Journey Of A Lifetime

By Rob Keller

When I first started to pursue the idea of riding my 2014 BMW R1200 GS adventure motorcycle to the northernmost road in North America, I knew it would take months of planning and, equally as important, plenty of time to complete this 8,000-mile journey.

In my research, one of the repeated themes crossing my computer screen was a rider trying to cram the round-trip ride into two weeks and not being able to take in the sights. They were riding long and grueling hours just to check this item off their bucket lists.

In addition, I have always wanted to be the “first” to do something big and exciting, like be the first Army public information officer to fly into space or the first to motorcycle the Dalton Highway—more commonly known as the “haul” road to the Arctic Ocean’s Prudhoe Bay.

Well, I will have to settle for the first person in my family to navigate from Bismarck, N. D., to Deadhorse, Alaska, and return. I set aside 30 days to accomplish this amazing and wonderful ride.

The ride to Alaska from the lower 48 is more than a motorcycle journey. It’s a ride that will test your skills and patience and overwhelm you with thousands of sights and sounds along the way.

It requires more planning than most.

When I first rode to Alaska, in 2008, it was to celebrate my retirement from the U.S. Army. Contrary to my wife’s advice, I made the trip solo. For this Arctic trip—which began on July 1, 2017—I took along an Army buddy and my brother, so we could share the experience.

We were about to tackle some of the most remote, wild and scenic portions of the world. It was like we had awakened a “wild at heart” spirit that lies dormant in so many of us. And when the ride was over, we both felt an accomplishment that only a small group of riders would ever contemplate undertaking, much less enjoy.

Someone once said to “expect the best and plan for the worst.” It was, as the saying goes, the ride of a lifetime.

The purpose of my story is to not tell you what we experienced and did, but to create in you the excitement for undertaking your own journey, one that you can carry with you the rest of your life.

You will write your own story of your journey and tell it with photos, video and maybe a blog or social media posts to share it with others, who can experience it vicariously.

That’s what I did.

Your friends and family will travel with you and experience it from your first-person perspective.

You will discover that your daily, stress-packed routine back home will be replaced with solitude, as you ride hundreds of miles each day.

Thoughts about your job will fade and be replaced with your innermost dreams of conquering this wilderness and all the challenges it has to throw at you.

Folks will come into your lives on this trip, and some may become friends for the rest of your life.

We met people riding various types of motorcycles from Russia, Norway, England, Germany, France, and we all had this common denominator called motorcycling.

Some had been traveling for more than a year.

One young man fresh out of his first military stint rode his bike through 27 countries in five months.

I think they all had a “wanderlust” and a “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” calling them to head to this last frontier.

As we sat around the campfires sharing our adventures and close calls and talking about why we ride, it occurred to me that, maybe, we are all more alike than we think.

Researchers and psychologists have looked beyond motorcycle riding as purely an adrenaline kick. They have discovered that motorcyclists find riding to be a therapeutic process that allows themselves to de-stress.

So riding a motorcycle is great therapy. You will not find a sad biker on the Alaska Highway!

Every day you travel north takes you into another dimension, one filled with majestic views that not even pictures can portray. You will be exposed to a rich history of the Gold Rush along the Yukon River, ride the 1,500-mile Alaska Highway that was built is less than a year, see glaciers up close, cross mountain passes, experience the tundra and permafrost upheavals, fall asleep in your tent to the sound of a stream and a rain storm and see—up close and personal—brown bears, grizzly bears, muskoxen, caribou and ptarmigan grouse.

Planning and preparation are paramount for a trip of this magnitude, especially if you take the plunge and ride the Elliot and Dalton Highway, 500 miles north of Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean.

That was my bucket list item for this trip.

Let me caution you, though. I did too much planning and read all the adventure forums and almost became convinced that I did not have the technical riding skills to make this adventurous run.

If this is a must for you, then please have a riding partner to make the trek with you. Decisions can be made as a group and almost always turn out to be the right ones.

I was nervous, elated, cautious and giddy. I experienced all the ranges of emotions on our ride along this road that was spattered with frost heaves, graded dirt, mud surfaces and broken chip seal.

The road also has spots where it is smooth as glass. The key here is to ride it at your speed. Agree with your partner that road conditions will dictate your driving speed, and know when your limits are about to be reached.

There is one stretch of 250 miles where there is no fuel. There are no convenience stores, just boreal forest.

If you plan accordingly and take your time, the reward comes when you pull into Deadhorse, Alaska, and realize that you accomplished a feat that relatively few others have.

You have just ridden to the terminus of the northernmost road in North America.

Revel in the moment. Take pictures. Wade or swim in the Arctic Ocean.

All your planning, preparation and patience have paid off.

Call home. Post on Facebook. Tweet on Twitter.

Take the feeling, and lock it into your memory bank.

Your children and grandchildren will want you to tell them the story over and over about how you tamed the “haul” road and survived.

You are a modern day explorer, and you may be the first in your family to have ever done such a thing.

Rob Keller is an AMA member from Bismarck, N.D.

Some Things To Consider

1. Our ride from Bismarck, N.D., to Deadhorse, Alaska, was 8,300 miles.
2. We were gone July 1-31, 2017.
3. Sunlight at this latitude will be over 20 hours. Don’t be tricked into thinking you can ride that long. You need rest.
4. Expect any type of weather, any time. Locals say June is spring, July is summer and August is fall.
5. Temperatures will vary, along with precipitation. Going through a pass can drop the temps into the 30s and 40s. Carry gear that will keep you warm and comfortable in these wide ranging conditions.
6. Your motorcycle must be in peak operating condition. Use knobby tires.
7. Bring along a tire repair kit and air compressor and know how to use them. I advise my friends to practice plugging or changing a tire in the dark, because that is probably when a flat will occur!
8. Be in good physical shape before the ride.
9. Don’t forget your passport, insurance cards, etc.
10. There are plenty of social media sites, websites and motorcycle forums to help you plan your trip. Use them. I found that the best item was Milepost magazine. You get a code to log onto the digital version, so you don’t need to take the heavy book.