I added a Husqvarna Norden 901 to my garage. Why?
On an episode of of This Motorcycle Life, the host interviewed Melissa Holbrook Pierson. She’s most famous for taking a very long ride on a Ural with her disabled child, but also for writing a book called “The Man Who Stop at Nothing“, in which she claims that Iron Butt style riding is the most pure form of motorcycling. As a multiple Iron Butt finisher , I must disagree.
For a long time, a couple of extreme events have been calling to me. The first is the Hoka Hey Challenge, in which riders cover around 10,000 miles in short order, often 10 days or so. The rules include no staying in hotels and no using GPS. You have to sleep by your pony and follow a set of written directions with paper maps. The first years, people wrecked and died because the trip included gravel and a lot of extreme terrain.
The other is the James Dalton Highway, riding all the way to the Arctic Circle in Deadhorse/Prudhoe Bay. The last 400 miles of this trip is largely shitty gravel.
Beyond these trips, it should come as no surprise that significant miles of dirt and gravel on a 1000lb touring motorcycle is at best impractical. The tires don’t grip, the suspension isn’t built for that kind of rut. The appeal of a machine that can gobble some highway miles but then just take a sharp right onto a gravel road, a Backcountry Discovery Route, maybe some muddy Jeep trails, is strong.
There are views and settings that are hard to get to, and some of those are precious and likely to be much more sparsely occupied than the paved roads to a county park.
The Challenger, of course, is still in the garage. The American highway system is amazing, and that is the machine for long road trips.
I didn’t grow up on dirt bikes like a lot of people did. The guy who’s been putting patches on his black vest for years is buying the full Klim riding gear and hopefully putting some stickers on “panniers” soon.
Adventure touring is the purest form of motorcycling.
two wheeled thoughts 