So I spent this previous weekend up in British Columbia (again), this time in the company of my good friend Colleen and a bunch of folks from ADVRider. In contrast to most of my longer trips, which tend to be 90% pavement and 10% dirt, this trip was very heavily biased toward dirt and gravel riding, and was very challenging for me. I considered myself a fairly competant dirt rider, though new to it, but these roads were well beyond anything I've experienced before and at some points I was definitely outside my comfort zone. The Strom was dropped a number of times on one particular section of very nasty road (marked "EXT. ROUGH / 4WD ONLY" on the map, which should have been a hint to avoid it) and though it escaped without any damage other than scuffs to the Givi bags, it was still quite a harrowing experience.
The road in question involved 45-degree scree and boulder slopes, crossings of relatively deep streams, and other adventurous things which were more difficult on the mostly-street VStrom 1000 than they might have been on a bike better suited to this sort of thing, like a KLR. The various mods I've made to the bike - removing secondaries, changing the gearing for crazy acceleration, etc - didn't really help it out in the back-of-beyond, either. Ah well. Colleen tells me that adventure is "adversity recounted at leisure" and I'm inclined to agree. That doesn't mean I feel like seeking said adversity out in the future, though...
Check out Colleen's ride report of the trip at her website here. My pictures are also posted on my Flickr page for any interested parties.
In other news, at the beginning of this trip I noticed that my recently-installed crash bars from Pat Walsh Designs had failed. Several welds had given way under normal operating conditions. I emailed Pat when I returned from the trip and I need to give him credit for outstanding customer service and standing behind his product very honorably, as he's having me send the bars back at his expense to figure out what went wrong, as well as offering me a refund of my money or a brand new set of bars. This kind of customer service is rare in my experience. I haven't decided whether I intend to replace the bars with another set of his design, but given my treatment I would be happy to do business with him in the future.
