“Do you want to ride from Alaska to Oregon this fall?” On the phone was my friend ex motocross pro Tom Carson. Immediately I said, “yes” without actually hearing any details.
Tom, who runs the Alpinestars Medic Rig at all the US Supercross and Motocross events, had just wrapped up a long season at the races and was jonesing to do a big adventure trip. He is friends with the folks at Motoquest , and had set up a rental deal that involved riding bikes from Motoquest’s Anchorage location down to Portland. As winter is rapidly setting in Alaska there is not much call for adventure bike rentals in the extreme northwest, hence their need to move the bikes south for the winter months. Also the price of this Transporter Special is reduced from the Motoquest regular rates, so it’s a good deal.
Once I had all the actual info, I realized this could be a two-week ride covering a ton of miles, and I didn’t really know what to expect. I did a quick “directions” on my iPhone map and saw the distance was about 2400 miles.
This could take a while…
I spent a few days packing up all my gear, and soon I was flying up to Anchorage. My hotel was just across the street from Motoquest’s headquarters, so I stopped by to say “hi” the afternoon before our scheduled pick-up. The Anchorage crew immediately made me feel welcome and handed me a cold beer as it was after 4pm. The walls of the offices were covered in magazine clippings and moto travel memorabilia from all over the world.
Tom’s flight landed later that day, and the next morning we packed up our bikes with our gear for the next few weeks. I was to be on a BMW GS800, and Tom was going to be riding a Suzuki V-Strom 650. Motoquest offers some other options such as bigger BMW GS1200 bikes, but we were quite happy with our chosen rides.
We had geared up our Arai XD-4 helmets with the SENA 30K intercoms, which were put to use right away as we navigated our way out of the city of Anchorage. We made a wrong turn and found ourselves on a muddy trail next to the Matanuska River. Normally I’d keep going to find a way through, but the trail dead-ended pretty quickly. Soon we were back on track and making quick work of the highway miles toward our first night’s stop in Valdez, AK.
We made several stops along the way, the best stop being the Matanuska Glacier. We were able to do some off-road action to get down to the viewpoint, and we found a little cut off side road that gave us some good photo opportunities.
I soon realized that for us to keep on schedule, we would have to make our photo stops short and sweet, getting back on the gas as soon as possible. The ride to Valdez was an out-and-back so I scoped out some photo spots for our ride out the next morning. Arriving almost at nightfall, we found a hotel, reflected on our day, and planned for our next day’s adventure.
Up early and back on the road, we stopped at the epic Thompson Pass outside of Valdez for some photo action, and found some dirt double track. Riding early morning in Alaska in late August is cold, so we were well wrapped up. Our bikes were fully loaded so even this little detour was challenging but still fun. Our goal for the day was to make it out to McCarthy, AK to stay the night. This was another out-and-back from the highway, but this time it was 60 miles of fast gravel road. Both of our bikes were mounted up with Shinko 705 tires that are a 70% road / 30% dirt combo that worked surprisingly well on the gravel with loaded bikes. We were able to push pretty hard on the dirt section out to McCarthy, which put us there after lunch.
We decided to head back out to the freeway and head north to find a hotel in Glennallen, which proved to be a difficult task as everything we found was fully booked for some reason. We had visions of sleeping in the bug-infested woods, but at literally last light, we connected with Brad at Buck’s Cabin Rental and rolled up to a picture perfect spot away from the crowd in town. We got lucky this time, so moving forward we would need to be better prepared with our lodging.
Our planning for gas stops took a hit the following morning as we had researched a fuel stop in Slana, only to find out there actually wasn’t gas in Slana. Great. We limped north at about 55mph on a fuel-saving mission and rolled into the bigger town of Tok with about five miles worth of gas left in the BMW. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention we hadn’t eaten lunch or dinner the previous day, so it was a nice change to hit the restaurant in Tok and eat actual food, not just bars and trail mix.
After going north for a few days, it was time to head east from Tok, and we pushed on toward the Canadian border. The roads just went on forever, and I was constantly scanning the landscape for some good dirt side roads that we could explore. Funny thing is, there weren’t any. Literally, just a road with trees on either side for hundreds of miles. We saw some snow-covered peaks in the distance, but there was just no way to get to them.
We crossed into Canada at an easy border crossing and spent the night in Beaver Creek, in the Yukon Territory. Up early, we made up big miles again on our way to Whitehorse, YT. I had talked to Tom a few days earlier, and our actual mileage was going to be closer to 3500. It was time to put in some 400+ mile days, so we ended up on the bikes for eight or nine hours a day for the next few days and made our way through Whitehorse and onto the Cassiar Highway. Then it happened… we saw a bear! Having not seen any wildlife so far, this was a big moment. The big guy just wandered past us as we sat by the side of the road on our bikes, looking over a few times before cruising into the trees.
The Cassiar Highway is off the beaten path and proved more interesting than the previous days of highway pounding. Small lakes surrounded by a million trees is a good place for bugs to hang out, and we were getting pretty good at cleaning bugs off our shields without stopping. Got to keep those miles going!
We were now on day five, or was it six? I had lost track of time as we had been on the Ride-Eat-Sleep-Repeat program. After the Cassiar Highway was behind us, we were in for a big treat. We turned toward the coast and rode down a great road (37A) into the small town of Stewart, BC. We stopped at Bear Glacier for a break and thought how cool this spot was. Little did we know what we would be seeing later that same day.
After checking into our hotel in Stewart mid-afternoon, we crossed into the US at the town of Hyder. Our plan was to go along the Salmon River up to another glacier. As we headed out of Hyder, the smell of fish became quite apparent. Stopping at the Fish Creek Wildlife viewing area we soon found out why. This is the place where salmon head upstream in the shallow river and end up as bear treats. We saw another black bear who was actually more interested in pulling berries from the trees than the fish buffet a few feet away.
The road up to the Salmon Glacier was a fun off-road climb to a breathtaking viewpoint overlooking an enormous glacial flow. Truly amazing. After making our way back across the border into Canada, we had a bit of a wake up call. We had met a couple of other riders doing the Transporter Special, Junior and David. It turns out that the ambulance we had passed earlier in the day was on its way to collect David, who had wrecked at speed on the road about a hundred miles behind us, and now had a broken bone in his wrist. I thought about how many miles we still had to go and was a little nervous about the remainder of the ride, onward and upward though.
We put in another couple of marathon days through British Columbia, and all of a sudden we were in Princeton, BC, just about 60 miles from the US border crossing into Washington State. Our plan was to hit the top section of the Washington BDR so that we could get a break from the relentless asphalt grind, and shoot some photos in the dirt.
We crossed at probably one of the quietest US borders there is at Nighthawk Road. We didn’t see another soul except for the border agent. It took us all of two minutes to get through, and we were once again back on US soil. Time to hit some dirt!
The WABDR was a lot of fun for us on the big bikes, and we saw a few other riders on the trail heading north. As the temperatures started getting up into the 90°F zone, we cut out onto the asphalt. The temp kept rising past 95°F, and this was a big contrast to some of the 34°F mornings just a few days earlier. We crawled into Leavenworth, WA in the late afternoon, and Tom sprung for a flashy hotel in downtown. It was actually about the same price as some of the standard hotels we had stayed at the week before, but it felt pretty high end!
We were getting so close now we could feel it. We had made up two days on our proposed arrival time into Portland, OR, but we were quite okay with that, as I think both Tom and I were ready to be done. One more early start and we blasted along the Hood River into the Portland Motoquest office. Nine and a half days and 3500 miles later and we had made it!
Big thanks to Brenden at Motoquest, SENA communications, Shinko tires, Arai helmets, and Alpinestars for helping us with this trip.
I definitely want to go back to Alaska again and head north from Anchorage into some more off-road wilderness areas. If you’re interested in a bike tour or bike rentals, hit up the good folks at Motoquest and head out on your own adventure. For more information go to www.motoquest.com.
