The Ottawa Valley Overland Route

You don’t have to travel to exotic, foreign locations to find adventure. I recently decided to do a little local adventure riding and picked up the GPX tracks for the Ottawa Valley Overland Route from GravelTravel ($25 donation suggested) and asked my buddy Ray to join me. Ray usually rides an Indian Chief Vintage but also does some adventure riding with me on his 2003 Kawasaki KLR when he feels particularly masochistic. We’ve gotten into some hard knocks before on our excursions, but I assured him this route would be mellow. I’d checked the forums and YouTube videos and it seemed big-bike friendly. I bought the files, reserved a campsite at Granite Lake, about halfway through the loop, and bought Lanark County trail permits for Ray and me.

We left Montreal early and arrived in Merrickville in time for an early lunch at Bob’s Fresh Cut Fries. Merrickville is a charming historic village with more heritage buildings for its size than any other town in Ontario. I’ve written about it as a favourite destination for bikers, but in this case we were just passing through. Soon after lunch, we picked up the OVOR track and, to my great surprise, almost immediately hit mud. I didn’t have the tires for mud so stopped to assess the situation. I was also thinking of Ray, to whom I had promised an easy ride. I waded in and it wasn’t deep, just slippery. After serious consideration, I did what every self-respecting male does and let bravado decide. Onward!

A dropped bike and 45 minutes later, we emerged from the trail onto the road. Now it was smooth sailing on gravel roads up into Carlton Place, another pretty town that was on my Top 5 Ottawa Area Destinations list.

We filled up in Almonte before heading down into the bush again south of Ottawa. The highlight of the day was riding the Lanark County Trail System.

I was loving this and could have done it all day! The Tiger is in its element here and the Dunlop Trailmax Mission tires are fine for this stuff. We stopped for a photo out over White Lake during the golden hour and the ride was now everything we were hoping it would be. We had a little ways to go to get to our campsite and were looking forward to the steaks I had packed in one of my panniers.

Unfortunately, we never made it to Granite Lake. In fact, we didn’t get much further. We crossed a hydro line, then rode the line for a few hundred metres before exiting onto another gravel road. What we didn’t know is that a bridge was out not much further along. We got off our bikes and surveyed; sometimes there’s a bypass, but there was no getting through here. We looked at our map and figured we were about 2 kilometres from Highway 511 and the best bet was to return to the hydro line and follow it out to the road.

Hydro lines. When you’re lost in the bush, they’re a lifeline to civilization, a man-made geometrical order imposed on the chaos of wilderness. But they can also lure you into that chaos, the fisherman’s line drawing you into dark waters. And speaking of water, what I’ve found is that they almost inevitably involve some of it at the low points as the terrain rises and falls. A ride along the primitive access trail of a hydro line is a rocky descent to a water crossing to a steep rocky hill climb to a moment of respite before another descent, and on, for hundreds, thousands of miles if you want, from remote dams to urban centres, traversing great swaths of Canadian boreal forest.

Unfortunately, at one such particularly-deep water crossing, I got hung up on some large rocks and dropped the bike. I hit the kill switch before it submerged and I had it upright within seconds but it wouldn’t restart. After several tries, I started to become worried. My 2013 Triumph Tiger 800XC has always been very reliable. I was perplexed because the bike was under water for only an instant and I was quite sure it hadn’t taken on water. What was there to do but leave the bike where it was and give a little think. Maybe in my mind I was hoping the ECU might reset while keyed off, or any air-fuel imbalance might self-correct? To be honest, I was at a loss.

After a few minutes I tried again and it still didn’t start, so we pushed the bike out of the stream. Now I was thinking water in the cylinders, but to get to the spark plugs on this machine you have to remove a lot of plastics and lift the gas tank. I didn’t want to start that work with 30 minutes of light remaining, so we made the decision to camp on the hydro line. I left my bike where it was, Ray rode his up to a clearing on the line, and we set up our tents there. I fired up my stove and cooked us the steaks. We had a little something from the liquor store in Alexandria, and I had a pipe and Ray had a cigar. It wasn’t exactly the campsite at Granite Lake I had imagined, but we made the best of a bad situation.

The next morning after some coffee and porridge, we started tearing apart the Tiger.

We took out the plugs and they looked dry. We turned the engine over and no water came out of the cylinders. Next, we thought that maybe the air filter was soaked and choking the engine. Unfortunately, Triumph put a weird 7mm hex screw on the airbox and I didn’t have that socket on me. I pride myself on being prepared but I came up short on this occasion.

We decided that I would ride Ray’s KLR out and up to the Canadian Tire in Renfrew. Why me? Ray said I had more experience off-roading and would have a better chance of getting out. There was some really gnarly terrain and another pretty significant water crossing, but I made it out to the 511. Shortly after I started heading up toward Calabogie, if things weren’t bad enough, the skies opened up and it started to rain cats and dogs.

In fact, unbeknownst to us, this extreme weather was causing major flooding in nearby Ottawa and back home our wives were concerned. I got the socket, rode back to the trailhead, and started heading back in, but before I reached the bike, who did I see but Ray walking out. He was soaked to the skin and looked pretty miserable. Our “easy ride” had turned into 24 hours of hell, stuck in the bush in extreme weather. I was never going to live this down.

Ray had determined that the trail was now impassable and that I might be waiting for him at the highway. I guess he doesn’t know me as well as I thought; no extreme weather is going to prevent me from getting back to my bike. But he looked cold and miserable and it was teeming, so we agreed to abandon the troubleshooting and get a room in Calabogie. There was nothing more to do but turn around and splash Ray, who couldn’t get any wetter, then double him up to the Calabogie Motor Inn.

After some hot showers, we went to the amazing Redneck Bistro for dinner and drinks and I tried to forget about my bike abandoned trailside back on the hydro line.

The next day we were down to the bike early. I opened the airbox and found the air filter dry! I was right: the bike hadn’t taken on any water through the airbox. We tested the plugs and we had spark. I could hear the fuel pump cycle on so I knew it had gas. And with the filter dry, I knew the bike had air. We were stumped!

Finally, the decision was made to ride back to Calabogie and find someone who does trail rescue. My friend Riley offered to trailer me back to Montreal.

In the end, back in Montreal, I discovered several litres of water in the tank. The only theory that makes sense is that at the river crossing the engine and tank were hot. When I dunked the bike, the tank cooled rapidly, creating a vacuum, and water was siphoned up through the tank breather hose that was hanging below the bike in the water. It would only take a bit of water to foul the injectors and prevent firing, but with this much water in the tank, I now think the bike was drinking water the entire time it was sitting in the river. I’ve since modified my bike to prevent this happening again in the future.

Some people say that the essence of adventure riding is adversity. We watch Itchy Boots riding through Nigeria and Cameroon with their bad roads, bad gas (if you can find it), security check-points, and security risks and are impressed by her courage and tenacity. To his great credit, Ray didn’t hold the mishap against me but said, “riding with Kevin makes you feel alive.” I’m reminded of what Mark Twain said along the same lines: “The fear of death follows from the fear of life.” If you don’t face risk, you are only existing, not living. I don’t go seeking danger—I love life too much—but neither do I let “what ifs” stop me from living fully by doing what I love.

And that’s why I ride. Memento mori. When I’m old and feeble and no longer able to ride a motorcycle, I’m sure I’ll be thinking wistfully of Ray’s and my Ottawa Valley Extreme Weather Misadventure. My only hope is that, when his time comes too, Ray will feel the same.

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