Maine Northeast Border Defense Region

Hey, welcome back to the motorcycle travel channel. My name is Sterling and this is my channel all about motorcycle adventure travel around the world and right here in the United States. In this video, we're going to look at the final section of the newest BDR route, the Northeast BDR, and travel into Maine. Maine's one of the least populous states in the nation, so we're going to, you want backcountry discovery, we're going to show it to you. Going remote. Yes, we're going remote, as remote as you can get on the east coast. Well, good morning. It's day eight on the Northeast Backcountry Discovery route into Maine, the final stretch of this journey. We spent the last night here in Gorham, New Hampshire, and we will momentarily be crossing into Maine, and then we've got a full day of good off-road riding to get up to Rangeley, Maine, where we're going to spend the night and then do the final push to Jackman, Maine, and the end of the route tomorrow. Brian, we're in Maine. How do I even know I'm in Maine? There's no signs. We keep it a secret. That way, they lure you in. You won't even know. We're on a back road here. Obviously, the Maine road has a sign, but right here in the country, the borders don't mean much to us up here. Yeah, you would not even know you're crossing in other than the GPS track and the dotted line. I could just see that all of a sudden we left New Hampshire and we're in Maine, heading up to Rangeley, Maine. It's going to take us most of the day to get up there. What are we going to encounter today besides mosquitoes? Well, we're going to have the Maine state bird. Yeah, we're going to be going down south here and getting some tough stuff and come up through the lakes region, do some water crossings, and then basically the western part of the Maine and all the way up to Rangeley. Cool. Some tough stuff, some water crossings. Sounds like a good way to wrap up an epic BDR route. Grew up in New Jersey. My dad got frustrated with New Jersey and decided we used to vacation up there and decided he just pulled the plug when he was 40 years old. As soon as I graduated high school, we're gone. But you've adventure rode all over the USA. Yeah, I've done seven or eight BDRs. I grew up in a motocross background as a kid, so I started riding at seven years old. Started racing at 12 in District 6, New Jersey, Delaware, Eastern Pennsylvania. So I was always in the dirt first and then got into road bikes for 10 years and then back into motocross and then adventure bikes came out and got involved with adventure bikes and then discovered the BDR. Absolutely. The BDR and GPS have absolutely transformed the sport and what you can do, right? You can't run a BDR following a map. Following the track gives you the safety to follow and back it up with a map and fantastic. It opens up possibilities you never thought you could ever do. So Brian is telling us that this is some of the most challenging parts of Maine right here at the beginning. So from now until noon, we're going to hit the most challenging sections of of Maine. A little bit of sand, a little bit of loose rocky uphills, some embedded boulders. It's kind of bouncing around here. I feel like I could probably let a little bit of air out of my tires and be a little bit softer. I've been running more or less kind of street pressure this whole trip. Honestly, I haven't even checked since I started. Since I put these new Bridgestone tires on and my new Woody's wheels, I bit the bullet and upgraded to a new set of Woody's wheels. Super strong, much stronger than the original stock wheels. Been happy with them so far. Not a single issue. And these tires, these Bridgestones seem pretty good. I'm usually running the Continental TKC80s and you know, I have to say these Bridgestones, they felt pretty darn good to me. Thanks for following along on this trip. I hope you're enjoying it and that you've got some useful information out of it and that it perhaps inspires you to do this BDR ride or another one. Gilead is the town we're going to go through on the other side of this bridge. Gilead, Maine. There's only under 200 inhabitants. It's of note as being a location in a Stephen King novel or two and also the setting of a movie, The Spitfire Grill. And what's interesting over here is that you can see on the right there's this snowmobile track that they use to drive the snowmobiles across the bridge in the wintertime because snowmobiling is such a big thing up here in the winter. We went through a little water crossing there that we were thinking we might have to go around. The reason being that I didn't want to take a chance of tipping over in something that's so deep that all my camera gear and laptop and hard drives and drone would get submerged, but went through it without even realizing that that was that section. So not as deep as it can sometimes be. So this is interesting. This is a sign out here in the Maine woods telling you that if you need help, call this number. And this is a helicopter landing pad out here. So remote that they're really, you can see it'd be impossible to get an ambulance in here. So they pick these spots where they can land safely because you'd have to get here by four wheeler or some other way because we're getting into the back country. This is, we're getting to be pretty remote. Cool. Those kind of signs get your attention. If you've made it this far on your journey, you need to congratulate yourself. Pat yourself on the back. It's no easy feat to get this far along on a BDR. The last time I looked at my mileage a little while ago this morning, we were around 1200 miles into this route. This is day eight of our riding. And so to be doing BDR style ride for eight days, 1200 miles with some of this kind of technical terrain, it's no easy feat. If you've made it this far, congratulate yourself and hopefully you will continue all the way to the end. How was it putting the main route together? Did you use, did you put it together based on stuff you've been riding for years or did you go out and find new stuff or how did it work? Both. Stuff I've been riding for years, but the thing with the BDR is trying to put it all together in a route so it flows. I've done a lot of stuff. You do one day, you do a lot of out and backs, but I want to do a multi-day 300 mile and something that flows and goes on a journey, right? The BDR is a journey from point to point. So trying to put it all together so it flows nicely, pulls in the different elements and shows people as much as we can. I mean, Maine is a massive state, right? It could have its own BDR, but we're making this part of the Northeast. So we're limited to the two days, 300 miles, but you're going to see a nice cross section of the mountains and the lakes region and remote, very remote areas that border national parks and paper company land and all that. Problem with Maine, if you move too much towards the ocean, to the coast, too many tourists, too much, we don't want to be near that. We want to be back country, right? So we're going to be out in the back country. It's exactly what we're trying to do. Stay away from people, stay away from population centers and get out where we can A lot of the towns around here are named after European countries. So for example, back there, we saw signs pointing to Norway and that's pretty common up here. The beginning of this section of the, the main part of the Northeast BDR, super cool. We're in the woods, starting to feel kind of remote, a little bit more technical. That last section was pretty cool. We are going through the woods up and down some, you know, moderately steep hills with some loose rocks, gravel, some embedded rocks, some sand thrown in there for a good mixture. So quite a recipe for good adventure riding here in Maine. And now we're at this Melby's Market and Eatery. We're going to go in here, get some supplies, stack up because this next section is going to be a long section with no services, nothing, no food, nothing in between here and Rangeley, Maine. So we're going to be, we're going to be doing that all morning and we want to make sure that we're prepared for that journey. So let's check out this little store and then let's, let's get back on the trail. Look at that. So you got those here, especially, that's a special thing. $2 bills and half dollars. Can you show me the whole stack? Holy cow. Look at that. I haven't seen that many of those in a long time. Beautiful lake over here to my right. This is really cool. I feel like we're really getting remote. It's a sunny day, but it's raining at the same time. Might be getting into some weather. The good thing we got out of this weather, it's coming down hard. We just got up to Rangeley, Maine, and we got into our hotel a little early today and it is a good thing because look at this weather. It is coming down just in the nick of time. We made it just in the nick of time before the skies unloaded. Perfect timing. It's our last day of the ride. We're going to finish the route today. We're on old highway 16. You can see the broken up pavement and the yellow stripe down the center of this road in some places from ages gone by. Kind of cool to just be riding on this old highway that's overgrown with trees and moss. This is just rugged, remote, wild country up here. It's so cool. We're just going down these dirt roads through the forest. Nothing but trees all around us. Temperatures dropped down to about 50 some degrees, so it's cooled off quite a bit. As you can see, this big logging truck behind me. This is really cool. There's a lot of this activity going on up here. Logging is a big, big, big part of the economy in Maine. We might see some more of those down the road. Maybe hopefully see a moose. What a great way to end this BDR. This last section is so much fun. It's like a freeway through the wilderness. The population in this area, in Maine, New Hampshire, these are like vacation land. Maine's known as vacation land. The population more than triples, almost quadruples in the summer around the lakes, around the ocean. We had to make sure the BDR avoided a lot of those places. You just run into a ton of traffic. We want to stay out in the backcountry. We want the remote area. That's what we're looking for. We got our last gas, fuel, the last vestiges of civilization. Once we turn the corner up here, it's going to get really remote. Nothing in between here and Jackman, where we finished this route. Really looking forward to this. It's going to be such a cool finale to this route. It's been getting more and more and more remote along the way. Now, we're just going into the most remote part of all. What a great way to wrap it up. Fantastic. Good job. Absolutely. Loved it. See you down the road. We're going to probably be 80 miles, maybe 100 miles from another human at some point. So you really got to bear in mind that remoteness when you're doing a BDR up here, like in terms of be prepared, have the right supplies, have a sat phone, those kinds of things. Doing the BDR by yourself in Maine is, you better be prepared and you better, people better know where you are because you could disappear up there. There definitely are wild animals. There's a lot of stuff. You could get hurt and you're so far away from help that you really need to go in a group if at all possible. Somebody needs to know where you're at. It's beautiful and all, but there's a lot of treachery around. There's a lot of terrain and you're just a long way away from anybody. If you fell and got trapped under your motorcycle or you got knocked out or you broke a wrist where you couldn't operate your throttle, you could be in real trouble, real trouble. You're a long way. Luckily, it's not the kind of thing like out in the desert in Utah where there's no water. There's plenty of water in Maine. But if you did it in the wrong time of year, you could get hypothermia if you were out and it got really cold and wet and miserable. I mean, it cools off almost like west of where you're from. At nighttime, you know, it's like last night, it cools off dramatically in New England at night. It's not like some of eastern seaboard where it's still 80 or 90 at night. That doesn't happen up here. You're going to get into the 60s a lot of time at night, so you could definitely get hypothermic if you had to spend a night out there. And that's the end of this BDR adventure. Hey, I hope you guys really enjoyed this presentation of the newest BDR route, the Northeast BDR. I'll be back with another video shortly giving you my overall impressions about the Northeast BDR. In the meantime, I encourage you to go to ridebdr.com where you can find links to the official Northeast BDR movie that we filmed last summer. You're definitely not going to want to miss that out. Check out the ridebdr.com website. You can download GPS tracks for all of the routes, find information about route conditions. It's just a really valuable resource for your BDR rides. That concludes it for this video series. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, please click the like button, subscribe to this channel. It'll help me produce more content for you guys in the future. Okay, we'll see you next time.