Last Great Frontier Alaska
Go to Alaska!
The following is extracted from my Riding Log for a trip to Alaska in 2017.
Jane Trula Love, my maternal grandmother, married her third husband, Delmar, several times. I worked for Delmar when I was a teenager and he liked me. When I informed him that I was going to college, he advised, “No, no, no, don’t go there. You’ll just end up working with a bunch of women. Go to the Colorado School of Mines, then head to Alaska, the last great unexplored frontier. It’s a place where a young man with few resources can go, work hard, and earn his fortune.”
Hmm . . . now I’m finally going to Alaska . . . at age 55.
Delmar is also the fellow who sold my father a 1962 85cc Kawasaki road bike when I was eight years old. Up to that time, I had been riding a mini-bike. My father didn’t ride it much, so I started riding it in the fields behind our house. It was made for the road, but I jumped it in dirt. I was little and light enough, but still, when I landed it would bottom out. The little motorcycle was made for riding around paved streets, so it didn’t have the lugging power to pull big hills, but with a long enough runway I could make it up most dirt piles. I rode it like it was rented and I never got it out without wrecking it. That’s the important bit, wrecking in the dirt. It’s how you learn what not to do while the stakes are relatively low. When someone asks me about whether they should learn to ride, my first question is, “Have you ever ridden a dirt bike?” If they haven’t, then I tell them to start there. Go fall over in the dirt some before wrecking in the street.
Before I got the Yamaha, I rode that little road bike into the ground. Leonard stored it all those years, but he never brought it back to life.
Go back to: Riding the ALCAN on a Harley