Words and Photos By John Young
I never intended to ride from Mexico to Canada, solo, on my dirtbike. Yes, I had meant to ride all the Backcountry Discovery Routes that connect the two countries, eventually, but not all in the same year. The year of COVID-19, the year of record high temperatures, the year half the West caught fire. 2020 has been a shit show of a year.
As a “Necessary Employee” I had a front-row seat to all the fun 2020 had to offer, a seat I was not allowed to vacate for the initial March wave of the spread. Nor was I allowed to go on vacation or even go too far beyond the borders of the county I worked for. So when my scheduled vacation days in April came and went without me heading off to do the Arizona Backcountry Discovery Route (AZBDR), it was a sacrifice sure; but a necessary one. When May rolled into June with no vacation approval in sight, well, I started to get a bit antsy.
At the end of June, after 3 months of quarantine, COVID-19 eased up and I finally got the chance to ride all 744 miles of the AZBDR. Weather.com said Phoenix was 110 in the shade. I pretended I had misheard the forecast and took off anyhow. I needed to go somewhere, anywhere, and really what was the worst that could happen? I prepped my bike and paid special attention to the coolant level.
At just over 320 lbs my modded 2019 Honda CRF450L was a fantastic light ADV motorcycle. In addition to a few other performance enhancements, I had added a bigger Nomad 20L tank to stretch the miles between gas stops, a heavier Race Tech rear spring to help carry Mosko Moto’s Reckless 80 luggage system, a fat Seat Concepts seat to carry my fat ass, and an Adventure Spec nav tower and Bajaworx windscreen to make the highway miles a little more bearable and also to give me a place to mount my GPS unit. And it’s a Honda, so it’s never had a failure of any kind over the 13,000 miles we’ve ridden together. On a loaded down dirt bike those baby head hill sections will still be a nightmare, but a manageable nightmare. Greasy Utah mud, deep Colorado moon dust, stretches of bottomless sand, no problemo. And when you ate it, because you know you’re going to eat it, you could pick yourself back up and carry on.
The trade-offs: You are going to have to change the oil every 600 to 1000 miles, and learn to travel light. It tops out at about 90 on the highway, which you don’t want to be doing anyway since it gets blown around easily. 21-inch wheels don’t turn in so quickly and the motocross seat height makes it hard to touch the ground. Scars and all though, it’s still my unicorn bike.
I mounted up some fresh Motoz Desert HT knobbies and hauled my Red adventure partner the 500 miles from Snowmass, CO down to Page, AZ on the back of my Tacoma so I could listen to music, save myself an oil change or two, avoid a ton of wear off my knobbies, and because air-conditioning was a thing.
And Oh My God, what a great idea that turned out to be. I pulled into the Page Arizona Honda dealership’s parking lot late in the afternoon to discover the black asphalt was so hot it burnt my feet through my flip flops. I quickly unloaded the bike from the truck, loaded the Honda up with a week’s worth of gear, thanked the folks at the dealership for allowing me to leave my truck there while I rode, then headed South towards Mexico to start my AZBDR journey. Here’s how hot the ride was, it was cooler for me to close my helmet’s visor and cut off most of the airflow than to have it open and allow the hairdryer hot wind to blow dry my face and cook my brains. 500 miles of blast furnace later and I was in Bisbee, AZ near the Mexican border; home of the Jonquil Hotel and Sterling Noren.
If you don’t know who Sterling Noren is, then shame on you and hand in your ADV card on your way out. Sterling has filmed, produced, edited, and starred in all of the Backcountry Discovery Route movies. Sometimes all at the same time. He and his partner, Eva, own the Jonquil Hotel located in Bisbee, which itself sits at the bottom of a canyon. This last bit is important because when I finally woke up the next morning, late, (like really late), it was nice and cool and breezy out. It was such a respite from my experience the day before that I let Sterling talk me into staying an extra night and starting the AZBDR the next day. I think he said something like, “Usually we ride in the early morning so we don’t die in the desert, but hey, you do you.” Sterling, you saved my life.
I completed the AZBDR in 3 days, riding from dawn to dusk, stopping only to fill the bike with gas and my CamelBak with whatever electrolyte drinks I could find, because once I stopped riding, climbing back on the bike was an effort of will and my will was melting fast. Each night I gladly paid the price for a cold shower and air conditioning at a motel.
The Arizona roads switched back and forth from smooth gravel to baby head sections where the baby heads were made of volcanic lava rock; so that when you crashed, you not only smashed, but scraped and grinded as well.
I don’t mean to get too down on Arizona. It had given me my first sighting of Saguaro cactuses; they took my breath away. They are so big and grow in forests and no two look alike. I decided they were my spirit plant. The black volcanic sand around Flagstaff was stark and alien and held me up at speed making me feel like a Dakar Pro. And of course the Grand Canyon. If you’ve never been there, hand in your American card on your way out.
I took an alternate road to end the AZBDR because the Navajo Nation had closed their section around the Vermillion cliffs. They were fighting a losing battle against Coronavirus. Many places had been closed for the COVID-19 outbreak. On the other hand, many places acted as if nothing odd was floating around in the air. The AZBDR was beautiful and brutal and exactly what I needed.
A month went by before I guilted my boss into letting me have another vacation, this time to finish the 744 mile UTBDR. I had to split it into multiple trips. The first sections, the Arizona border to Moab, UT, were done on long weekends. At the beginning of August, I went back to Moab to finish. Yup, Moab in August. You would have thought that I would have learned my lesson. Wrong.
If you have never been to Moab or Southern Utah, A) Turn in your ADV and American cards, and, B) it is the most surreal place on the planet. Everywhere you look there are towers of rock and walls of rock and valleys of rock, mountains of rock, sculptures of rock. From Mexican Hat to The Valley of the Gods to Lockhart Basin to Fisher Towers and North you are constantly surrounded by insane formations of rock. Red rock, tan rock, milk chocolate brown rock. The roads vary widely from hard pack to tracks in the sand to slick rock. Some roads are barely roads. Lockhart basin is a jeep road made by and for jeepers. Where anyone else would say “Here ends the road”, jeepers just pile some boulders together and keep on jeepin’.
Moab is also the place where I suffered from heatstroke. Headache, nausea, flushed skin, altered mental state, CHECK. The symptom that scared me the most was that I had stopped sweating. I raced to Thompson Valley along highway I70 and the 7-11 there. And what do all 7-11s have? That’s right, that All American concoction of sugar and artificial coloring mixed into slush - Slurpee’s. I drank 3 liters of Slurpees until I felt better. and by better, I mean that I started to sweat again. Then I filled my CamelBak with 3 more liters of Slurpee and I was back in the game. 7-11 had saved me, although, for the next two days I felt like crap and everything I owned was sticky.
From Green River to the Idaho border in Garden City I discovered that Utah’s Self-Isolation flood gates had been opened and The Quarantined had been released; for the rest of the trip I was never alone and never far from a UTV or F350 hauling a camper. Despite all the traffic, the Wasatch and Uinta mountains were green and cool and again, just what I needed.
I hadn’t put together the whole “Mexico to Canada” thing in my mind until I was watching Sterling’s IDBDR movie. They talked about the Canadian border, a real border. “Guys with guns just over there”, which was now closed. The only ones guarding the Mexican border had been some horses and cows. As far as I knew they were unarmed, but cows can be tricky. Although I had the 1233-mile IBDR trip planned for the end of August since the year before, I’ll admit, the extra feat of crossing the breadth of America via dirt roads gave it some extra spice.
I would love to tell you exciting tales of drama and near-death experiences I had on the IDBDR, but Idaho doesn’t do drama. Idaho does well maintained and groomed flowy packed-sand backcountry roads up mountains and down mountains. Idaho does vistas and scenery and landscapes. Idaho does small-town Inns and solitary campsites and fire tower lookouts. The only drama I had was of my own making when I realized too late that my maps hadn’t downloaded on the GPS. I spent the next 1200 miles obediently following a blue route line across a blank white screen.
I suppose if I had a complaint about Idaho, it was that California’s wildfires were making the mountain panoramas hazy. Some days the smoke was heavy and you could smell it on everything. It made you wonder why forest fire smoke didn’t smell good, like a campfire. Some days it was light. But in typical Idaho fashion, it took the smoke and blended it with sunlight and mountain tops so that every sunrise and sunset were turned into the most stunning photo ops ever.
The US - Canadian border came out of nowhere along a windy road in the middle of nowhere. My blue line just ended. And just like that, it was over; no surprises, no crowds - just peacefully over. The IDBDR, Mexico to Canada, Summer.
Melancholy; happy I had done it, sad it was over, anticipating what was to come next, like when Summer turns to Fall. It’s these occasions, like boundaries, that I love. I am someone and know some things, then I go on an adventure, and afterwards there’s a new someone (usually tired and beat up) who knows some new things. Maybe that’s why I don’t mind 600 mile oil changes, or swapping out worn knobbies every few thousand miles. Maybe that’s why I’m hopeful that when 2020 is finally over we’ll all be left better than we had been before; scraped up, sweat-soaked, sticky, and all.
