Passes & Canyons Blog

We were up in Eagle at Willie and Jungle’s earlier this week and to our pleasure and surprise, Mario was there, too. You’ll understand what a surprise this was as I tell you Mario lives in the Yukon. He’s a long way from home.

We met Mario four years ago on a ride Judy and I did with Willie and Jungle and some others up to British Columbia, to Banff and Jasper, along the Ice Fields Parkway. Mario flew in from the Yukon to Calgary, rented a car, met us in Radium Hot Springs, then cruised with us for about five days. Super nice guy.

So among the many things we talked about, Mario told us of a road north of where he lives that had been built across the tundra. I don’t recall if he said anything about the purpose of the road or where it went to and from, but the road itself was the item of interest. First off, it’s hard to build a road across the tundra. As the soil freezes and thaws the road gets lifted, sinks, and you end up with mile after mile of some terrific whoops. Whoops are great fun for a short distance but not something you want to drive on for a couple hundred miles.

To build this road they laid down some kind of fabric as wide as the road was to be and then covered it with sand. We’re talking some honking big rolls of fabric. Let’s see: 18 feet by 150 miles . . .

You can see how this type of road could better handle the freeze and thaw and the shifting. But there was some kink that nobody had expected. In the first couple months it was open, Mario said, the EMTs had to go out something like 50 times because motorcycles had had bad crashes. And primarily these were all heavy cruisers, Harleys mainly. What the heck was going on?

Mario went out to ride the road himself on his Kawasaki KLR 650. Everything was fine at first but then it got to where he felt like he was floating. He came close to crashing but managed to ride it out. What the heck?

Riding on, more cautiously now, the same thing kept happening. He had a hunch, and he pulled over to see if he was right. This is not a busy road so he had to wait awhile but eventually another vehicle came along and he saw just what he expected to see. It was like this.

The fabric material was waterproof, and beneath it, with the sun beating down on the sand, heat permeated and melted the permafrost. This released water, which had nowhere to go so it sat there. When a vehicle would come along some of the water would get pushed along under the fabric, gradually building up to something of a wave, which would start lifting the front end of a motorcycle up–the floating feeling–until such time as the front wheel would go on over the crest of the wave and suddenly the biker was running steeply downhill ahead of the wave. Then you hit level ground at a steep downhill angle and things do not go well.

Once he had this figured out Mario pushed on, cautiously, and eventually found what seemed to be the best way to ride it. He would stand up on the pegs and lean back, like you would on sand going down a hill. Hard to do on a big Harley, but OK on a KLR. So he rode to the end of the road and then turned around and rode back. Fun in the Yukon, huh?

Biker Quote for Today

More people die in their sleep than on motorcycles, so sleep less, ride more.