5 Dual Sport and Adventure Riding Backcountry Safety Tips

Hello everyone, welcome back to the dork side. It is I, your friendly neighborhood Dork in the Road, and today we're in the woods riding the CRF250L, and I want to talk to you about five dual sport safety tips. Five things you should do before every ride to ensure that you are as safe as possible. That's right everyone, I am the Dork in the Road, and I want to be your internet riding buddy, and I'm better than your regular riding buddies because I'm available whenever you want, and I come with the mute button, so please hit that subscribe button, and don't forget to turn on the notifications so that you know when I post awesome new content just like this. That's right everyone, I'm up here on my dual sport bike just exploring the woods on some forest roads. I'm 14 miles or so off the highway. I was just up here looking around for camping sites, and it's one of my favorite things about owning this motorcycle is that I can look at one of and take off up it, so I do a lot of exploring on this bike, a lot of forest road riding. I also take it on the trails from time to time. That's really fun. I love the versatility of it, but before I go out, and I ride by myself a lot, so today I am on my own. I enjoy riding with my friends, but schedules don't always line up, so I go out by myself pretty often, and so there are some things that I always do when I go out by myself. Some might say they're overkill or that I'm being paranoid, and that's fine because the reality is probably the stuff that I bring and the tips I'm about to give you hopefully aren't necessary if you're just being safe and sensible and taking care of yourself, not taking unnecessary risks, but ---- happens. Things happen. Weather changes. Roads get closed. Banks give way. You just don't know. You could fall off the bike and break your ankle. Things can happen, and so the difference between a minor inconvenience and a good story and dying is how prepared you are to deal with, wow, how prepared you are to deal with something bad happening, and so these five tips are all about being the most prepared you can be in the event that you were to get stuck in the woods, your bike were to have a mechanical failure, or you were to be injured in some way and unable to ride out. Tip number one, I always do this before I leave, and you should too. Also, how cool is this? See, I told you roads get closed. Things happen, right? What if I couldn't get around this? What would I do? Anyway, tip number one, always tell someone where you're going. That's obvious. Anytime you go into the backcountry, hiking, fishing, hunting, anything, tell someone where you're going and when you'll be back, and someone who's going to notice if you don't meet, you don't make it back by that time. I always tell my wife where I'm headed and when she should expect to hear from me by, so today I gave her the location. I shared the location on Google Maps of where I was headed, and I always tell her where I'm going to park the truck so that if I were to not, and when I'm going to be back, so I told her she should hear from me by dinner time. She almost always does. If she doesn't, she could call and say, my husband was in the woods. He hasn't come home yet. He's somewhere between House Rock Campground and this point up in the woods, and narrowing that search area down, should they have to send somebody out to find you, will greatly decrease the amount of time that it takes someone to find you, and increase the likelihood that they do find you. It's a simple thing. It's easy. It takes no time. It's also easy to forget, but you should definitely always, 100% of the time, tell someone where you're going to be, and be as specific as possible. If you can put it on Google Maps, especially for someone that doesn't know the area, my wife would give those coordinates to search and rescue, and they would know where to come and look for me. But if I just said, oh, I'll kind of be out by House Rock, that's a much wider search area. So always tell someone where you're going to be, and when you're going to be back, as specifically as possible. Tip number two is, if possible, and I recommend it, I think it's worth the money, bring some way to communicate. Again, the difference between, my bike broke down, and it took me a couple hours to get out of the woods, and my bike broke down, no one knew where I was, and I died, is the ability to communicate that my bike has broken down, and where I am, so someone could come get me. So I carry an inReach. They're made by Garmin now. Mine is a DeLorme, but an inReach Explorer, which is a two-way satellite communication system. It has an SOS function, and so if I were to be gravely injured, and unable to text, or really manipulate the device, I could just hit that SOS button, and they'll send the cavalry. But it also has the ability for me to send messages to specific people, so I could say to my wife, bike broke down on main road, bring truck, and she could bring my truck, and we just load up the bike and go home, versus me having to hike out. You know, again, I'm 15 miles up right now, even though this is a major road, and I just saw a guy, so I might be able to get a ride if that were to happen today, but that's because it's hunting season. I don't always come up here when there's people in the woods, so being able to communicate in some way, there's lots of ways to do that. The SpotMix devices, that'll send preset messages. You can also get a PLB, personal locator beacon, and those don't require a subscription service, so you just buy it. It's a one-time expense, and then if you need it, you hit the button, and they send a helicopter to get you. But that is a emergency oh----- button only. There is no, I'm not that injured, or my bike broke down, or I'm just lost. It's only, holy crap, send a helicopter, I'm in trouble. So it's all or nothing. So I like, even though there's a subscription fee, I like my InReach, because I can send those messages. Isn't this a cool view? There's Mount Jefferson way up there, way in the background. Pretty amazing. I just, I just come around a corner, and it's just majesty. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. All right, number three. Number three thing to do before you head out into the woods, or into the backcountry on a dual sport adventure, is pack survival gear. Plan for every eventuality. Do you need all of your camping gear? No. Are you likely to have to use it? Probably not. I carry a lot of, I carry survival gear on my bike, in my giant loop saddlebags, and I never have to take it out, and I hope I never have to. But if the time comes when I do, if I get stuck out here, it's going to be really nice to know that I have the ability to build a shelter, and make a fire, and purify water. So those are probably the three most important things for you to make sure that you can do. Like a little pond down there. That's just a meadow. That's a marsh. Yeah. So I carry a silky saw, and a silky saw is also useful for clearing trail, clearing roads, if small trees have fallen. Silky saw, I have a survival knife, a real one, not a shitty one with a hollow handle, with a fire starter, and a whistle, and it also works as a saw. And I have a tarp with paracord, and I have a life straw, and I carry water on my back. So I can purify water. I can carry water in my hydration pack. I can cut wood. I can baton it down into burnable pieces, and I have a lighter and a fire steel, so I can make a fire, and a tarp, so that I can get out the elements if need be. And that's useful if I just want to stop and sit in the shade for a while. It's nice to have that tarp. It doesn't always have to be all or nothing. So it's nice if stuff has more than one use. You know, if I want to come up here and have a campfire in the winter, of course, I have all the stuff to do that too. So it's multi-useful. But bring that gear. Bring a little bit of extra food. Make sure you have water. Those are just essentials that you should be carrying anytime you go into the backcountry. So bring the right gear. That's important. Number four is dual sport motorcycle specific. What's motorcycle specific? Before you leave, before you go riding on your bike, no matter how long of a trip you think you're going on, no matter how far you're planning to ride, you should fill your gas tank up all the way. Always have maximum fuel when you leave. But dark in the road. What if I'm just going up five miles and back? Well, faithful viewer, what if you get up five miles and you come back and the gate you passed is closed? Or a tree has fallen across the road. Or there's a damn forest fire. These things happen. Any reason that could make it so you can't get back the way you came. Or you get lost. You need just to have maximum capacity. So there's a tree across the road on this road, not a ways down. It's been partially cleared, but it stopped me from getting up here last week when I came up. But if I had gone up, it had fallen, and I came back down, it is a 30 mile detour to get around that to get back to where my truck was parked. If that had happened and I hadn't had a full tank of gas, I wouldn't have been able to make it. So it's helpful to have that, that extra gas. And, uh, and really, and the one thing I forgot to mention along with the survival gear is a GPS, some kind of backup navigation in case you get lost, make sure that you have a way to navigate your way out or send a, send a message or both. There's another tree in the road. And then finally, this is less of a thing you do beforehand and more of a thing you do while you're up here. Uh, and it's kind of a given, but you know, people make dumb decisions sometimes. So it's, it's worth saying out loud. And that is don't be an idiot. Ride your own ride, ride safe. Don't take unnecessary risks, 15 miles into back country, or no one knows exactly where you are. So I've been up here on rides. I have chosen not to attempt obstacles or, uh, rough roads that probably were well within my, uh, ability because, you know, all the time I've spent on the trails and stuff. Ah, that's pretty, but I don't take unnecessary risks when I'm up here by myself because, uh, all it takes is one stupid screw up. And then suddenly all that gear that you thought you'd never need becomes very necessary if you're injured. So when I'm with my friends, when I have somebody with me, I'm a lot less risk averse. We try a lot of more different things. That's why I'm trail riding. I work, you know, do more stuff that I would never attempt on my own, but when you're by yourself, don't take unnecessary risks. Don't, uh, ride fast up to a jump that you don't know what's on the other side. Don't attempt super technical terrain. Don't go out on that weird, potentially unstable log or ledge. Just don't make good decisions. Stay safe. I want you to go home to your family. And so today, so this hobby, this, this, uh, obsession, this passion riding is amazing. And it's super fun. I'm so glad I get to do it. And, uh, it's not dangerous, but it can be, if you don't take the right precautions, it's because people don't get lost or die frequently. It doesn't mean it's not dangerous because just the farther you get from the main road, the more dire the consequences are of something bad happening. So you just have to take it easy, take care of yourself. So those are the five things. So if you have anything to add to the list, anything that you always do before you go out, please let us know in the comments, let everyone else learn and benefit from your experience. But for now, I just want to say, thank you very much for watching. Thanks for coming on this adventure with me. And as always, please do not forget to be excellent to each other. Thank you. Excellent. So make sure you tell someone where you're going to be and when you're going to be back, bring your survival gear, fill up your gas tank. Shit. What's the other one? Bring your survival gear, fill up your gas tank. Tell someone where you're going, bring gear, fill up your gas tank. Don't take unnecessary risks. Number five. And bring communications. Bring something to communicate with. So those are the five.