1236 miles, 4 days - The Michigan U.P. Safari
By Chad Berger

Day 3

We headed out of Little Lake and into Gwinn for Breakfast. We had to make a detour from the route to avoid some road construction. We got back on track and and headed up to Munising to get gas and some camping supplies. After Munising is the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. We stopped by Twelve mile beach then headed up to Hurricane River on some really sandy roads.

Twelvemile beach

Hurricane River

Wheres the scantily clad ladies..what kinda beach is this anyways?

This area has an excellent backpacking trail near the beach, something like 38 miles long I think. Bryan has done it a couple times and said it was great.
Next stop, the Grand Sable Sand dunes. Bryan said they would be impressive and it certainly was.

In the above pic there is the Au Sable lighthouse.
There is a spot on the Dunes where in the hayday of logging they had a chute down the dunes that they would send the logs flying down the 300 foot dunes to the lake, where they would be floated out to ships.
Here is the area the chute used to be.

Bryan checking out the chute. You can go down this but its harder than hell to get back up.

Heading out towards the Crisp Point lighthouse.

We gassed up near the mouth of the Little Two hearted river and had to either take a shortcut on the ORV trail or backtrack a ways to the gravel forest roads.
In this 3 mile section of ORV trail I dumped my bike 2 or 3 times. The sand was super deep and I had major issues. In the above picture I was busy screaming a series of expletives that woulda impressed anybody...it wouldn't be the last time I did it either.

We finally make it to the Crisp Point lighthouse.

and off we go again on some better ORV trails and forest roads.

The next little side trip was Raco Field. Raco field is an abandomed military airstrip, built around WWII to protect the locks at Sault St. Marie. There are 3 runways each around 5000 ft long and built in the shape of a triangle.

Bryan scooting down the runway.

We pull into a camprgound near St. Ignace early and head out to a buffet then go grab some beer and head to camp. I spend the rest of the night trying to fix my thermarest and drinking some cold ones.
aahh

The whole time on the ride I was wishing I had a KTM 450 dual sported.
Bryans DRZ worked great, but so did my XR, well except for the sand. I'm sure the sand thing was mostly my fault but Bryan hopped on my bike and was suprised with the geometry. On the XR, you sit right on the tank, even when you slide back, you end up sliding forward because of the seat angle. The DRZ's geometry is much more like a dirt bike. When you sit naturally on the bike, your arms are pretty straight, and your hips are probably 2 feet from the center of the steering tube.
I know the DRZ isn't the greatest dirt bike either but its better than the XR. Heck, I think you could ride a GS or a V-Strom on most of the route, its pretty easy for the most part, but there are some sucker sections.

Its a pretty cool area. Its really hard to belive that something like this is possible anymore. Its staggering the amount of land up there. There was one section that I'm pretty sure I didn't see a house for more than 30 miles! Everything was pretty laid back, the people and the weather were great, and it felt like we could do whatever the hell we wanted.
The Cycle Conservation club of Michigan ( http://www.cycleconservationclub.org/index.htm) actually has three things like this. The U.P. safari, the L.P. Safari ( which is also 1200 miles ) and the M.C.C.C.T. trail safari which is 500-800 miles depending on how you do it and is the longest permanently marked motorcycle trail on earth!

Onto Page 4