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

Parting Thoughts

Chad ->

It was pretty cheap actually. You have to be a CCC member, which is $30 and you need to buy the Safari packet, which is $25 and includes your passbook and a CD with all the GPS info, Maps and other info. Then, you need a Michigan ORV stickers which is $16.75 I think.
There really isn't alot of info out there about this trip, thats why I wanted to post some pics. Its a great trip with some awesome scenery, get out and ride it!

I fall down alot, I have a bit of a problem with deep sand. I do OK if the sand is only 2-3 inches deep, but when it gets real deep and tracked up, I have a tendency to wipe out. I've tryed about every technique out there, and they all end up the same way.

Bryan ->

Chad rides pretty well. I think it has more to do with the bike. I sat on it and it seemed like you were sitting on the front wheel. Maybe he should go with the DRZ after all . . .
And hey, some of that deep sand was really tough. The only redeeming factor was that sometimes there would be a small piece of good trail in between patches to let you get the bike trimmed back into coordinated flight before plowing into the next section of "turbulence". Once you lost speed, it was a real struggle to recover.

Background - Even though we did it in four days, it was not a death march. We ate a leisurely breakfast sometime during the morning (restaurant – we didn’t cook), made side trips, and took a lot of breaks and photos. For dinner, we would pick up a sub and a couple of beers to enjoy at the campsite. If you keep moving at a reasonable pace you really rack up the miles. It probably should have been a five day ride for us but we got a little crazy the last day and rode out the finish just as it got dark. Take those side trips. If something interests you, go for it.

Consider this: if you stretch the trip out too long, it has the potential to turn into something boring or even become a chore. We stayed active and eliminated dead time by filling our days with a good mix of riding and tourist stops. The bottom line for us was that we like to ride and we came to ride, so we rode until we ran out of time, light, or ambition.

My DRZ-400S was stock except for the fresh set of DOT knobbies – and don’t those tires boost your confidence when your bike is swimming around under you in that soft sand or spongy gravel. Oh yeah, I also “upgraded” to a gel seat. This didn’t work out for me as the upgrade seems like I went from sitting on a concrete block to sitting on a railroad tie. When the beaded seat cover I ordered didn’t come in, I went to a discount store and bought the auto version for about seven bucks. I folded it into the shape of the seat using zip ties (you can’t cut the beads) and rode it the whole way. This thing kept me cool and dry – no monkey butt! Try it – you will like it. If not, the wooden beads would make a nice campfire along the route.

Clothing - I left my riding clothes at home and instead wore light backpacking trousers, a long sleeved shirt and desert boots. The theme was to keep cool and dry and it worked. I wore a sleeveless travel vest because I liked the easily accessible pockets. If it would have rained or if we would have had wet trail, I had a gore-tex rain suit and almost had gore-tex socks for my boots.
I wore a fleece lined jacket in the early morning and later evening when the temperature was between 50-70 degrees. If you don’t wear a jacket, you might want to wear a mock turtle neck tee shirt of a dust rag around your neck to keep those crunchy bugs you run into from going down the front of your shirt. Dark sunglasses won’t serve you well. You end up going from bright sunlight into a “forest tunnel” of dark shadows and it is hard to see the trail.

Camping/Packing - We took light sleeping bags and small tents. My air mattress, pillow, sleeping bag, tent, and extra clothes all rolled up into a compression stuff stack that I strapped to my luggage rack. I strapped a small lumbar pack around that for miscellaneous items. It took a day to learn how to pack everything securely. The lesson learned is that everything needs to be inside a bag. The whoops on the ORV trails cause you to jettison some things from your bike (like a can of chain lube, a water bottle, and assorted soft drinks in various stages of consumption). Put it all in a cheap stuff sack under some elastic cargo webbing. By the way, if you find one of my soft drinks, better wait until spring before you open it. It is probably still pretty fizzy from the paint shaker treatment it got on the whoops. I had a one gallon gas can for a while, but gave it up when I found out I didn’t need it at all. I also had a tow rope wrapped around my front fender – speaks for itself.

I ran 18/24 lbs in the tires. The couple extra pounds in the back was for the extra load. The bike rode well, even with the extra load, but was harder to handle standing still as it was more top heavy. Also, you can’t swing your leg over the back making getting on and off a chore. I had 5 or 6 good rock strikes. Sometimes you just can’t see them in the shadows or when just and edge juts up from the trail. Look out for wooden bridges too as the edges are sometimes exposed. I had heavy tubes and tire slime in both wheels. Chad and I had no flats.

Navigation - I had a Magellan Sport Track GPS mounted on the handlebar loaded with topo maps for the UP. I also loaded the waypoints from the CD but for some reason ended up with some big sections missing. Although I cobbed in a 12 plug for the GPS, I decided to go with a fresh set of AA batteries everyday instead. Saves on a lot of external power lost messages on the screen. I printed out the maps from the CD and put them in a waterproof 9X12 map case that I clipped to the crossbar with cheap key ring carabiners. I liked this because I could clip and flip the map over on the fly. I could display two full sheets at a time – one on each side. I also carried a DeLorme Gazetteer with the route highlighted on it. I put this in a jumbo waterproof map case and carabiner clipped it to my read cargo net. The Gazetteer is also great for map recons. The definition and detail is good and it shows a lot of area information regarding state and federal camp grounds and other items of interest. In an emergency it might be good for alternate routes and has lat/lon info in the margins. Road names vary from publication to publication and I attribute some of this to the “same road” having segments that have different names. The GPS pops up a window with road names (in addition to the names on the map) as you approach them – including the name of the road you are on. This is very handy. You have to be good enough with the GPS to operate it on the fly. You will have to zoom in and out a lot to get detail and look ahead for confirming waypoints. We had the waypoints starting out so they were great in confirming that we were following the route correctly. Later when we lost them, we were still OK because by that time we figured out distance, scale, and what each of the roads and trails might look like.

All that doesn’t mean you won’t still miss a few turns. Sometimes you are daydreaming and lose track of time/distance and mess up. If the trail you are on is more and more looking like less and less you are usually in the wrong place. Don’t get frustrated if you miss a few and have to back track. It happens to everyone. Instead, congratulate yourself on taking a scenic side trip in addition to the standard course and move on. These “exploratory moments” are actually kind of fun. You usually get an interesting ride.

The roads and trails vary. You can easily do 30-50 mph on much of the gravel and ORV trails. Some places slow you down to putt-putt speed (whoops, rocks, washouts, potholes). Roads that are also snowmobile trails are great because they have fabulous signage. Those that aren’t give you those adrenaline moments – you know, like when you are in the groove heading into a blind corner on a forest road when you suddenly realize that the road is turning much sharper than you are. Conveyor belts nailed to some bridge surfaces can be slippery. Echelon formations work good on most gravel roads to keep from powder coating the #2 rider. In narrow areas, a l-o-n-g trail formation will keep #2 out of the worst of the dust.

We didn’t run into a lot of traffic on the off pavement sections – even on Saturday. Deer seemed to be more present on the trails in the evenings although we saw a lot of them. I had no close calls but slowed down early when I saw one ahead.

Gas was not a problem. The longest stretch we had was 96 miles and I made that without going on reserve with my 2.4 gallon tank. Chad had a custom large tank and we had a siphon hose along just in case. That 96 miles would have been more like 80 but for a few “exploratory moments” on our part. We did have a problem with “intermittent” gas stops. One place had a note in the window proclaiming “no gas”. Others were closed. I usually gassed up when I got down a gallon or when I saw a very long stretch ahead. On one long run, the marked stations were closed. When I got close to a big town I already had about 90 miles on my tank and scoffed at an available station thinking I was packing sufficient cool to make it. Five miles out I hit reserve. I'm glad I did because now I can say that I had to go on reserve. We needed to be able to do that just to add drama to this story. We were short on harrowing tales of adventure because everything was going too well. Both Chad and I were often getting 50 mpg – except where the trail was tough.

Here is a basic route map.

uff da, that 4th day was a tough one!

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