With only a few weeks left before the big Arctic Ocean trip, I wanted to do one last weekend of riding to shake down the bike and my gear. I also a half-worn set of tires, fairly fresh oil, and front brake pads I didn’t love that I wanted to burn through before my last round of maintenance before the trip.
Taking advantage of the Memorial Day weekend, I decided to do the Mass and first Vermont legs of the NEBDR. Again. I figured knowing the roads and the campsites would help me isolate any issues by removing variables, but I also just really love these two days of riding. As far as I knew the Class 4 roads in VT were opened up again, so I decided to take about 60% of my total gear instead of my full setup. I also decided to invite some friends along, so my buddies Nick and Dylan joined for big chunks of the trip.
Day 1: Mass
We met up and set off my house on Saturday morning, burning to the rendezvous with the BDR in southern MA. One of the things I like most about this segment of the BDR is the gentle ramp-up in difficulty, which definitely suited Nick on his first full day of off-pavement riding on his Tiger 800. I think Dylan was a bit bored in the beginning of the day, but the track has enough technical sections to keep the route interesting as the day went on.
Dylan split off at the end of the day since he hates camping, and Nick and I made camp in Clarksburg State Park (my usual campground at Mohawk Trail was fully booked, sadly). A bit of rain ended our night early, but the new tent did great.
Day 2: VT
Nick and I took off onto the route in the morning, and I guessed a spot that Dylan could meet us around lunch. The morning of Section 4 is pretty but non-technical, so we made good time and the 12pm meet-up with Dylan a few hours into the route actually worked out pretty well. It was still another few hours of riding before we hit the first Class 4.
The floods in ’23 definitely left some scars on the route. While I remembered the first Class 4 having one difficult section, the erosion had made things more challenging than they had been in ’22 and there were now two pretty gnarly bits with large step-ups. Nick struggled a lot on his big ADV bike with 50/50 tires, and by the end of the first expert section he was pretty well pummeled for the day. Dylan and I carried on through the rest of them, but we were both pretty beat by the time we were outside of Barnard and the end of the route.
The first Class 4 definitely has the hardest single feature. The second section is probably the most consistently difficult, with a few long rock gardens and lots of ruts. The third section is the longest and is a very rocky ATV/OHV trail with lots of drainage ditches that can catch you out. The remaining expert sections are actually pretty mild in comparison to the first three, but I imagine they can get a lot trickier with heavy rain and mud.
Camp at Silver Lake was pretty much how I remembered it, just a bit crowded for the holiday weekend. Despite only a 7% chance of rain, my night of relaxing around the campfire was ended early by one of the worst torrential downpours I’ve experienced while camping. The Tiger Wall tent did its job well, but I still had to pack up a pretty soggy camp in the morning.
Ride Home & Aftermath
The ride home went pretty well, and I left with my confidence in the trip maintained. I was still averaging about 50 MPG even with flogging it a bit on and off-road. The 400 mile days at the start of the Arctic trip will still feel like slogs, but my average 200 mile day should be pretty comfortable.
The maintenance marathon over the next few days was a bit more of a mixed bag. The new Motoz tires actually spooned on pretty easily, the front brake caliper didn’t give me any issues on my pad change, and I put in a brand new EBC racing clutch for good measure.
On the other hand, my fairly new chain completely rusted after the two evenings and day of riding home in the rain. It cleaned up pretty well, but I decided to replace it with a gold finished chain for (hopefully) better corrosion resistance for the trip. None of the name brand chains were in stock for the DRZ, so I took a chance on Tusk.
my oil consumption was also higher than expected at ~1L recovered after about 1,000 miles since the last change. I had been revving out the bike pretty hard off-road and had taken the interstate more often than usual for commuting and the ride home from this trip, which are likely contributors. More concerning, however, I found some bits of ferrous metal on the drain plug magnet. While I couldn’t positively identify them, my best guess is part of an oil seal ring, which would explain the higher oil consumption.
Unfortunately there’s no way I have enough time to do another top-end job on the bike before the trip (or likely even get parts in time). Since the oil consumption is my only symptom (power is still good, no smoking or burned oil smell in the exhaust, and no extra noises from the engine) I’m still going to take the DRZ for the trip and keep a close eye on the oil consumption.
Worst case scenario if that ring breaks further and causes more damage to the engine, but the magnetic plug should hopefully handle that. It’s also been almost 4,000 miles since the rebuild, so I’m betting catastrophic failure would have already happened if it were going to. If I do have an issue that I can’t fix on the road then I’ll have to rent a van or truck and finish the trip on four wheels, but either way the engine is coming apart again once I get back from Anchorage.