I've been riding for years; 3 of my 4 bikes have been dual sport or adventure. I started on dirt bikes going back to my childhood. Generally I stick to the pavement, but I like a good fire road as much as the next guy. A good friend of mine picked up a used VStrom 650 a couple of years ago and got his license. This is technically his second season on 2 wheels. He's been bugging me to try some proper "adventure" riding off road. Today I took him on a road in my area called "Hogsback Road". It's on the maps, but it's an unmaintained road. It's popular with the 4x4 crowd, and the dirt bike crowd, and is about 4km long from where we picked it up. The last time I was on it, it was lots of dirt, some rock, and some sand. Well, today it was a lot of rock; like so much more rock than I was expecting. In the 5 years since I last rode down it, someone, I'm not sure who, has dumped tonnes of fist sized river rock all over the hills, up and down. I presume it is to stop erosion.
Anyway, we got on it, and the first part is a hill climb up to the actual "road". My buddy went first so I could watch him, with me following a good distance back. He of course fudged it half way up, and stalled out because he wasn't in first gear. Mistake #1. Mistake #2, he decided to get off the bike, on the hill. Mistake #3, he let go of the brake for some reason and had put the bike in neutral, while it was running. Mistake #4, I had pulled up about 10 feet behind him. Long and short, he dropped his bike pretty much right on top of me after rolling backwards down the hill 10 feet, with me yelling at him to grab the brake. I didn't go down, thankfully, but it was close. I picked a new line, and climbed to the top onto the main "road", with the intention of parking and going down the hill on foot to help my buddy. By the time I was starting to walk down the hill, his bike was back upright, and he was crawling up towards me. Awesome. I checked my bike over, and no damage from where his bike's rear rack had effectively landing on my front wheel.
At this point I asked him if he wanted to just turn around and go back down the hill and out to the main road. He wanted to push on, so with me leading now, we did. The last time I did this road was on a DL650A VStrom, and before that on a KLR650. The S10 is a wee bit heavier, though that torque makes up for it just by not having to constantly work the clutch; I can see how capable this machine would be in the hands of a more experienced off road rider. We pushed on, and thankfully we have helmet comms, because I lost him several times, and kept having to stop. While I was busy talking him through a section that was very sandy and rutted, I wasn't paying attention to my line, and got caught by a rut. That resulted in me clipping a tree with the bar end; actually the hand guard caught it. I kept the bike upright, and kept moving. In total I probably stopped to wait 4 times, each time wondering if I was going to have to walk back up the trail to rescue my buddy.
Several rocky steep hills later, and we emerged victorious beside a little pond and a short smooth 500m to the proper road again. I snapped a quick shot of the bike before we headed out again.
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I'm not sure I will be revisiting that "road" any time soon, and I think this cements that I am more about touring, then going off road. I will definitely never take a novice down a trail like this again, not even a short one like this. I spent nearly the entire time worrying about my buddy, which almost caused my own dumping of the bike.
That's what I did for my lunch break today.