Friday, June 13. Dawson City To Arctic Circle and return.   I am not superstitious, but I would have preferred a date other than Friday the 13^th to tackle the Demptser Highway and the ride to the Arctic Circle. I awake at 5:15a.m. and I feel excited and anxious at the same time. The tourist information folks in Whitehorse and Dawson City have both cautioned about riding this route alone and have told me to bring a spare tire. The Milepost says to carry two spares. The road is rough and there are no services until Eagle Plains, two hundred and twenty-nine miles north. I realize there are risks but I have been thinking about this ride for a year and now the time has come to ride it. I want to get an early start. I plan on riding five hundred and fifty-seven miles today. Not knowing the road conditions I plan an early start to allow time for any unexpected events. 

 With the only fuel stop before the Arctic Circle some two hundred and twenty-nine miles away I needed to top off at the fuel station at Flat Creek. I arrive at 6:00 a.m. to find that they do not open until 7:00 a.m. Is this the start of Friday the 13^th stuff? There is nothing I can do but wait in the thirty-nine degree air and hope they really mean 7:00 a.m. As I walk around I notice a motorcycle on a trailer. Its rear tire is flat and off the wheel. Next to the garage is an SUV with a crushed roof. I now have an hour to think about them while fighting back huge waves of doubt about this ride. Why did it have to be Friday the 13^th?   The attendant arrived promptly at 7:00 a.m. and I get fuel. He said both vehicles were towed off the Dempster yesterday. The guy on the bike is fine. The folks in the SUV are in bad condition. I use that information to rationalize that motorcycles are safer than SUV’s. How is that for positive thinking? I ask him what it cost the motorbike rider to be towed back to the station. He tells me that I did not really want to know. I have read that it cost five dollars a mile.  I top of my tank at 92.9 cents a liter, that is $3.52 per gallon. I let air out of both tires in anticipation of the road conditions ahead.

The road is mostly gravel but the first five miles are seal-coated. The first five miles give you a false sense of security. You think to yourself, what is all this talk about a tough road? Then the seal-coat ends and you find out. It is now in the low forties’ and I need both my e-vest and heated grips. I have both cranked up to maximum when I begin smelling something burning. I know this e-vest is warm but am I burning the skin off my back? The smell is real funky, like burning flesh or melting plastic. I do a quick scan of the bike but cannot see any obvious damage. I turn off the vest until a more plausible answer surfaces.  

 The Dempster is great, terrible, spectacular, dangerous, challenging, technical, unforgiving and marvelous. It is a road that once driven you will always remember. The RT did great but it is not designed as a dual-sport bike and I did have my hands full on this ride. One section about two hundred kilometers out and extending for about one hundred kilometers was particularly difficult. [pic] It was like riding on greased marbles. I seriously thought I would have to turn around if the road continued like that for any distance. Other sections were off-camber and I found my rear wheel sliding down the road surface while I wrestled with the front end in an attempt to stay upright and moving forward. There are sections of the road that are hard packed dirt without gravel and they can be ridden at seventy miles per hour.  Most sections have some form of gravel and must be taken more carefully.  I thought it interesting that when riding at home if I come upon gravel on the road I become very concerned. Here I am intentionally riding over five hundred miles on the loose slippery stuff. The trick to riding it is to stay in the tire tracks of other vehicles. This made for riding that reminds me of single track riding. Imagine focusing on a path six inches wide and holding your line for a hundred miles at fifty miles per hour.

I have come to the conclusion that the highway crews in Canada and Alaska use three types of gravel. The first is the kind you or I would use on our driveway. It is a little slippery but drivable. The second type used is more like ball bearings than gravel. Driving on this is treacherous and life threatening. The third type is what I would call arrowhead gravel. This type is made from two-inch shards of sharpened stone. Its primary purpose in life is to impale itself into your tires and leave you stranded along the roadway. The Dempster has all three types of gravel in roughly equal proportions.

Actually the ride is a lot more enjoyable than I have made it sound. For example, there are very few  vehicles on this roadway. I rode the first one hundred and fifty miles without seeing another person. When I did see someone the odds were good that they were stopped with a flat tire. I stopped and offered help to three couples with flat tires. One older couple was struggling with the tire change on a rented SUV. I doubt they had ever changed a tire before but they had a bigger problem. They said that as they were working they spotted a grizzly bear circling the area. I suggested that I would take over the duties of changing the tire if they would open the doors of the SUV and keep watch for the bear. I was worried that if the bear came around they would get in the car and forget that I had nowhere to hide. All worked out and we got the tire changed without any further assistance from the grizzly bear. When finished changing the tire my hands were so cold that I had to ask them to buckle my helmet strap. While I was glad to help everyone that needed help I also had another motive. I hoped that if I helped them that they would return the favor if I needed help. The Dempster is not a place you want to break down. [pic] I spent a lot of time thinking about my Dunlops with the three thousand tough miles on them and all the “arrowheads” trying to fulfill their destiny.

 I do not want to focus only on the difficult parts of the ride because there is some spectacular scenery and the vastness of the area is overwhelming. The Tombstone Mountains are great and the Mackenzie River Delta is one of the largest deltas in North America. Hugh frozen blocks of ice, some twenty feet tall lay helter-skelter along the banks of the rivers suggesting the extreme conditions in the winter. There are two places along the route through the Ogilive Mountains where you cross the Continental Divide and a third spot where it runs within a few feet of the road. There is no marker to note the event but it is pretty cool to cross the Continental Divide twice in less than one hundred and fifty miles. Another area of the road is used as an emergency airplane landing strip! The signage warns you not to stop on the runway!

 I had been riding on reserve fuel for some time when I arrived at Eagle Plains. It is a desolate place with a fuel pump, garage, small motel and restaurant. I got a quick splash of fuel and continued the twenty-three miles to the marker that tells you that you have reached the Arctic Circle at north 66 degrees 33 minutes! [pic] It was pretty desolate, windy and cold. The winds had been blowing nonstop all day at thirty miles an hour. When parking the RT I had to position it so it would not blow over. I take the obligatory photos and want to relax and enjoy the moment. I don’t stay long. It is real cold and I know that I have another two hundred and seventy-five miles back to Dawson City. Most people think that the Arctic Circle is a discrete place, like Chicago. Actually it is not a place at all but rather an imaginary circle on the surface of the earth at sixty-six a one-half degrees north latitude or twenty-three a one-half degrees south of the North Pole. It marks the northernmost point at which the sun can be seen at the winter solstice [about December twenty-first] and the southernmost point of the northern Polar Regions at which the midnight sun is visible. So I did not technically ride to the Arctic Circle. I actually rode to an imaginary point on the earth’s surface that intersected with a navigable roadway. I think there are only two places in North America where you can drive across the Arctic Circle, here and along the Dalton Highway in Alaska.

 I circle back to Eagle Plains to top off with fuel. Fuel was 99.9 cent a liter, that is $3.78  a gallon. I was not going to complain about the fuel price. Eagle Plains is an oasis in this remote area of the world. When I was calculating the driving distance to the Circle and considering my fuel mileage I thought to myself that it was great that the designers of the road placed a fuel station at just about the place where the RT would need to refuel. I latter read that the location was chosen because the engineers considered the permafrost in the area and found that the bedrock was at the surface on this site, so the station was built there. It had nothing to do with the fuel mileage of a RT but I was real glad it was there when I needed it.  

As I got fuel I thought momentarily about checking into the motel and resting for a few hours. It was too windy and cold to simply pull off the road and rest. There was nothing to shelter you from the wind and there is no side of the road The road is built on a gravel berm at least ten feet high. If you are not on the road you are in serious trouble. But the thought of resting passed quickly and I motored on. The return ride was another dose of dirt, gravel, potholes, and single track riding. The wind seemed to be at my back on the return ride and I did not feel like I had to fight it as badly as on the ride north. You can reach some elevations that are above four thousand feet and you are really exposed to the wind. [pic] At one point I could feel the rear of the RT moving sideways through the gravel as the wind moved us from one side of the roadway to the other. The nice thing is that you have the entire road to yourself so you do not worry about being blown into upcoming traffic. I was lucky that the road was dry during my ride. Knowing what I now know about the road I would not drive it on an RT in wet weather. The tires that are available for the RT simply do not give you the grip needed on the surfaces you encounter.      

It took me fourteen hours from the time I left Dawson City to the time I returned. I was beat and too tired to do anything but shower and crawl into bed. I had not eaten all day but I needed rest more than food. I took a quart of water, a maximum dose of vitamin I [ibprophin] and I hit the sack. I had carried too much tension in my back and shoulders through the entire ride. My grip on the handlebars was excessive and I put too much weight on my lower back because of my riding position. So I was going to suffer for a while but I also knew that the pain would pass. I was beat up, filthy dirty and blurry-eyed, but I felt good about myself. I also felt good about the performance of the RT. It is not a dirt bike but it did everything I ask it to do.     

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