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As we were putting this issue together Canada was in the deepest, darkest days of winter 2009. So it seemed appropriate that we look south, really far south, with an issue of travel stories intended to bring a little heat to chilled bones.
With the exception of two weeks over Christmas when we imported some of Canada’s “real winter” to Victoria, I have been riding to work each morning. But, unlike Victoria’s famous annual Flower Count, a show-offy civic pride-building event that starts sometime in February, my telling you that I can still ride to work at this time of year is not an attempt to flaunt the excellent climate here on Vancouver Island. And it’s not to prove a point either. I raise the subject simply because my motorcycle is my means of transportation, and while winter riding in Victoria isn’t always fun, the odd sunny afternoon in January mitigates the discomfort of a season of otherwise non-stop rain. It also forces me to contrast my own relative winter riding comfort levels against that of Michael Cole’s as he made his cross-Canada “Ride for Diabetes” this winter. I met him at the Edmonton Motorcycle Show in January where his level of exhaustion was apparent. I counted myself lucky not to have to ride in the kinds of temperatures and conditions he had been experiencing.
The upper limit of my daily ordeal is a 20-minute ride to my office in 2C temperatures. But to ride across Canada in January would verge upon the limits of anyone’s endurance, and from the look of Cole, Edmonton was marking that limit. The ride through the Rockies was going to be a challenge or rather even more of a challenge. I have found that a 600-mile day in the summer can leave a rider feeling a bit stunned. Make that ride in the winter and you are going to exponentially increase that fatigue which is perhaps why there is something almost mythic about riding a motorcycle in Canada in winter—well, perhaps with the exception of Victoria.
In our Oct/Nov. 2008 issue, readers met the Wrecking Crew, a team of Germans who were testing their vintage Harleys against the ice road of the Mackenzie River delta. A few year ago, in bone-chilling conditions, our own Oliver Jervis challenged the winter road connecting Fort McMurray to Fort Chipewyan, near the Northwest Territories border.
We shook our heads at the winter riding antics of Kimberley, BC resident Jim Chomica, whose sole means of transportation in his mountain ski town is a sidecar equipped Triumph Scrambler.
The point being, if you want to ride in the cold then Canada is the place to do it. While all the aforementioned riders were looking for and even counting on severe challenges, I draw the line at snow and ice. It is after all just a commute I’m making.
In this issue Neale Bayly takes a cold weather ride aboard the Victory Vision Tour Premium (“TeleVision,” page 22), which shows that I am not the only one trying to extend my riding season and that there are more accommodating bikes than 1940s-era Harley-Davidsons or Scramblers with which to tackle the single and minus digits. Heated grips are my nod to comfort but I think an electric vest would be a valued asset. Riding in the winter is a little about suffering, but not needlessly. But those days on the fringe of the winter when there’s no traffic on the roads and beckoning blue skies, the windshield and heated seats of the Vision would have to be considered pretty comfortable in the cold, or as cold as it gets in California’s high desert country.
Far less comfortable is John Wellburn in our cover story, “Chasing Dakar,” in which he goes in search of the elusive endurance riders who have made the Dakar rally what it is today. After political, and bullet, issues forced the Dakar to move to South America this year the heat was on to make the race as great and challenging as its namesake. Mission accomplished apparently. John discovers it’s hard work just finding a place to watch the Dakar—let alone riding in it
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