Great Roads: The Salmon Glacier
A short ride out of Stewart and you encounter one of the most jaw dropping landscapes the Province of British Columbia has to offer – the Salmon Glacier. Undoubtably, this is a destination worthy of member of OneWheelDrive.Net’s Great Roads collection.
Hard and Soft – Adventure Riding BC’s Sunshine Coast
B.C.’s Sunshine coast is no stranger to riders, so how to spice things up. Great food, great accommodations, a good measure of adventure, and a motorcycling celebrity know for his work on Race to Dakar and Long Way Round. No, not Charley or that other guy.
Arctic Adventure Video: The Dempster Part 2
In the final video of the Arctic Adventure online video series, the OutDrive.ca team reaches Inuvik, NWT. A ride that has carried us from Vancouver, BC to our destination 200km north of the Arctic Circle. Watch for our upcoming feature download and DVD exploring the Dempster Highway in detail.
Arctic Adventure Video: The Dempster Part 1
The OutDrive.ca team has made it to the Dempster, Canada only all season highway to cross the Arctic Circle, on the second to last leg of the Arctic Adventure video series.
Arctic Adventure Video: Telegraph Creek
The road to Telegraph Creek is one of British Columbia’s greatest roads, jaw dropping scenery, a hint of danger and a uncertain future. To steal a phrase every visit is potentially a last chance to see this great destination. So the http://OutDrive.ca team takes a two day detour on our way to the Western Canadian Arctic.
Arctic Adventure Video: Bugs in the System
This episode we’re dealing with some bugs as http://OutDrive.ca hit the road, riding from Vancouver, BC to Inuvik, NWT some 200kms North of the Arctic Circle.
Epilogue – Rush Hour
Crawling under the towering cables of Lion’s Gate Bridge, we’re rolling into Vancouver on the final leg of our return from the Arctic and our welcome is an automotive slap in the face. Traffic is ornery, pushy, and demonstrating the road selfishness we’ve not had to deal with for 10,000 kilometers. Mainly because for a major portion of that distance there was no traffic…
The Salmon Glacier
Stewart, B.C. – We are overlooking the Salmon Glacier, on a road that curls up the ridges overtop of the great flowing track of ice driven forward by its own weight. In the sun it dazzles the eye, gliding imperceptibly around a corner, with race stripes of medial moraine rock debris giving it black curves like a remnant alien roadway from the last ice age.
Top of the World
Awestruck by views so broad, so expansive, that the landscape and sky can barely contain them, the Top of the World out of Dawson, YT is one of the few highways we’ve encountered that truly, fully and completely lives up to its name.
Dempster Resplendent
Is this even the same road? I know the sign fading into our rearview mirrors says “Welcome to Inuvik”, but the Dempster Highway is transformed. Four days ago the infamously challenging adventure highway tossed us around like Cerberus using three souls as chew toys, today what was once the Mud-Beast is now asleep in the sun.
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.
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 [...]
Irrational Adoration: Best Western and Harley-Davidson Press Tour
I throw the Harley-Davidson Sportster Nightster into the corner, hard and fast enough that it wobbles on Quebec’s pavement chop. This will pass, but sometimes a little active intervention helps – we throttle on out of the apex to a scrape of the peg. A long straight and the little Sportster’s needle brushes 160kph, this Harley-Davidson/Best Western press tour hasn’t been going to plan, but thundering down the straight and setting up for the next corner I can’t help but crack a smile.
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 [...]
