Finding Dual-Sport Roads To Ride
The DualSportMaps.com website.
I was looking at old Examiner.com articles with an eye toward doing another Examiner Resurrection and I came across something I had forgotten about. A little preface first:
I totally loved the dual-sport ride I did with others in the RMMRC recently and was trying to figure out how to make more of those happen. I joined the group about three years ago with at least part of my intent being to meet up with other folks to do that kind of riding. But this is the first such ride in all that time.
I realize that if I want to do dual-sport rides I can take the initiative and put it out there and presumably others will join me. But the weak point in the chain is that I don’t know a lot of good unpaved roads to ride. I will frequently be heading somewhere else and see a gravel road going off somewhere and wonder where and whether that might be one to explore. But I don’t want to take a group out there only to find out that it runs up in the hills a ways and then dead-ends.
No, the obvious thing to do is to pre-ride the route first to make sure it’s something to take a group on, but that gets me back around to my first issue: needing someone to ride with. I don’t want to head off into the boonies on some lonely road all by myself and run into trouble, with nobody likely to come along to help me any time in the next three days.
End of preface.
So this old Examiner post I came across is about this website, DualSportMaps.com. And as I looked it over I figured that rather than posting the old piece I might as well do a new piece–and here we are.
DualSportMaps.com is a pretty basic site but it offers exactly what the name implies. It has some rides put up by the going doing the website but also–probably predominantly–rides put up by people like you and me. You start with a broad map and then zoom in and in to the area you are interested in and you see what there is on offer.
For instance, when I zoom in enough to get clear separation by state it shows two blobs in Colorado, one with 209 rides and the other with 268. Zoom in once more and you now see smaller blobs with 3, 34, 48, 68, 67, 77, and 19 rides. Keep zooming in and the blobs keep dividing until you are looking at individual rides. For example, the Bill Moore Lake ride north out of Empire is shown here.
Now, unless you register, the site doesn’t give you much information on the condition of the road. But it’s free so there’s no reason not to register and then a great deal of information becomes available. It would still be necessary to pre-ride the thing before leading a group there. And once again, that gets back to needing someone to go with me, but at least now I have a tool to explore and select the routes that look most promising. And then heck, if nothing else, Judy and I can go exploring in her Subaru Outback and then I could lead a group there.
Of course, this is exactly why I do these Examiner Resurrection pieces. Most of the stuff I wrote for Examiner years ago is old news and of no interest today. But some are what writers call “evergreen,” meaning they are timeless and just as relevant today as 10 years ago.
Biker Quote for Today
A lot of fun when you get it right but the other side of the coin is when you crash. — Mick Doohan
Tags: DualSportMaps.com
