Arctic Circle Jerks Part 4: Live Free or Die Jerks

For anyone just tuning in:
Arctic Circle Jerks
Arctic Circle Jerks part 2: Circle Harder
Arctic Circle Jerks part 3: Jerks with a Vengeance

When we last left off, Chris's engine was having water trouble, and our heroes had devised a daring plan involving a plastic bottle and some zip-ties to keep the bike running.

Will it work?

Yep.

Will our heroes get eaten by bears?

Nope.



The fender extension worked just fine, and the engine fired right up on both cylinders after Chris put it all back together, and we took off again.



Sup, dog?



Chillin, yo.



Word. Keep on keepin' on.



Word. Let's roll, C.

And on we rolled.

How does engine type correlate with sexual preference?

Oh, well okay then.


And so we rode on. And then we had to stop again, because holy crap what is that?









Excuse the spots on my lens--it was raining at this point and there wasn't any way to keep it dry.










It was cold and rainy and all we wanted to do was finish getting to Prince George so we could put up camp and sleep, but this was the most incredible rainbow we'd ever seen; it was brilliant in a way the cameras just couldn't capture, like a multicolored laser shooting out of the ground, pointing at a magical pot of gay somewhere over the horizon.

But we managed to eventually shut our gaping mouths and fight on through the torrential rain that produced that rainbow, and a few hours later we had camp set up at Goji's place.


We woke up at Goji's, packed up our crap, talked to Goji about some magical Chinese herbal roofies or something that he wanted to share with us, and then took off.

At this point, I had realized that my chain and rear sprocket were both worn as damn--the sprocket teeth had been worn thin and sharp, and the chain was having to be tightened and lubed at almost every gas stop, it was stretching so quickly.


Nate's Ass: Status sexy.

And we met a man named BigHat McBallsChin.

No, I have no idea why they call him that.

I think this was the day when Chris's GPS actually fell off his bike while we were cruising--I guess Chris hadn't reapplied the zipties yet that day. We stopped and went back, and wouldn't you know it, the stupid thing was still working. So we strapped it back on and kept moving.

We switched bikes once between gas stops, just for some variety, and when we came to our next stop, it was like there had been an oil explosion somewhere around the aft and of Chris's bike's motor. There was oil on the shock, spring, swingarm, centerstand, rear header pipe, everywhere. Terrified, I went to the local auto parts place and got some thicker oil, oil stabilizer, and silicone for emergency leak patching. We spent a few hours trying to figure out what the F, and never could figure out where it was really coming from. So we topped her off and kept going and hoped this wasn't going to strand our asses up here to get assaulted by lonely, amorous moose.

Turns out after that first unexplained oil explosion, the oil loss slowed to barely a trickle, so we'd throw in a few drops at every gas stop, and it never gave us any more trouble. I think we ended up deciding it was the countershaft seal, but it never tried to recreate the Exxon Valdez incident again.

We made it to our friend Mike's place in Burnaby, BC, and I was jonesin' for some hot food, so Mike's slow-moving spaniel was starting to look tasty.




Then Mike distracted me with some real food, and managed to save his dog. Mostly. We cleaned ourselves up and took off for a night on the town in Vancouver.

Hey, a camera!


Old school! I wonder if anyone's done the Dalton Hwy on one of these.


Vancouver at night:


On the right is Mike, who kicks ass. To the left, not shown: a man urinating in public.




and here's our group, minus Chris the photographer.

Code names: The Revisionist, Mortal Wombat, Nathaniel T Kittenstomp III, and Man With Beard (Mike).

and if we were all in a band, this would be our album cover photo:


Nate: Easily Distracted.


Crotch: Present and accounted for.


Fill with care, indeed. Reminds me of how I feel about your mom, Chris.


Bridges: just another reason for Nate to make the Unnecessary Angry Face.


There's no way a caption could possibly improve this picture.


Jalapeño poppers, meet The Angry Face.


There was actually no reason to have an angry face. We had much Canadian beer, walked around town a lot, and ended up at some fancy restaurant, where we had poutine.

Poutine, for those who don't know, is a Canadian thing that's a huge bastard pile of fries, drenched in brown gravy, and topped with melty cheese curd. It's delicious, and probably took years off my life, and could only be improved with the addition of bacon. But we were in Canada, dammit, so to the hell with healthy eating!

I highly recommend it.

The next morning, Chris took off early and hauled ass, so he could meet some work friends in Oregon. I slept in and took my time, and found this, when I approached the border:


Miles of it.

It turns out that morning was the morning of the Glasgow/London airport bombings, so they turned the border dial down to Slow As Frozen Shit Running Uphill. It took me 5 hours to get across that thing, so in the meantime I turned off my bike and walked around distributing Coffee Crisp candy bars to my fellow motorists before they melted all over the insides of my saddlebags. One lady gave me some bottled water and an apple in exchange--God bless Canada. Everyone got out of their cars and hung out--it was like a cocktail party on a beautiful sunny day, except it took place in a gigantic traffic jam.

I eventually made it to the border, and the border crossing asshole confiscated my gigantic 1kg bag of dried pepperoni sticks, because I guess we're not okay with Canadian beef anymore. Screw that guy, twice. I called him unpublishable things under my breath, and then headed to Eugene, Oregon, to Susie's place, without incident.

Susie is for some reason deathly afraid of my camera, and is now a brunette:


Chris caught up with me there, and all three of us crashed together on the futon that night (in separate sleeping bags). Chris managed to get this shot of me before he left in the morning, so now I have proof that once I was in the same bed as a girl.


I stuck around that day, because Susie was having a potluck for other Couchsurfing members that night, and because I don't have a real person job that requires me to be available at any particular time, like Chris does.

I gave Susie a moto ride around town, picking up tiki torches and other things that I would not advise carrying on a bike, and then I helped her pound in a support for a fence, while she commented on my form:


Later, Steve arrived to surf Susie's couch that night, and also share in the potluck festivities There's him on the right:


As it turns out, Steve is my long-lost brother who lives in Chico, CA. He also has a cheap adventure bike (KLR650) held together mostly by bungees, and a traveling beard, and by a very strange coincidence, we have the same military-surplus rifle from Big 5 Sporting Goods, which I was thinking about bringing to fend off bears, and which he suggested I bring to fend off bears. We were finishing each other's sentences within 15 minutes of meeting. It was kind of strange.

The potluck went well. I set off some fireworks, and we all got good and drunk on Susie's mojitos, and everyone who attended thinks that Susie and Steve and I had a threesome later(we did not, in fact, at any time, have a threesome).

But I eventually managed to tear myself away from Susie and the charming town of Eugene, and headed off the next morning, equipped with the newest Feline Positioning System navigation technology.


That's cutting edge stuff, folks.

But after another uneventful day, a stop-off in San Fran at Ben's place that involved some incredibly gay karaoke and a piñata, and another day of cruising down the coast, I was home.

I don't think I've ever been so happy to see the Pacific Ocean:


When I pulled into the driveway, my bike was offially done running for a while:

The rear tire was down to damn near zero tread: toasted.

The chain was stretched way beyond the "replace now" point, to the "you should have replaced this a few thousand miles ago" point: toasted.

The rear sprocket wasn't just worn as hell, it only had half its teeth left; the rest had broken off between here and San Francisco: definitely toasted.

The sprockets and chain, I'd been tightening and lubing at every single gas stop since the Canadian border to keep them from falling apart. 200 miles farther and I wouldn't have made it.



So now the long, painful (for my ass) adventure is over, and I'm back home in Los Angeles. There are no insane black flies, or torrential downpours. I can have three meals a day, none of which have to be trail mix or beef jerky, and I have a choice of more than two shirts, and they're nearly all clean. Shoes and pants are purely optional, and I can drink things with ice in them, out of cups and not a Camelbak that makes everything taste like Wild Turkey 101. I get to sleep on a real bed, instead of next to Chris in a tiny 35-year-old backpacker tent that may or may not be leaking rain on my face.

But sometimes I wonder if that's what I really want.

For all its difficulties and discomforts, the road felt like home. Two wheels, the endless road, and a leaky blue tent were all I had, but they were all I needed. I always had a good night's sleep, no distractions, and the time and space to really think, and now I don't have those anymore. Left them out on the road, I suppose.

I just hope they're still waiting for me when I get back there.

Arctic Circle Jerks Part 3: Gravel, Burgers, and Engine Trouble in the Rain

For those just joining us:
Arctic Circle Jerks: Part 1
Arctic Circle Jerks: Part 2: Graffiti, Firewater, and Gravel


So we woke up in Fairbanks and took our time with breakfast (peanut butter and Pop-Tarts, Breakfast of [Poor] Champions), because I'd allotted an entire day to get to the Circle, only 200 miles away.



While we were in fairbanks, some guy in a truck next to us at a light started revving his engine and looking over at us, like he wanted to race.

We let him race himself, since we were in the left hand turn lane. He wasted at least $20 in rubber and didn't really go anywhere. Between him and the Walgreens cashier with the serious fem-stache, this place is obviously filled with the best and brightest humanity has to offer.


Good times. A few trees and clouds later:


and we were at the beginning of the infamous Dalton Highway.

Chris, ready to tackle this thing on his streetbike. How he fits in regular sized pants, I'll never know:


Crotch is intact and operational. Let's do this.


This is the picture Wikipedia has for the Dalton: looks about right.


Here's some of the sort of road we spent most of the Dalton dealing with:


Nate is slightly dismayed by all this gravel, and doesn't know what the F.


All he knows is fuck gravel.


At this point, the infamous Alaska Black Flies had finally shown themselves. As soon as we stepped off our bikes and removed our helmets, we had about a second of peace, and then we were surrounded by a cloud of these tiny black assholes. Thousands of them, all trying to climb inside our noses and mouths and eyes, and the 98% DEET we had all over us barely slowed them down--these bastards eat DEET for breakfast. So we took off before we could be their lunch.

That's my excuse for having so few pictures of the Dalton. Every time we stopped, they attacked.

So after the first few miles of dirt road, we switched bikes so we could share the terrifying experience of riding it on the SV, just for giggles. It was quite a sight, me trying to ride a sportbike like it was a motocrosser--standing up, elbows out, sliding the rear all over the place. Except for the potholes, it was fun, in a demented, masochistic sort of way.



We stopped at the Yukon River crossing to fill up, since gas stations were about as rare as sanity up here. We loaded our Camelbaks up with ice and water, and tried to hit on the cashier girl.

How she resisted my grizzled charms, I'll never know:


Down the road, we pulled off to get some shots of Finger Mountain, and for me to exaggerate about the rocks we had to get through, and also the size of my johnson:


Thumbs up, Finger Mountain!


Crotch Status: Operational


Take that, Finger Mountain.


And here's finger mountain unmolested. Not really much of a mountain, truth be told.



...and back to the road.

There were a few construction portions where the road was covered in at least 6 inches of jagged, pool-ball-sized gravel. That was the worst-- neither bike's front wheel would stay put in that crap, and we were forced to follow a pilot truck that was going about 5 MPH, which did not help. These sections were the ones infamous for shredding tires and sending bikers back to Fairbanks on a tow truck, but somehow we escaped any such disasters.

Anyhoo, 17 miles past Finger Mountain there was this:


Awww yeah. That's the stuff.

We took some pictures with the sign to prove we were there:


...of course, one of our trusty bikes:


...and one of me jumping off a rock trying to look like I'm sitting on top of the world:


This is Lisa:

She works for UAF and was doing some kind of recreation study, giving questionnaires to travelers and whatnot, so we kept her company for a while.

We didn't add our mark to the back of the Arctic Circle sign, but we admired the handiwork of those who came before us.


And I read about some nature crap:



After dicking around for a few hours, we decided to start heading back so we could get a head start on some of the obscenely long days we had scheduled ahead of us, and maybe get some hot food for the night.

We stopped so we could take a closer look at this Alaska Pipeline:
Limited access, blah blah whatever.


I got your limited access right here, buddy.


You say pipeline, we say urinal.


Would these count as evidence of trespassing in court? Maybe we shouldn't be posting so many of them.


Seriously though, that's one big pipeline. GOD BLESS THE USA


"Why Chris, I do believe I have a gigantic pipeline emerging from the fly of my pantaloons!"
"You know, Nate, I have some recollection of a similar comment that your mother said last night regarding my own trousers."
"To that level of wit I truly have no answer. Touché, my friend."


Anyway, enough screwing around, back on the road.

And then it started raining, which was interesting.

And by "interesting", I mean "the only possible way to make the Dalton any more terrifying".

But we made it 60 miles anyway, and stopped at the Hot Spot "restaurant" for dinner, where I had the most obscenely large hamburger ever:


Seriously, it was ginormous. It extended an inch past the bun all the way around, and was a good 2cm thick at least--I'm guessing a pound of meat. This was a burger you could use to beat a man to death with, and then feed a family of four.

F you kitty, this is my big-ass burger!



We made camp right there by the Hot Spot, hoping that the smell of delicious burgers didn't attract any bears:

The ground was impenetrable, so we had to go find big rocks to replace our useless tent pegs.

Take THAT, tent!


obligatory "epic motorcycle picture with top-of-the-world sunset in the background:


Tomorrow: the Long Way Home.

We woke up the next morning, filthy and fly-bitten. Turns out 32 year old metal tent zippers start losing teeth when you pull them out of retirement for some roughin' it.

Our stuff was pretty dirty at this point, mostly just dried mud instead of the furry coat of dead bugs we had before. Here's my setup, complete with "WASH ME" and disgustingly dirty emergency spare helmet:


...and Chris's bike, which is normally quite a handsome machine:


Here's my emergency spare gas, a Powerade container.

The vast majority of plastic soda/water bottles are made of polyethylene, which is the same stuff my gas tank is made of, so it may not be DOT approved, but it's perfectly safe to use in a pinch, at least with a nice strong thick bottle like this one.

So we took off, back down the shitty gravelly Dalton, which, now that we had time for pictures, looked mostly like this:




Sometimes it would get a little shittier like this:







We'd show you the really big sharp stuff, but we were too scared to stop while we were actually going through it. So go ahead and pretend that I just posted pictures of us climbing mountains of jagged obsidian with our bikes strapped to our backs or something. It was approximately that manly, I assure you.



This was a pretty common sight for us, old guys on BMW GSs and slightly less old guys on KTMs. They thought Chris and I were fuckin' nuts for taking a streetbike up there. We told them our next project was doing the Dakar Rally on a Segway.

But eventually we reached proper tarmac, at the Elliot Highway.

Oh God yes, pavement.


I think I just peed myself a little.


Our trip off the paved roads had wreaked havoc with Chris's GPS cradle, and the power connection was only working intermittently, so Chris anchored that little shit down with a ziptie to make it work.


It continued to give us problems, though. Our solution? More zipties, of course.

2 Zip Ties: Serious Business.

We still had plenty of energy due to the head start we'd given ourselves the night before, so we went right through Fairbanks and kept going, until we stopped for dinner in Tok (pronounced "Toke"), Alaska.

A friend on an online forum suggested we try the pizza at Fast Eddy's, and since it was about the only restaurant in town, wasn't exactly a difficult choice:



Hot food! Yeehaw!


Pizza so good, you'll catch the Down's:


It's just...so beautiful.


They were all sold out, but this might be the greatest piece of Mountie-related art I've ever seen, and dammit, I want one.


We ended up going all the way to Alcan, just on the Alaska side of the border, and camping in the rain.

32-year-old backpacker tent: mostly waterproof. mostly.


I kid you not, we had to pay 12 dollars to camp in this muddy, sloped "campsite". Don't get me wrong, it was probably worth that just for the hot showers, but referring to this generator and tire graveyard as a "campsite" is a bit of a stretch.


As soon as the rain subsided enough the next morning, we packed up our crap...


...and booked it out of that place. Other than the hot Southern blonde working the front counter, there just wasn't any reason to stick around that hole any longer.

A bit down the road, our first mechanical issue of the trip struck, and we had to stop to take care of it.

It was the dreaded Wet Twin becomes Thumper Syndrome, where the front fender isn't long enough, and the front wheel throws water up into the engine and drowns the front spark plug, turning a 650cc Twin into a really shitty 325cc Single. It's pretty common on the SV, and a lot of people get fender extensions to prevent it.

"A lot of people", meaning "a lot of people who are not Chris".

So Chris cursed and started removing parts to get at the problem area while i provided encouragement and dicked around with his camera, which was much nicer than mine:










Chris managed to get most of the water out of there, clean the area up a bit, and displace the rest of the water with some WD40 (the WD stands for Water Displacement--go figure), and we carved up a bottle and ziptied it in place, for a homemade fender extension that I think Macgyver would be proud of:


Will it work?
Will our heroes get eaten by bears?
How does engine type correlate with sexual preference?

Tune in next time to find out!


Circle Jerks 4: Live Free or Die Jerks (the last part)

Arctic Circle Jerks Part 2: Graffiti, Firewater, and Gravel

Arctic Circle Jerks: Part 1, for those just joining us.

So anyway, we looked around for something to siphon gas from or whatever, and then made elaborate plans to put all of Chris's gas in my tank so I could make it to a side road 30 miles up that led to a station 20 miles off the main road, and then bring back my full tank plus all 3 ItzaGasCans full so we could both make it to the next station down the road.

As it turns out, though, there was another open station not more than 5 miles down the road that wasn't on my map. This is because my map was a copy of the Milepost from 2003 (I am a genius), which was woefully out of date with regard to where fuel was.

So we filled up our tanks plus one of the emergency cans, just in case:


and Chris transformed into a ninja, with his new fleece cold weather gear and an official Harley-Davidson balaclava he picked up in Prince George. Note that the gas is $1.21 per litre:


We finally made it to Fort Nelson that night, where we had not managed to find a Couchsurfing host, so we put up our tent at a campsite at the edge of town, but not before visiting the local liquor store--it had been a really long and painful day and there's no way we were going to end it sober.

Have I mentioned my seat yet? The Suzuki DR650SE has the worst seat I've ever had the misfortune to do any distance on. To give you some context on this statement, I once did a round trip from LA to San Fran on this:



Yes, that seat is a license plate. The padded thing is a backrest. The bike's name was Gary. And that seat wasn't as bad as the godawful thing on the DR. I don't have a big ass by any reasonable ass measure, but the seat on the DR had at least an inch and a half of my ass hanging off each side of it, and was hard as a rock. So those first few days of the trip, I think I had some idea of what it feels like after some of the bad prison lovin'. Eventually I had the genius idea to turn that self-inflating sleeping pad into a ghetto air-filled seat cushion, which still wasn't all that great, but improved greatly on the alternative.

So I was still getting it prison style, but it was the lonely prison sex now instead of the angry prison sex, which is to say, with more lube and less punching. At this point I'd take what I could get.

Which brings us back to the need to drink. We picked up a bottle of Dr. McGillicuddy's Fireball Whisky and opened it up after we had settled in for the night.

Chris, Nate:


Meet Dr. McGillicuddy:





Truly, a pleasure to meet you.





and this is our tiny 32-year-old backpacker tent, set up there in Fort Nelson:


So the next morning, we had some trailmix, shared stories of hilarious sexual misadventures with each other's moms, and we were off, heading for Whitehorse:


We stopped at a small turnout to get some shots of the gorgeous scenery out here in the far outskirts of nowhere:







Hey, is that graffiti?

Nope, that's a shitload of graffiti!


"Dana Tubman smokes fatties with Brad"--kickass.


"Miller Mayes smells like [picture of poop] POOP"--I love the dedication to the message here, where they illustrated it, just in case you were not at all familiar with poop. Mad props, yo.

What can I say, I was inspired. So I whipped out a blue Sharpie and added my own, which I had spent the last 2 hours composing in my head:

There once was a native Alaskan,
Whose ass could be had for the askin'--
They say her caboose
Could handle a moose,
But had odors in dire need of maskin'.

I actually composed a second limerick as well, which was incredibly clever but so dirty it offended even me, so I'm not going to share that one. It really is that bad.

So we kept on, and passed Muncho Lake, which was gorgeous:


and then the famous Signpost Forest, in Watson Lake, BC, made from thousands of stolen roadsigns from all around the world, sort of like a frat house without any house or frat boys. Or beer, which I could have used at that point:




A while down the road, I had to pee. Bad. I kid you not, this was not a planned photo op--I stopped, whipped it out, and was peeing long enough for Chris to stop his bike, get off, see that I was pissing, start laughing that it was taking so long to finish, and THEN pull off his helmet and gloves, dig out his camera and take a picture, and then bust out laughing again because he seriously couldn't believe it. I must have been really using the Camelbak that day, because I am not exaggerating when I say that it took me a good 90 seconds at max flow rate to fully relieve myself:


I didn't even take the time to lose the helmet, that's how bad I had to go.

Man, that was awesome.

Anyhoo, we stopped in Whitehorse, Yukon that night and couchsurfed with a charming lady named Mel:


She let us cook bison burgers on her stove and use her internet and bring all our crap inside from the cold:


So I figured I'd repay her by letting Chris wash the dishes:


We crashed on her couches, and then woke up as cheery could be:


...and took off into the morning, heading for Fairbanks, Alaska.

I could probably just replace a lot of these pictures with the statement "and there was more nature stuff", but that just wouldn't properly communicate just how much fuckin' nature we passed. Anyone who likes space and trees should come up here, because this part of the world is big as damn.

Big as damn.



Here's Chris, showing the ideal position for super-long-distance riding on a sportbike. Laying on the tank, feet hooked over the passenger pegs. Works pretty well, although it looks strange.

Also, by this point Chris had gotten wise and gotten himself a Camelbak as well. I don't think either of us would attempt another serious road trip without one.


Speaking of big as damn:




I think that's Kluane Lake. It's pretty fuckin' large.

Gratuitous "parking in a no parking zone" shot:



Chris takes a squeegee to his bike:



I don't bother. We've been slaughtering bugs by the handful for the last 2 or 3 days, and we will continue to do so for a while, so I'll just let it be for now:

In retrospect, maybe I should have at least scraped off my headlight - there wasn't much light coming through the mass of dead bugs at that point.



The sky was angry that day, my friends, but I've never seen it more beautiful:

































The roads had only started to get shitty the day before, on our way from Fort Nelson to Whitehorse. Discontinuous permafrost and frost heaving tear the shit out of the roads, so the Alaska Highway, which is what we were on for a huge portion of the trip, is always under construction. And by "under construction", I mean "covered in 2 inches of loose gravel for some fucking reason".





If you're in an RV or a truck, it's no big deal, even though the retarded RV drivers slow down to about 30 over the stuff anyway. On a dualsport bike with 80% street-oriented tires, it's pretty shitty. On a sportbike, it's terrifying, like skating on marbles. Not including the infamous Dalton Highway, we probably did at least 80 miles of shitty terrifying gravel construction roads, and we did not particularly enjoy them:


After enough of that shit, Chris was considering lighting himself on fire with his Bag O' Gas (which is what those cardboard gas cans become after some rain) as a rational alternative to more gravel riding:


As a bonus, the weather started getting exciting somewhere around Fort Nelson. It would be a gorgeous sunny day, birds singing and moose humping at the side of the road, and then the road would change direction all of a sudden and put you right under a gigantic pouring raincloud. 20 minutes later, you'd turn a corner, head down into a valley, and it would be that gorgeous day again. Through most of upper BC and the Yukon, this cycle ended up repeating sometimes 12 times a day.

On the upside, though, the periodic rain helped wash the layer of dead bugs off my faceshield. Hey, glass half full! (Full of bugs.)

Anyhoo, we made it to Fairbanks late that night, after 590 miles of gravel and rain. We stopped at a Fred Meyers to pick up some food and other supplies, and our lady cashier had a mustache. I guess that's just how they roll here in Alaska.

And then we ate here:


Northernmost Denny's in the world. And we ate there. Take that, Lewis and Clark.

Then we set up our crap in a campsite in town:




and passed the hell out.

Tune in next time for the last leg up to the Arctic Circle, and the start of the long stupid journey back home!

Arctic Circle Jerks 3: Jerks with a Vengeance