I caught up with my best friend and riding partner Sean Kobia to talk about his thoughts on the perfect Dual Sport ride, his recent trip to Idaho and the never ending search for the unicorn bike.
Sean on his KTM 790 Adventure R on the Idaho Backcountry Discovery Route
Brad: What does a perfect dual sport ride entail?
Sean: I think it starts with the company and the people you ride with. And whether you know them well or not, you will. When it's in the planning and preparation phase, there's increased communication that happens. Whether it's somebody you've done it with before a lot or never before, it starts in an anticipation phase with the people. And that's what it did with us. Brought us together after not doing anything for a long time to start the planning of when and how. And then that led to what kind of ride. Dual-sport rides can be pretty relaxing meaning it's predominantly fun twisties with some dirt or gravel. Or you can mix it up like we decided to and look for something a little more aggressive on this particular ride and ended up with a route that would lend itself to challenges. Each type of dual-sport ride has its benefits. But each type of ride will also depend on who the people are you are riding with. Are they physically and mentally capable and do they have the skills and experience to do the more challenging stuff, or should it be a smell the roses, fun, flowy dirt road kind of ride? And I think The Coal Mine ride we built out did everything right. We picked the terrain to be the challenging aspect, versus just a simple ride and we chose it over a couple of other varieties.
Brad: You've owned a number of dual sports bikes, and you’re now riding a KTM 790 Adventure R. Why did you choose the 790 and how would you describe it compared to the other bikes that you've had?
Sean: Well you're always looking for the unicorn, which is the perfect combination of fast and comfortable, but light enough and capable enough to do the hard challenging aspects of a route. And so I started with a KLR, which is an older, mid-weight bike that is less performance oriented and more of a ‘Jack of all trades’ tool as opposed to a real dirt bike. Then I got a dual-sport capable KTM 350 EXC which does everything from single track and enduro routes to no kidding adventure rides that last for days with luggage. Then I got an Africa twin, a big liter bike which was still amazingly capable off-road although quite heavy which you paid for if you were in too hard of a place. Then I found the 790, which is probably what I would've chosen to begin with following the KLR had it been available because it was faster than the KLR, not much heavier, but way more capable, with better suspension and everything else and has some of the off-road capabilities, of course not like an enduro bike, but good enough that the bike lends itself to some much harder riding and better performance. It's a much more performance -oriented bike than the KLR or the Africa twin. I sacrifice a little bit of comfort on the highway, which is easy to give up, but then it still has amenities like heated grips, which came in handy on our WV trip, or the cruise control for the highway. So it's pretty neat to be able to have a bike that is fast, fun, not too heavy or burdensome and highly capable.
Brad: I was jealous of those heated grips especially on the first cold morning. One thing that is so unique about dual-sport rides is the ability to transition from 70 miles an hour on the Interstate, down through the small towns out through the countryside and then work your way up into mountains and wilderness areas on challenging trails. On the first day of our recent WV ride we had all of that plus the rain, and we ended up hitting the hardest section first which was pretty challenging. How do you describe the mindset and physical challenges of riding a bigger, heavier bike like the 790 over a tough, risky section?
Sean: You know up front that you have to be mentally prepared and that it is going to be hard, but if you get in a bad situation it is going to be even more difficult to get out of. So you do everything you can to scout route selection and think about momentum. You only have so much you can do once you're in the middle of it. So it's a matter of lessening the impact of mistakes and ensuring preservation of self and bike. You have to stay consciously aware that you’ve got a long way to go to get back to civilization sometimes or to finish the route that you want and not get hurt while doing it. So you take your experience from prior rides and you weigh the risks and you try to walk the line between fun and hard and stupid and understanding the difference. And you also don’t want to put you or your partner in a bad position that one of you can't get out of or neither of you could do because of the weight of the bikes. So you're taking all that into account and then running it like almost like a whitewater creek where you plan your moves along the way, “I can get to there and there's this place to stop where I can think and I can adjust”. It’s the same way on a trail, you have to always have a way to get back home on the bike.
Brad: I think about it just like paddling a hard section too. Dual sport riding is truly a team motorcycle sport, as opposed to most any other styles of riding.
Sean: With a big bike for sure. I wouldn't have done that hard section in WV we are talking about by myself. I wouldn't have done it with just anyone. Again it goes back to the beginning of what we were talking about and the need to understand your and your team's capabilities. Is everyone able to make it. Is everyone strong enough and wise enough to be able to pull it off and conduct self-rescue if you need to and deal with consequences if it goes bad?
Brad: You recently did the Idaho Backcountry Discovery Route with a mutual friend of ours, Mark. The Idaho BDR is an iconic, long expeditionary type trip requiring a significant investment of time and commitment. What are one or two of your top lessons learned from that trip?
Sean: We did that trip and were fully loaded the whole time. There were numerous optional expert sections and again those are sections where you had to think, “Oh, should we do this?” And the answer became yes because we didn't want to do a trip like that and miss out on anything we could or should have done. But at the same time, you're riding fully loaded bikes. And sometimes we got ourselves in the middle of something like, “I can't believe we're doing less than a loaded bike. Could we have taken our gear off for a section, gone to that top of that one section, the mile and a half and made it easier or less burdensome for an issue to happen?” We didn't chose to do that. We were probably pretty blessed that it all worked out because we were in the absolute middle of nowhere. Because of the remoteness of that route and because there was only two of us and there wasn't the ability to bail out in sections I brought along a Personal Locator Beacon for the worst-case scenario. This was the first trip I ever felt like I should have something like that on me. And then the other situation that we had to deal with was serious weather events where it could have gotten really bad at any given time. We were as prepared as we could be for that, always mindful of how we could affect self-rescue or other rescue should the situation dictate. There were fires in the area, there was high wind, down trees and you just had numerous extreme weather elements in addition to being pretty exposed. It was the most exposed trip I’ve ever been on from a remoteness point of view.
Brad: Any final thoughts about the mindset of dual-sport riding?
Sean: If you think back to our most challenging section on the West Virginia ride, one of the things that we had to factor in was the fact that the trail was wet and very slick. A dry trail is very different when its wet and muddy and it adds a higher level of challenge, especially with big bikes, that would have otherwise not have been a big deal. How slick that was truly created a hazard I wasn't expecting, I think we handled it pretty well. I wasn't expecting that to be that slick, but it was fun, just like creeking. As the environment changes, as the weather changes, whether it is an Idaho ride or our ride in West Virginia, you got to be prepared for those things.