2012 UT/ID/OR 2300mi 11d Outback Ride via UTBDR, T2, OBDR

Crescent Lake OR to Canby OR – 254 miles

Packed up and got on the road pretty early this morning. One of those bitter sweet days, you're looking forward to getting home to the family again, but at the same you're in a groove and want to keep the adventure going.

Plan for today is follow the OBDR section 3 track north past sisters to hwy 20, then as much non-pavement to Canby as possible, home of BackCountryCruizer. Same route Tom and I road a couple years ago in reverse order on our way to the TAT route. I think a vast majority of section 3 is basically snowmobile routes, as marked by the diamond trail markers.

Came across this dead forest section just north of Crescent Lake.





lots of sweet graded roads like this as we ride north



and a wee bit soft and dusty in a few other areas. Tom and I parted by a few minutes in the dust sections





massive Wickiup reservoir



we started to see a lot of smokey haze in the distance, the lake provided a good vantage point. wiki says depth ranges from 20 to 70 feet. I've heard this has some good fishing...







almost in our backyard again, skiers paradise and the naked Mount Bachelor



as we moved closer to the town of Sisters, became apparent our route was going to take us thru a serious forest fire. We stopped and talked to a forest service gent that was stationed at a road closure on NF-4601. He said the road was closed due to the massive "pole creek" fire. We asked about continuing north on a different spur (4602) and he thought that was a dead end, but we're welcome to try. No back trackers in this group.

After a few miles, near Triangle Hill, the spur basically petered out into a game trail, no sign of recent activity in many years. Looking over the topo, we could see this was an old logging skid road many many years ago, but looked like it headed in our direction. Was slow going for a bit with branches, trees, etc, but we scratched our way thru till finally the road started to open up again. Neat area...sorry no pics thru the fun section.

The forest fire was just a couple miles to our west. Danger close.... We later learned this area was definitively closed from the north and east access points. Good news was the the smoke was being driven north, towards the town of Sisters.



We quickly moved our way towards Sisters, hoping to not get in trouble by a patrolling sheriff or fire fighter. Sorry crap picture, but quick snap and shoot after finally arriving and driving down main street in Sisters. Kind of gives a sense of the thick smoke, in an otherwise cloudless day. Stopped to get a bite at Bronco Billy's, not bad, a little pricey...



Rejoined the OBDR route 3 heading north after leaving Sisters. We road thru the remains of another forest fire from a couple years ago.



Looking southwest thru the muck towards the Cascade range and mount Washington



found ourselves riding thru a small ohv area on NF-811 near Big Lake. Didn't slow down a bit, like a cow on the way to get milked.



Pushed on crossing hwy 20 and a short pavement section of hwy 22 north. Turned off on NF-2266 then NF-1164. This was a really neat area to ride thru with views of Mt Jefferson and Buck Mountain to the east. Arrived at Detroit lake via graded gravel service road NF-060. Started to get late in the day so we continued on hwy 22. Tom and I know this area well since we do day rides here, there's a shortcut from Detroit lake up and over Lookout Mountain. This is a private timber area, but the gates can be manually opened. Don't tell anyone...



Our shortcut home crosses under the bonneville power administration (BPA) transmission 500 kV line. Only about 40 miles from home.




Pulled into Tom's casa just before dark

254 miles today, in total 2300 miles of good times the past 11 days, and memories to fill a life time. Tom and I went inside and enjoyed a beer. It tasted so good ...I got back on the bike in the dark for my last 20 miles home to see my beautiful wife. Shower and bed felt so good, no place like home.





The End - really was blessed to ride with an excellent riding partner, and see some of the most amazing backcountry of our Western USA. For me this trip allowed me to lay witness some of the best riding of my life. I'm sure Tom will say the same. Now as I write this and easing back into the daily pattern of life, this experience will help keep things in perspective.

Can't wait for the next trip....all smiles...

Thanks for reading!!!

Awesome ride report!! Thanks for sharing and putting in the time and effort to put this together. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

I finally got to check out the videos - great report - thanks for posting

Great ride report and amazing pics !!! I'll have to hit Utah next and the T2 brings back some memories

Fantastic ride report! I really appreciate the time you took to post your great photos and story. I've added Utah to my bucket list of trips.

Thanks for sharing.

Still working on the rest of the video. I'll post as I get them done.
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Great trip and report. Too bad about the smoke around Sisters, OR. We had a lot of that this summer and fall with all the PacNW fires.

Great trip Dale and Tom, thanks for sharing! I am curious as to what you guys used to store your raw video files on from your gopro's? We are starting to plan an OBDR trip in late July next year and I shoot a lot of Pics and Video.

It looks like I may get day's 8, 9 10 and 11 all on 1 or 2 videos. Should be done by the weekend.
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I took 3 32gig sd cards for the Go pro and filled only 2 of them. I had 3 2 gig sd cards for my point and shoot.

Great report----this trip on the bucket list for sure

Question----you both had the Montana 650 GPS. How did you like them? And what didnt you like?

Thanks again for the time to put this great ride report together.

Dale's done a fantastic job writing about this adventure. I have to say "Great job"!!!!
I'm just a user of the Montana where as Dale is the &#8220;master&#8221;. Honestly I feel like a tourist when I do these multi-day rides with Dale. He literally spends 100's of hours pouring over ever detail of these trips so when we're on the bikes it's soooo easy to follow our designated route. I just follow the purple line on the display.
I like the fact that the 650 has such a variety of features with a multitude of ways to set up how and what info is displayed. This may also one of the things that I dislike about the 650 as well. There are way more features than I could ever use and it takes some time to learn how to use even the basics. The display is large and easy to see. It's easy to use the controls with gloves on.
My previous GPS was a 550 and I like the 650 much better.

Can Lockhart Basin Road be done as an out and back ride from Moab? I know you guys came down the road from the La Salle Mtns. to Moab - but I'm wondering about if it could be done in a day ride from Moab? Thanks

You could easily do the entire Lockhart Road to Canyonlands and back to Moab (maybe even find a loop so as not to back track?) in a day ride. We've actually already talked about trailering back to Moab to stay for a few days and do daily loops.

It's a little over 60 trail miles from Needles outpost to Moab, which equates to about 3 hours moving time based on our avg speed of 22 mph thru lockhart. So agree with Tom, easily done as a day loop from moab.

The Montana is my 6th or 7th GPS that I've owned, and the best so far. I really like this unit for our type of riding. Quick off the top of my head list of likes/dislikes:

likes:

• screen readability in different light conditions
• ability to handle lots of high resolution tracks, up to 10K track points
• Customizable home screens and shortcuts
• Customizable smart profiles tailored to activity (off-road, on-road, hunting, etc)
• share tracks, waypoints, and routes wirelessly with another Montana (or ANT+ equipped devices). Tom and I have used this a bit out while riding, no computer required.
• dashboards and data fields. You may have noticed from the ride pics a field called Grade on my 4 field off-road dashboard. You can have different dashboard stored with each profile based on activity
• support for Tempe wireless temperature sensor, so you can see how bloody hot or cold it is while riding
• ability to turn off route calculation behavior
• AMPS GPS mount, inexpensive and works really well with the Montana

dislikes:

• software stability, when it was initially released in June 2011 (v2.20 original firmware) it was very unstable, but with dozens of Garmin firmware updates since purchase, most of the issues have been sorted. Now at firmware v4.6, you can do the math.
• route functionality is not as well supported as with Zumo or Nuvi branded models
• missing track manager feature to show or hide ALL tracks
• missing multiple trip odometers

guess i gotta go and spend some money-----i think im on my 6th or 7th one, also ---- thanks again

Here's the last of the video for this trip.
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