs in a sewing machine jiggle. At a table a woman works through a [...]
Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – The Irish Loop
This is the Newfoundland you’ve seen on every postcard ever sent, craggy red rock coasts, crashing blue waves, white foam, and seabirds mid-glide…
