And we’re back. It’s been a couple of hard, but fantastic days.  Sorry about this, but it’s another long one.  When you’re 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle on motorcycles, there’s a lot to say…

Not really sure what this means, but someone is not happy with the Canadians.

I woke up on Day 9 feeling really, really tired. I mean exhausted to the core.  Not a good way to start.  I didn’t sleep well last night – probably just excitement about heading up the Haul Raod. Plus there’s been a bit of excited partying.  Plus I woke up an hour early.  You see, this whole time thing has me all screwed up.  My motorcycle is on one time, my watch another, my phone changes by zone and whether or not we have service so sometimes it’s right and sometimes not, and my GPS is on another time.  So, when I was setting my alarm the night before, I’m thinking, ok, I have to wake up at 8 am local time which is 11 am at home making my watch 9 am, carry the three, times pi, plus Avagadro’s number, and viola, I’m up a full hour early.  Sonofa!  Sitting in the lobby eating another horrendous breakfast of “sausages” and powdered “eggs.” I’m wondering where Brad is since he’s usually up before me.  Then it hits me, oh yea, Brad can tell time.  Math is hard.

About 60 miles outside of Fairbanks before the beginning of the Haul Road, I looked down at my dash mount, and I noticed two error messages – “LAMPF!” (that is not some twitter code) and a picture of an oil can.  Shit.  The lamp was just a broken headlight, which isn’t a big deal with the big PIAA lights I run, and I just threw on my high beam, so that was fine for daytime riding.  The oil was a problem.  The next service was about 100 miles up, and chances are that we could have made it, but we had no idea what we’d find there, and the idea of getting stuck up there wasn’t appealing.  So, back down we headed for 25 miles to the last gas station where I oiled up.  Sweet – we’ll add 50 miles to the already long trip today. (The fact that we were not carrying extra oil is really embarrassing – especially since we’d talked about getting some and at one gas station Brad even pointed to a wall of oil, and I said, “yea,” and then we walked away.  Couple of rocket scientists for sure.)

While we were oiling up, we spent some time talking to a trucker hauling diesel fuel.  This was one hardened creature, but he warmed up to us and talked about the road.  We asked about the conditions, and he looked at us both slowly back and forth, and said, “It’s a muddy mother fucker man.”  He also told us about a motorcyclist screaming up the road behind his truck who didn’t realize his truck was stopped and went off the road end over end.  Wow, I asked if the guy was all right, to which he replied, “I don’t know.  And I don’t care.”  You’re kinda on your own up here.

Back to the trail and we make the Dawson Highway finally.  On the way up, we hit a bunch of dirt, and it felt great.  Then the Haul Road starts, and things changed dramatically.  At first, it was just slippery as hell, and then we hit the construction.  We were sliding all over the place, and I was close to dumping on several occasions.  Brad was worse off with his Torrence tires, which are just this side of street tires.

We pulled off the road to have a pee and a talk.  While doing so, I took a few steps onto the road, and I was shocked to find it slippery just to walk on.  Holy shit I’m thinking.  I don’t even want to go back over and do the section we just did much less 180 miles to the Circle or 450 to the Ocean.  The road was a gnarly mess on this particular day. Fuck.

Before reading, click here and watch this video.  (I say “Dempster Highway” in the beginning, but I think I was just brain-frazzled for I meant “Dawson Highway” or Haul Road.  I also called Mount McKinely Everest yesterday, twice.)

Sorry this damn video is sideways – I cannot find the setting in WordPress to change it around – open to ideas.

It’s just not going to be today, and while this is a rough decision, there is really no doubt in either one of our heads.  If Brad had different tires, we’d try it a bit longer, but at the pace we have to go, it would be 7-10 hours just to the Circle, and neither of us is up for that.  And if I was here alone, there is no way I’d be going up by myself.  It’s not even so much the slipperyness from the video that did it – it was all the other factors that made the first 10 miles hideous, and we had no way to know how long it would be like that, and even the thought of going back over the last ten was daunting to say the least.  It was definitely doable, but it would have taken forever, and we just didn’t want to put that much into it or risk our bikes or limbs or worse.

Those are real smiles.

In addition slippery nature of the wet road, they were dumping truckloads of wet dirt (not mud, but wet, loose dirt) on top of the road, and they didn’t bother to filter the rocks, aka, boulders out of the mixture, and they were dropping water mixed with calcium carbonate up and down the road.  The calcium carbonate hardens the road, but when it goes down wet (after days of rain) it’s slippery to walk on.  These boulders are so big that I hit one with my skid plate (that’s 8 inches off the ground) and waited for my back tire to crunch into it and send me flying so I could come crashing down on a big rock.  Somehow I avoided it and we were able to make our way down through muscle-tensed arms and legs just missing construction vehicles and super-charged truckers.

Another awesome stop on the road.

Are we disappointed?  Yea.  I mean, I’d be lying if I said we weren’t, but having the confidence of knowing absolutely that it was the right decision helps a lot.  Plus, we knew this was a possible, if not likely, situation going into the trip.  It’s not like there’s a Dalton Highway info web page like you see for ski hills.  Those truckers are moving cargo back and forth no matter what – they don’t care what the conditions are.

Plus, if it had rained up there, I think I’d have been calling my dad to come tow us out.  He’d have found me running through the woods in a loin cloth hunting rabbit with my teeth, and Brad would have been drafted into the oil fields to never be seen again.  Neither of us wanted that.

We didn’t come out here to wreck our bikes or ourselves, and the trip has never been about the absolute destination – it’s about the voyage, and it’s been spectacular, and now there’s almost a weight off of our shoulders, and we can start riding patiently without being in a hurry to get somewhere.   No more getting up at 6 am and riding until 8pm.  No more skipping hot springs or road side fruit stands – t he stuff that makes rides truly memorable.  The next leg is about experience on the road – not getting through the road.  I feel a renewed lightness of step.

Results of the Dalton.

I’m sure that other people have made it up there, and maybe the road would have cleared after the construction section, but there was no way of knowing.  Our decision has been confirmed as the right one on several ocassions.  We ran into some bicyclists on our way down in Joy, Alaska, and from looking at them and talking to them, the road’s gnarliness quotient did not go down further up the road.   Then, the next day at the Harley / BMW dealership, we met a guy who just went up in a Harley – at 5 miles per hour.  We told him we bailed, and he said, “Good.  You guys are smart.  I’m on a rental.  I wouldn’t rent a bike to me.”  We said, “yea, but doesn’t it get better further up?”  He said, “Yea, and it gets worse! I didn’t realize that the mud has glacier sand in it – it’s way more slippery than your typical mud.”  Brad said, “yea, I thought I was on snot.”  You heard it here first.  I was feeling pretty good about the decision again.

We also saw two Harleys come in on hooks totaled from a ride up yesterday.  Feeling even better.  Plus, seeing those other GS guys turn back was even more reinforcement.  I am pretty sure I saw Mike and Alex from ArcticBound2011.com heading up as we came down, and I hope they made it on their KTM’s, but they looked fully loaded.  Their legend will only grow if they actually made it.

Keep in mind that people are riding this road every day right now.  I’m not saying it’s impassable – not at all.  I actually think that we could have made it if Brad had different tires and we felt like taking the risk, but for us, this trip has always been about the journey, and the Circle was more of an excuse for the journey.  If we had more dirt experience this year, it’s a passable road, but that’s not what this trip is for.  It’s about cultivating experiences and riding life.

On our way down from the Haul Road, we saw a guy selling what we though were wild berries on the side of the road, so we stopped.  Turns out, it was jam, which we had no use for, but we were still glad for the experience as we was packing a full-on hogleg loosely strapped to his thigh like some American tourist’s fanny pack in Paris.  This hand cannon had to be a .44 magnum if it was anything, and it just dangled there with a lack of concern that only an Alaskan could pull off.  But then, I guess if you’re standing outside in bear country selling sweet jam, you better be prepared to take down a bear should the circumstance present itself.  Life here is real, uncomplicated, and at times absolutely brutal.

Say hello to Amanda.

We ended the day with BBQ at Big Daddy’s BBQ, which was ok, but we met Amanda who sent us along to the Big I where we met Brenna, who sent us along on our boondoggle for the next day.

This is Brenna. Either evil genius or keeper of the secret road...

She told deep, dark secrets of a road leading from Central, Alaska (the town of) to some mysterious place called Central Village where, according to her, we shouldn’t go because “they don’t like white people.”  She was absolutely insistent that this hidden, Atlantis-like city existed and is in fact within the Arctic Circle.  She went so far as to say, and I quote, “If you don’t find the Arctic Circle, you’re fucking idiots.”  I’m telling you, this woman had a way with words.  I researched the bowels of the Internet, and I talked to

We're appreciating all things Alaska. The short, intense growing season makes for incredible flowers. It's not gay if it's in Alaska.

people everywhere including George from Trails End (THE guru), other native Alaskans and anyone else who would listen, and no where is there any mention of this fabled place. But, Brad and I are just dumb enough to strike out in search of this little-known (actually only known by one bartender) third road in North America that enters the 66 33′ 44″ line.  Fueled with more beer and whiskey than either of us cared to take credit for, we had our plan for the next day – in search of the secret road to the north…

So, not much of a trip update today.  Here’s the map including roughly where we got to today.