Sibirsky Extreme 2012 - The Toughest Ride of Them All

But all this beer is made in Russia according to the license, at the Russian plants.
Its taste differs from the original.

Awesome RR

Wow !!!

Walter, just to confirm, your speedo is in km/h, isn't it?


Anohter great report by the way. Thanks for contributing to my other's adventure daily dose

Walter, just for curiosities sake, would roads like this be on Russian Maps?

Thanks, David

Yes ... km/h

I had manually (incorrectly) set the speedo calibration, and at a stable speed it actually underreads by about 2.5% (stock speedos overread by about 5% at 100 km/h) ... so on mine if the speedo is saying 100, the GPS is normally saying 102 or 103. Its often a bit hard to read the GPS, as the screen protector kinda makes it hard to photograph the screen well, but in the shot here you can see the GPS ... which is reading 114 km/h while the speedo is reading 112.


On a stock speedo, if speed was stable and the GPS was reading 114, then the Speedo will read about 120.

Terry had a stock digital speedo in mph, but ran his GPS in metric (km/h), and while Terry and I both saw top GPS speeds of 132-133 km/h on the double track trails his speedo got to 90 mph at the same moments, which is 144 km/h ... about an 8% overread. The faster you go, the more OEM speedos are inaccurate. My experience is that most OEM speedos are out by 5-6% at 100 km/h and about 10% at 150 km/h - which is similar to what we were seeing from Terry's OEM speedo as well. The aftermarket speedo I was using doesnt use a built in inaccuracy curve. Its out by a fixed percentage all the time, in my case -2.5%. If I had adjusted it correctly, it would have matched the GPS at every stable speed.

[If you are curious, UNECE rules for speedo accuracy on motorcycles specify they can NEVER underread. So thats why they are made with built in overread at the factory - and technically my bike was illegally modified as it had an underreading speedo!. Maximum overread for production bikes is 10% plus 8 km/h ... i.e. a bike cruising with a GPS reading of 120 km/h can have a OEM speedo reading as high as 140 km/h.]

Also note, if accelerating rapidly, then the GPS obviously lags, as it is a lagging indicator (indicating average speed over the last 20-30 metres), whereas the speedo is far more instant, updating speed each front wheel revolution (every 2.2 metres).

The number under the speedo is the tacho ... which usually worked ok ... so in the pic you highlighted its 104 km/h at 5300 rpm, and in the pic below, its 111 km/h at 5600 rpm

Maintained gravel roads, like this one, will be shown as minor rural roads on detailed Russian road atlases, yes. The earth farm tracks obviously are not.

It was a flagpole ... for a Ukrainian flag. The flag was completely shredded by the time I got to Volgograd.

The pole lived on, impersonating an aerial, until our bike wash in Pervomayskiy. I must have blasted it off when washing the bike there.

as you can tell from all the vid caps from day 23, there was a TON of helmet cam footage from this day.

Here are just a couple of short clips

[EDIT - replaced original with HD 720p version]

When planning this route, it was inevitable that there would be water hazards. I recalled some of the Ural Mountain river crossings I came up against when with the Russians in 2010, and thought that while some of those crossings were too deep then (it was early May then) they might well be crossable in mid June when we were there, when all the snowmelt was well and truly out of the climatic system and temperatures would be higher. So I made sure we had a lot of crossings on the route. A lot of them came up today.

We left our very nice hotel in Mednogorsk, and headed north, out of town .... Barely half an hour out of Mednogorsk, the water crossings began ... nice and easy at first. The first crossing was in the 2010 ride ... back then it looked like this:



Now, over a month later in the year, with 5 weeks more warm weather to recover from the harsh Ural winters, it was much more green and lush ... Here's Terry blasting through.

Open this thread like a book to read a few more pages everyday and wish it will never end
Thanks for sharing all this

Firstly - LOVING the report!!!!

Lighting....

did you do much riding in the dark?

do you notice a difference (better or worse) with the vertical stacking of your hid50 units versus the side-by-side of the beige bike?

are they both bi-xenon units?

ever consider the need for extra lighting? ie LED etc?

cheers for your thoughts

Shane

Hills

That flat stuff is fine, but I'm looking forward to some up and down.

This is one of the most amazing adventures I have ever seen! More please!!!

The vertical stacking doesnt change the amount of light put out ... the only disadvantage of it is that on dipped beam the cutoff is higher for the top light than the bottom light. Whereas for side by side lights they are at the same level. A minor irritation for a lighting perfectionist like me, but no difference in the amount of light hitting the ground.

They are both bixenon units.

I typically rode with one on during the day for visibility, and on the occasions that we strayed into night, I rode with both on. There was maybe one day in 10 that we were a bit late and rode into the evening.

Did I consider extra lighting? yes ... I wanted to have a good LED light (flood beam) system for two reasons ... one so that I could use it as daytime running lights so I could leave my HIDs off during the day, and secondly so that I had lights to put a tent up without idling the engine ... this is what I have in mind ... they are 15 watts rather than the 35w of each HID light, and a flood beam would be ideal for putting tents up with and being seen with during the day ... while the HIDs are still the primary tools for illuminating the road when its dark.

http://www.adventure-spec.com/defau...inch-xmitter-low-profile-prime-led-light.html

One of these will fit nicely into my oil cooler space on the front fairing. Winter project.

Gotta love the look of the bikes (and the gals ), keep up the good work

We continued into the hills





Passing a broken down Lada sedan on the way



A kilometre later, another Lada ... and like the other one, full of people. Where were they all going? This guy wasnt broken down, but he was holding us up. I took a quick detour to get around him:





And reached the next little stream:



And charged in

We were now in broken forest, on double track







It was a bit rutted ... nothing bad, but somewhat funkier and the super smooth tracks we had on the steppe





The landscape was familiar to me ... but it took me a while to pin down where we were in my head from 2010 ....



When I was here in 2010 it had been all burnt out ... and looked like this:





We continued up over the ridge ... which now looked like this:



Two years ago, when the fires had cleared the area, it looked like this:

Fantastic.... Thank you Walter!!

I'm curious about the Steppe.... rough guess as to how much is farmed? grazed? still in natural state?

I hope you don't mind a question of a more personal nature. Are you of partial Mongolian descent? You obviously have an affinity for the area, and there's something about your eyes....

Never worked for me...but then nothing did..