June 13, 2011 Day 10 Fairbanks north and return

Today I am hoping for the hardest ride of the trip. I would love to have a picture of my bike in front of the sign at the Arctic Circle. That is 200 miles north of Fairbanks,  round trip will be 400 miles, just a little bit less than we have been doing. But only the first 85 miles are paved, the next 115 are gravel and they put down a dust palliative that holds moisture so that a little bit of dew or light rain showers will go a long ways in keeping the dust down. Dust is rumored to be like riding in a fog when it is dry but when the road is wet it is  slick and sticky. If you are looking at a map, the pavement stops at a little town called Liven Good, from there on it is officially called the Dalton hwy and unofficially called the Haul Road. From Liven Good to Dead Horse is 415 miles, parts of it are paved but it gets lots of truck traffic hauling supplies up for the oil fields at Prudo Bay so it tends to get beat to death. I am up early and ready to go. Still raining and I don't have much hope of getting to the Arctic Circle but won't know if I don't try. The rain almost stops about 30 miles out of Fairbanks and the ride is beautiful, some low clouds so you are riding  in a fog and other places where you can see of 30 or 40 miles so with the changing light it is a lovely ride, until I run out of asphalt and am into some nasty mud, I stand up on the foot pegs dirt bike style as I know that helps a lot in the gravel and in the mud and actually kind of have control, but I don't know that I can ride 230 miles standing up and if I screw up I have no one to help me get the bike back up, I had left a lot of the stuff at the hotel in Fairbanks but the bike is still over 600 pounds and a lot of work to set up on dry ground, in the mud it might be almost impossible. I am a little over 4000 miles from home and really want to be able to ride the bike home. The first place I find to get turned around I do and I am headed back to Fairbanks, so much for my attack on the Haul Road. Back in Fairbanks at the Hotel I find there are several other bikers that had been on the road, a rider from Indiana on a nice Honda ST1300 (a really nice road bike) made it about 20 miles and lost it in the mud, only broke a mirror and some plastic. He said while he was busy trying to upright the bike he stopped to rest and looked up to see a black bear a hundred feet away sitting watching him. We also have a  rider here  from Australia, he bought his bike in Idaho last December then just a week ago flew out and picked it up and rode north, He has done this once before. The guy could pass for an old wrinkled Crocodile Dundee. His daughter told him to be careful, she said remember "Young people bend and bruise, old guys break and bleed" A little something to think about. Crocodile had not crashed but just gave up as as it was so slow going he was running out of time, but he helped two other riders pull their bike back up on the road as they had gone off the edge. Well so much for the hard day of riding, I covered 170 miles but it was a fun day. John got his business taken care of so tomorrow we head towards Homer south of Anchorage
I almost forgot, critter count for the day 1 large moose.

Cactus Don the rain maker and the muddy donkey