I wish I'd grown up riding trails and, correspondingly, achieved a higher level of expertise and comfort on loose surfaces. My comfort level for travel leans more towards little paved roads, but my soul aches for this stuff. After thousands of miles of dirt roads in 2014 through Alaska, British Columbia, Yukon, and Northwest Territories, as well as dual sporting in my home area in Tennessee and MSTA events around the country, I should be getting more comfortable with this. But as much as I WANT to do this stuff, I still get a little white knuckled thinking about it. Maybe it's just my age and the thought of busting my behind when I'm out by myself 100 miles from anywhere that has a name. I still want to do it though.
I might try to incorporate some of this route into my trip to STAR in Vermont this summer before proceeding northward through the eastern Canadian provinces. I want to go to Radisson, Quebec and Goose Bay, Labrador among other places, and they are near the ends of long unpaved roads. In the late 90s, there was still a stretch of about 280 miles northward from Matagami, QE with no services, and it may still be that way. Can you say spare gas tank?
As was noted in some of the pictures, sometimes the better part of valor is to turn around and go a different way.
