Why not pick up some dirt on the way to riding some dirt.

Dirt you say? How ‘bout sand… and more sand. There are a few stretches like this closer to the river on Cochran Road. I didn’t dump my bike but it wasn’t pretty. I played with the settings on my steering dampener and it clearly makes a huge difference, at it’s lowest setting I basically squirreled off in a random direction almost immediately.

I rode out here once before on an R1200GS. The circumstances behind that are a long story but it was fun to compare the experience of two very different bikes. The 1200 performed greater in every way but somehow I like the 700 better.

Tree tunnel by the Gila River.

How much sand is too much sand? This much sand.

I don’t know why there’s a tarp hanging up in the middle of nowhere.

In the above pictures I’m stuck going North, below I’m stuck going South. Hilariously I put my front wheel in the huge hole dug up by my rear wheel when I passed in the other direction. I think I did one of those slow-motion ‘nooooo’ things as I got sucked in.

The bike is on its side here on purpose. The sand is extremely soft and rotating the bike on its side is easy especially when compared to any attempt to lift a near 500lb object out of a hole in the ground. A lot of tips I picked up from YouTube were helpful here.

On the way out, I ran into some two-dimensional desert pigs (don’t tell them I said that).

My boots started out black…

185 miles in about 6 hours door to door from Tucson.