Adventure Begins / Breakdowns, Fires & Moon dust / EP1

Hey there fellow adventurers, JR here with you, coming to you on a frosty day in the Blue Ridge Mountains at Headquarters, Virginia. I've been out doing maintenance on my bikes, thinking about the upcoming season, getting ready for it, and also thinking about the wonderful adventure I had this past season. Riding my DR650 from Washington State all the way to Virginia. Thousands of adventure miles and camping. Episode one is coming straight up ahead. You want to subscribe so you don't miss all the upcoming episodes that covers that whole trip through the west, the Colorado Rockies and on. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. How did this all come about? Well I was on the Oregon VDR. I'll leave a list of that playlist at the end of the video if you haven't seen those. I met Chris and Roger, ATM 890 riders out from Texas on a multi-week ride of their own. We became friends. They needed some maintenance and rest days. I said come on and camp in my backyard at the Washington Headquarters. They did and they invited me to join them on their journey. That set a kernel of thought in my mind. I need to get this DR back to Virginia. So I said I'm with you. They had to leave ahead of me. While I got ready, I joined them a couple of days later out of Nancy, Washington. We headed across. My adventure Washington to Virginia begins straight ahead. Subscribe so you don't miss and I'll see you out there. In the morning I'm going to head out on an extended adventure across Washington VDR down through Idaho. My plan is to continue eastward over into Colorado. Some of Utah on the way. I'm going to meet up with my son there. Get on the tat tracks all the way back to my home in Virginia. Glad you're coming along. Let's get going. A brand new adventure is starting. Leaving Wenatchee Confluence State Park. Riding with Chris and Roger's in town. Getting a bolt from Ace Hardware. Trying to get rolling before it gets too hot. We're on section three. The last part out of Wenatchee. I trailered over to meet these guys all the way from Vancouver. It was a long trailer. Glad to be on the bike and on the trail. Anyway, I'm going to pay attention. It's getting a little chunky here. I saw Chris almost spin out right there. Loaded a little heavier than I really like to be but that kind of starts out that way. You've got food that you're going to eat up and gas and well I had a little spill back there. Some super duper deep silt. A bug just tried to enter my helmet. I went down softly but my right leg got pinned back there behind my soft pan ear. One more coming. Looks like Chris is caught up there behind me. Well he got the bike up off of my right leg. It was definitely pinned pretty good. Makes you think twice about going solo all the time. That would have been very painful to get out from under 9-10 inch powder rutted out. It was not fun. This is fun. All right. Kashmir. Gassed up. Got a little refreshment. Heading out to start section four. Section four out of Kashmir. Beautiful morning. This is a gorgeous canyon that we're climbing up. Destination Shilland. Let's see how far we get today. Well we've been climbing climbing and now we get a little bit of a view looking up I think at the Cascades National Park up there. Trail is pretty challenging. Great views. Headed up towards Chumstick Mountain. Yeah this is quite a view. A little two track. We're not going up that though. Cascade National Park. I believe that range out over there is excellent. counting the trails. It's kind of smoky. There's a fire burning up near the Canadian border at the section six here. Look back and see Roger coming. We got to go back and get Roger. His trailer busted. Yeah he's back there. We're gonna have to figure out what to do with him now. Okay. All right. We go back and figure it out. The Roger's off-road adventure trailer has had a failure. This is a custom trailer that he's manufactured himself. He is an engineer. Real believer in the usefulness of a trailer like this. And he's put 20 some thousand proving miles on this. If you're interested in one of these trailers, I'll leave a contact link for him below. I'm sure he'll figure this out. A weak link point and get it fixed. I don't want to stop you guys from doing your trip. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna monitor this this trail. You know there's the Washington BDR Facebook page. There's guys that live in the area that have trailers. They would come and come and help. Very fortunate some guys came along with a four by four jeep. Big back has enough room to load the cargo into it. Take it on to Chelan. So quite an adventure. Canadians. Thanks. Okay those overlanders came to the rescue. It was a real blessing. And they're up ahead of us. We'll meet them on the pavement in Chelan. But take a look at this. Oh my gosh. Very hard to take your eyes off of the road to film it. In fact you better not. You'll be going down there. So it's about uh 3 30 or so in the afternoon now. So we're about ready to head down through the jungle. That's the alternate route or the route that we want to take. Chris missed it. He's on up that way. Yeah working our way down through the jungle. Deep ruts. Narrow ruts. Brush hitting against you on the sides. Deep silt. Chris had a little off and we're reorganizing ourselves. It's no joke. Get lost in the jungle. Taking our way down to Lake Chelan. And meet up with Roger again. It's uh Saturday morning. We rode long yesterday. We got into this camp at about 10 30 last night. We ended up eating supper after dark in town in Chelan. Which is down in the valley there. Lots of smoke. So my breakfast is uh yellow chicken curry left over from supper last night. And Chris is cooking up some steak. I can't believe Roger doesn't eat it. Are you gonna partake? Yeah you better. Gourmet. Gourmet as they say in Virginia. All right packed up. Fires up to the north. Oroville and on up to the Canadian border. I guess they want me to lead. Yeah so we came up a portion of this last night in the dark to set up camp. Not ideal. I don't like it. But I was in the lead and that's a plus because in the dark behind me those guys were lighting up the dust. Big chunks. Definitely places to uh get a pinch flat. Got no time for adventure riders. No sir. Now we're up at 6 140 feet. It's nice and cool. A little bit of control issues with our bikes because we bought groceries at Chelan. Chelan and uh got a little more weight than we had the day before. Yeah this road doesn't even show up on my map. A little break here and uh off we are for Conconelli again. Road's gotten a lot better. I don't know how long it'll last like this but might be a little welcome change. Beautiful green mountainsides though. Up out of the uh dry western side of the slopes right now. This is nice. Dust though. Dust. Dust. That's the bane of the route this time of year. I think I'll hang back a little bit here and uh let Chris get down up ahead. The dust settle down. Well we're on some pavement now. I think we'll be on pavement all the way into Conconelli and I have to admit that's a little bit of a welcome change. Sky is gray overcast. I think a lot of that is smoke from the fire up north of us and we are going to figure things out in Conconelli as to our routing. But right now temperatures are great. Enjoying the ride. Goats! In Carlton getting lunch. Some gas. Roger's gonna hit the slab and uh go take care of business. So we're gonna say adieu. Adieu and uh hit up the trail. Okay we're ready to head out. Leave Roger behind. Uh me and Chris now. So long buddy. So Roger's decided he needs to split off now. Go back and finish the recovery of his trailer. He'll do all that. Later join up with Chris and they'll finish their ride together. An avid adventurer. Thanks for letting me join you. Okay whoa okay okay. Now we've left Roger to his own devices. We're continuing up uh section five out of Carlton towards Okanagan. Fire's burning to the north still. Not sure how far we'll get. Chapers that dust! Move moose! Guys are out looking for those cows. Hey guy! Got the horses in the trailers. I just had an off in this unbelievable moon dust. Embedded rocks under it. They've been logging through here. Chris went down behind me. Just helped me pick mine up. I'm gonna get up here and uh see how he does coming up this hill. This is nasty stuff. Let's see if he can make it up the hill. Really a challenge. Yeah hope we're gonna get to camp here very shortly. And uh this probably continues all the way out to Nothing left.