That’s the plan, yes.

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I’ve been known to keep an eye on the phrases entered into search engines that caused people to stumble across this humble blog. Sometimes these plaintive cries for help are even answered.

This particular search query was too good to pass up:

Is Stacy at bolty a girl?

SPOILER ALERT!!!!

Yes.

Now, I’ve been told that I write like a man, so I can understand a little confusion. But I bet Fuzzygalore’s never gotten this question!

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Just a hint of what I’m going to be up to for the next 10 weeks or so.

One of the perks of being an employee at a land-grant university — cheap tuition!

Kyle, your request may be fulfilled sooner than you think.

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… but I’ve found myself in a bit of a rough patch personally and professionally, and fighting a two-front war has left little room for much of anything else.

Riding doesn’t bring me much joy anymore, to be honest. I ride to work. I ride back home. I repeat this 5 days a week. It’s transportation, not therapy.

As for this blog, it’s certainly not going away, but updates are going to be infrequent — at least until I can get my shit back together again. If you’d like to be informed when I resume posting new stuff, toss your email this way.

What a depressing post. Sorry about that! I appreciate every one of you who’ve been following along these past five¹ years. I look forward to many years more — if I can just clear this neverending series of whoops…

1. Wow, seriously, 5 years of blogging already? Just realized this and it kinda blows my mind a little.

In this guide, we’ll change the rear sprocket on a 2007 SV650. These instructions should work for second generation (model year 2003 and onwards) SV650 models. For the final word, consult your owner’s manual.

This guide is for those who are new to wrenching so it’s written at an exhaustive level of detail. If you’re experienced at performing your own maintenance, click here to skip right to the summary.

Step 1: Gather the Required Tools

• 14mm socket
• 24mm socket
• 12mm combination wrench
• #3 phillips screwdriver
• ratchet wrench
• torque wrench (up to 100 lb-ft)
• rubber mallet or hammer
• rear stand

Step 2: Remove the Rear Wheel

The first step is removing the rear wheel. For step-by-step instructions, see How to Remove the Rear Wheel on an SV650.

Step 3: Remove the Sprocket Nuts

Use the 14mm socket and wrench to loosen each of the 5 nuts that hold the rear sprocket to the wheel.

Step 4: Pull the Rear Sprocket Drum from the Wheel

Pull the rear sprocket drum to separate it from the rest of the cush drive.

Don’t be surprised if 5 bolts fall out of the sprocket drum. It’s OK, just set the bolts aside for now. Here’s the underside of the sprocket drum.

See these holes? Note how one edge is keyed (flat)? That’s so the sprocket bolt has something to hold itself against while the matching nut is tightened. This will make more sense in a minute.

Here’s how the bolt should fit into the hole.

Fit the 5 bolts into the holes in the drum so that they hang down like so.

Step 5: Attach the New Sprocket

Get your new sprocket.

Set the sprocket against the drum so that the bolts hang down and through the holes in the sprocket. For each bolt, replace the washer and hand tighten the nut.

It is crucial that all 5 bolt heads fit into the keyed holes as shown in the picture below. DO NOT MISS THIS STEP!

Step 6: Re-install the Rear Sprocket Drum

Locate the sprocket drum retainer. Here’s what it looks like.

Note that there’s a ridge around the retainer that divides it into a “short” end and a “long” end. (The short end is the one that has all the blue grease on it in the photo above.) Flip the drum over so that the underside is showing and stick the short end into the center hole.

Then, fit the drum back into the cush drive.

Step 7: Tighten the Sprocket Nuts

Now it’s time to tighten the rear sprocket nuts. I like to use a star pattern to tighten the nuts in a consistent manner across the sprocket.

Use the 14mm socket and a torque wrench to tighten each of the 5 rear sprocket nuts to 60 N·m (6.0 kgf-m, 43.5 lb-ft).

Check each nut to make sure that threads from the end of the bolt are showing, like so:

Step 8: Re-install the Rear Wheel

To re-install the rear wheel, reverse the steps you took to remove it. Take care to replace the wheel spacers and chain adjusters in the same order that you originally found them. This would also be a good time to check the chain adjustment.

The rear axle nut should be tightened to 100 N·m (10.0 kgf-m, 72.5 lb-ft).

Congratulations, you’re done!

Summary

• 14mm socket
• 24mm socket
• 12mm combination wrench
• #3 phillips screwdriver
• ratchet wrench
• torque wrench (up to 100 lb-ft)
• rubber mallet or hammer
• rear stand

1. Remove the rear wheel using the 24mm socket.
2. Remove the rear sprocket nuts using the 14mm socket.
3. Pull the rear sprocket drum from the wheel and cush drive.
4. Attach the new sprocket.
5. Re-install the rear sprocket drum.
6. Tighten the sprocket nuts to 60 N·m (6.0 kgf-m, 43.5 lb-ft).
7. Re-install the rear wheel.

Fin.

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Those of you who’ve followed my OBDR saga know that my bike and I took an unintentional bath in the Malheur River, which caused us to cut the day short to deal with the mechanical aftermath.

Daren and I aren’t the kind to leave business unfinished, so the last weekend in September, we returned to John Day and the Malheur River.

Not too bad. It helped having a water level several inches less deep than the first time we tried.

Next up, Crane Crossing.

Well, Daren made it look easy, right?

I guess you could say I successfully crossed 1.9 rivers that day!

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*tap tap* Is this thing on?

Today finds me a year older — and hopefully a lot wiser.

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Sunday, July 17, 2011 (or see the previous day, or start from the very beginning)

50 miles to Walla Walla. A gravel superhighway up ahead. Easy, right? Not a freakin’ chance.

The previous night’s frantic dash to find some camp — any camp — left us just a few miles outside of Tollgate. Tollgate’s claims to fame are a lake that has fish in it, a small resort and lodge, and a bigfoot sighting in 1986.

At Tollgate, we left the pavement for Skyline Road. Skyline steadily climbed higher in elevation as it followed a ridge, and offered views of a vast expanse of trees, mountains, and sky. The road was in decent shape, but the numbers of fallen saplings across the road showed that it hadn’t had a lot of traffic yet this season. It was also tricky enough that paying attention to the ride was a prudent idea.

Up around 6000 feet, the road left the ridgeline and entered the forest, where it turned into mud, and snow.

This wasn’t a complete surprise, as the riders we’d encountered way back on Day Two had warned us about impassable snow on Skyline. We placed our bets on a week of heat melting the drifts down to something manageable, and that’s exactly what happened.

The first side-effect of melting snow is mud. The mud was several inches deep in places and rather tricky, but I managed to ride through without dumping my bike. This was most excellent because stopping at any time left one open for the second side-effect of melting snow: mosquitoes.

Between stopping to take the photo above, and stopping to ride carefully through a snowdrift deeper than my footpegs, a couple of minutes at most, I ended up with over 20 fresh mosquito bites. And I was doing so well with only a few bites — until today.

As we cleared snowdrifts and mudholes and more snowdrifts, I worried that the next drift would be too high or the next mudhole too deep to pass. With the prospect of having to be at work the next morning looming like a shadow over the festivities, turning back meant going home without reaching the goal.

But that didn’t happen, because we began to descend and we passed the last of the snow and mud and we finally, finally reached the gravel superhighway that everyone had told us the OBDR was all about, all the way to Walla Walla.

“700 miles of gravel.” More like a thousand miles of dirt and rocks.

A group that started with four, then three, then two.

After grabbing a bite to eat in Walla Walla, we turned our wheels for home 360 paved miles away, through some of the finest twisties Eastern Oregon had to offer.

It was boring.

Daren said a ride like this would ruin me for street riding. He was right.

We began the day with temperatures in the 50s, then in the mid-90s in Walla Walla, and after riding from 9am to 9pm, we rolled through Madras with rain looming over the Cascades and temperatures dropping fast.

I had nothing left when we reached Sisters. I had to stop. But Daren had to be back home before morning, so he continued on, riding over the mountains in the freezing rain.

It was a minor miracle that the hotel room had a whirlpool tub, and I enjoyed a damn fine soak as a reward for 9 long, full, difficult, amazing, rewarding days and a thousand miles on the Oregon Backcountry Discovery Route.

The end.

Thanks for reading, and for your patience with me all these weeks as I struggled to put together a tale far too long in the telling.

• Total Distance: 45.63 miles
• Uphill Distance: 13.26 miles
• Downhill Distance: 32.42 miles
• Maximum Speed: 57 mph
• Average Moving Speed: 30 mph
• Average Speed: 20 mph
• Total Time: 02:15:59
• Total Elevation Gain: 3737 ft
• Total Elevation Loss: 6808 ft
• Maximum Elevation: 5876 ft
• Minimum Elevation: 2047 ft

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Saturday, July 16, 2011 (or see the previous day, or start from the very beginning)

I was on a jeep trail that clung to the sides of Mt. Emily, rain-slickened rocks crunching quietly underneath my wheels, when I came upon an old landslide that had washed away half the trail, leaving a path a foot wide next to a thousand-foot cliff. As my wheels spun inches away from the edge, death was only a bad bounce away.

The morning sun peeked over the mountain ridges that surrounded us as we packed up camp and said goodbye to the lovely John Day River. The OBDR led us up and along the ridgeline overlooking the river until a sharp hairpin turned us north toward the Winom Frazier OHV Complex. I’ve read several ride reports where people have found themselves on some ridiculously steep OHV trails while crossing this area, but our GPS track kept us on more sedate gravel roads. After yesterday’s OHV shenanigans I didn’t mind missing those black diamond trails.

Another day, another ride up to a fire lookout.

This one was impressively tall.

The view to the northeast was pretty, in an ominous kind of way.

Yep, that’s where we’re headed, all right.

Unfazed by the storm clouds ahead, we continued on until we reached a three-way intersection of gravel roads at the northern edge of the OHV area.

I glanced at the GPS and picked a way that looked likely, but quickly began to look un-likely.

“I don’t think this is the right way. Let’s turn around,” I said to Daren. So we did and backtracked back to the intersection, where I proceeded to ride around in a circle in an attempt to make sense of the GPS.

I picked another way. It led to a campground and seemed even less likely than the first way. “This isn’t right either. We have to turn around.” I said this with as much confidence as I could muster while hiding my sheepish dismay.

Daren, exhibiting infinite patience, simply followed along until I puzzled out the correct route. Just another case of the GPS track not quite matching up with the Garmin’s maps.

Not too long afterwards, I was cruising along a wide gravel road when shit seriously hit the fan.

The sweeping left hander was like any of the thousands of sweeping left handers I’d taken over the past seven days. I was in the middle of the turn when the front wheel began to let go, but unlike any of the hundreds of times I’d powered out of dicey traction, this time I couldn’t save it. Everything moved very fast.

I felt the front wheel wash out and the bike tip over to the left in a lowside.

I remembered that Daren was riding in formation just over my left shoulder, and thought, “Shit! I’m taking Daren out.”

I saw a culvert and a deep gully on the left side of the road grow alarmingly closer. Suddenly, the rear wheel regained traction and flipped the bike over into a highside which threw me into the air.

I felt the back of my helmet slam into the road hard enough for me to see stars and my right arm whip down to crack my knuckles.

All this happened in a second. It was my first highside ever, and now I understand why everyone says highsides suck.

As I took a few minutes to regain my senses, Daren matter-of-factly recounted the incident from his perspective. How he saw my front wheel wash out and my bike start to go down. How the lowside turned into a highside. How he was worried that my bike would slide off the road and down into the gully so he rode the front tire of his KLR over my rear wheel to keep my bike from going over the edge…

Wait, what?

I looked down at the bikes, which were both on their sides in the road. Sure enough, the front tire of the KLR¹ was holding the rear tire of my bike down, while my front tire dangled over the edge of the gully.

Clearly, time moves at a different speed in Daren’s continuum.

The sweeping line in the lower left corner of the photo above is the track left by my bike when I crashed. I’d been riding at least 35mph and it was the hardest crash of the trip. Unfortunately, it seriously messed with my gravel mojo. It’s been a couple of months since it happened and I still tense up a little on roads with deep gravel in corners.

We pushed on, and the GPS eventually led us off the gravel and on to a decommissioned road.

Unlike other such roads we’d encountered, this one featured large tank traps² every hundred yards along the way. I suppose we should have heeded the warning, but what’s the fun in that?

Sometimes the road disappeared.

Sometimes there were logs.

But there were always tank traps.

The tank traps were usually in pairs, which required careful traversal. Too fast and you’d jump the first berm and risk hitting the second berm on the landing. Too slow and you wouldn’t have enough momentum to climb out of the ditch between the berms.

The road continued to deteriorate until it disappeared in the middle of a stony hillside. I took this photo so I could blame the GPS track for leading us here.

Daren scouted ahead but was blocked by a large pile of rocks. It looked like someone had taken a backhoe and scraped up what was left of the road. We considered bushwhacking, but ruled that out when we couldn’t be certain that there was even a road up ahead to bushwhack to.

photo by Daren

I looked for alternate routes.

photo by Daren

Daren helped me pull my bike around so it pointed back the way we came.

Daren himself had an interesting method of turning around: he hopped on his bike and turned so it pointed straight up the hillside, intending to use gravity to roll downhill so he could turn back around. Unfortunately, the spot he chose to ride uphill left him stuck with his wheels in a position that left his feet dangling in the air. Amazingly, he kept his fully loaded KLR in perfect balance while he slammed his butt down on the seat repeatedly to jolt the bike rolling backwards. Daren’s exploits truly are the stuff of legend.

As thunder boomed closer and closer, we found a detour around the troublesome hillside. This dumped us onto McIntyre Road, one of the few true gravel superhighways we encountered on the route. We needed every bit of speed to outrun the weather.

We’d planned on heading into Starkey Station for gas and resupply, but decided to press on into LaGrande for something hot to eat. There may have been a little incident where someone lost the key to their bike in Safeway and we tore around the store for 45 minutes looking for it until it appeared in the lost and found.

We rewarded ourselves by having a hot meal in a restaurant. While we were eating, the sky opened up and absolutely dumped rain for several minutes.

This would have been a full day on its own, but we had a few hours of daylight left and figured we could avoid having to backtrack 50 miles by taking a road out of LaGrande that headed due north up Mt. Emily which would put us back on the OBDR.

We soon discovered that the area around Mt. Emily was actually a small OHV area. This wouldn’t usually be a problem, but I seriously underestimated the difficulty of navigating without the breadcrumbs left by a proper GPS track. The maps on the Garmin made no distinction between roads and OHV trails, and our paper maps weren’t detailed enough to help, so when I turned down a green circle trail — you know where this is heading, don’t you? — it wasn’t obvious that I’d made a mistake.

That is, until the trail started heading downhill in the opposite direction we wanted, but by then it was too muddy and slippery to turn around until we reached the bottom.

Mud offers the rider an exquisite bouquet of sensations. Wheels sliding in random directions. A certain sense of heaviness from riding through a thick substance. The feel of power being transmitted to the rear wheel and going nowhere as the tire spins toothlessly.

It’s truly a wonder that Daren didn’t kill me on the spot when I admitted that we had to turn around and go back the way we came: back up that muddy fucking hill.

Riding up that hill was an exercise in perception and execution. Anything that didn’t look like mud was fair game for tires desperate for traction. Small patches of rocks offered salvation, and I hopped between them like a tourist with a checklist of Hawaiian islands. Slowing down meant certain disaster, so I didn’t. Not until I reached safety.

Eventually, we found a large trail map that showed a jeep trail that looked promising. It looked correct on the GPS and the paper map showed it as a passable 4wD route. Besides, after the muddy trail, a few wet rocks didn’t seem so bad.

Until the jeep trail showed its teeth, that is. Which brings us to a rain-soaked cliff high above the Grande Ronde Valley. I’d had a lot of adventure the past week, but nothing that made me feel like I could die at any moment. This one did.

So I did the same thing that had served me so very well the past 900 miles: I pointed my bike on the path of least resistance and looked where I wanted to go.

I cleared the washed out area and an amazing feeling welled up inside me, equal parts Ohmygod, I can’t believe I just did that! and I’m really glad I didn’t just tumble down that fucking cliff. The trail remained challenging enough to discourage stopping, so I continued on until I realized that Daren was no longer behind me.

I stopped and smelled some flowers.

But there was no sign of Daren, and I didn’t hear his bike either. I heard nothing but the quiet sounds of a forest at dusk, until it was broken by a loud shout. I ran back down the trail and spotted the KLR on its side. Daren had found himself high centered, hung up by the skidplate on a large rock, and there was nowhere to go but tip over.

We had to unload the pack mule before we could lift it back up.

All the while a stream of rain runoff ran down the center of the trail.

The KLR seemed fine, until we started up again and heard a terrible grinding coming from the rear fender. The subframe of Daren’s bike seemed to hang abnormally low and the license plate was nearly bent in half. A few minutes of inspection revealed that his rear shock was blown.

This was the nadir of a very long day. We were still miles away from a suitable camp and the sun was setting fast. Not to mention the blown shock. I was almost spent, but we had no choice but to carry on.

Finally the jeep trail met up with a gravel road that ran for miles along the ridge overlooking the Grande Ronde Valley. The views were extraordinary in the golden hour before sunset and the turbulent weather cast dramatic shadows and directed atmospheric effects like a scene out of a movie. I wanted badly to take some photos of what I was seeing, but I knew my skills would never be able to capture anything even close. I settled for the next best thing: looking as intently as my tired brain could — and remembering.

The top of an exposed ridge is the last place you’d want to stop (or camp) when surrounded by unpredictable weather, so we kept moving until we reached Hwy 204. The sun had set and the rain-soaked air was now bitingly cold. My memory unraveled into a blur during the last stretch of pavement. I recall stopping at the first decent looking campground, setting up my tent in a light rain, trying to warm up by a fire made of damp wood, and falling asleep as soon as my head hit my cot knowing that tomorrow would be our last day on the trail.

Continued in OBDR Day Nine…

• Total Distance: 148.72 miles
• Uphill Distance: 56.51 miles
• Downhill Distance: 92.36 miles
• Maximum Speed: 58 mph
• Average Moving Speed: 27 mph
• Average Speed: 15 mph
• Total Time: 10:08:56
• Total Elevation Gain: 17211 ft
• Total Elevation Loss: 15502 ft
• Maximum Elevation: 6834 ft
• Minimum Elevation: 2769 ft

1. I want to take a moment to offer some words of appreciation for Daren’s KLR, which Daren has (intentionally) dumped as a direct result of me crashing far more times than I care to admit.
2. Tank traps: large earthen berms dug across the road to impede vehicles from passing.

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Friday, July 15, 2011 (or see the previous day, or start from the very beginning)

This was supposed to be a green circle trail. Green circle means easy. Green circle doesn’t mean being trapped on a rut 12 inches wide. Green circle doesn’t mean a steep, rocky hillclimb along the aforementioned rut. But when I saw two trees exactly a trails-width apart bracketing a tight corner up ahead, I finally realized: this wasn’t a green circle trail.

I’ll spare you the mundane details of how we spent the morning becoming regulars at the Napa Autoparts store in John Day, or how I got good at changing the oil in the DR after doing it three times to flush out the watery muck in the motor from yesterday’s river bath.

We finally left town just past noon, and headed east to catch the OBDR as it crossed Highway 26. The GPS track led us to Oregon Campground, and an OHV trail that led right out the back.

I’d like to direct your attention to the green circle on the trail marker in the picture above. And the trail obliged by starting out well behaved.

The tires of passing ATVs formed ruts that divided the trail in half. Unfortunately, the ridge down the center was tricky; it’s either a damn good edge trap or a deep pillow of soft dirt just waiting to take your front tire out from under you.

And check out the world’s smallest cattle guard!

Soon after this photo, the character of the trail changed like a demonic possession. It was one of those situations where neither of us wanted to stop for anything, much less taking photos, because we weren’t sure we’d be able to get started up the hill again. The dirt was deep and fluffy, the ruts were full of rocks, and it was steeper than Zimbabwean inflation.

When I saw the young trees bracketing both sides of the trail in a tight corner up ahead, I steadied myself and went for it — and hoped to God that I wouldn’t catch a handguard or a saddlebag on something in a re-enactment of The Human Trebuchet. The ATV ruts meant I couldn’t center the bike on the trail, and I’d be cutting it close on the right side.

My handlebars barely squeezed between the trees and I tipped Boo over to the left as I rounded the righthand corner. Skkkrit! That would be my saddlebag scraping against a tree. It wasn’t graceful, but I wasn’t down on the ground either so that made it a total success.

Daren and I stopped and looked at each other and said, “What the hell just happened!” Our uncanny ability to start out on a green trail and end up on a black diamond struck again.

photo by Daren

As quickly as the trail turned crazy, it spit us out onto a road. Or, at least, something once a road.

We saw vistas that people passing by on the state highway on the other side of the ridge would never get to see.

Then it was on to Sumpter for gas and resupply, and where the hummingbirds lay big eggs.

The road out of Sumpter followed a ridge, switchback after switchback after switchback, tempting us with a siren’s song of fantastic views — nevermind the precarious drop-off over the edge.

The Fremont Powerhouse is just outside of Granite and we stopped for a look.

A wooden pipeline was built to supply the powerhouse with water from Olive Lake five miles away. This blows my mind. Someone built a pipe. Out of wood. Over five miles long.

These are the kinds of things people did before they invented television and the internet.

The day was growing long and we blasted on. Did we let a ROAD CLOSED sign get in our way?

Heck no. Turns out it was only a logging operation and not something more exciting like a landslide or washout of the road.

As dusk threw its cloak over the shoulders of the Blue Mountains and threatened us with thunder, we found a nice campground along the North Fork of the John Day River and called it a day.

• Total Distance: 148.32 miles
• Uphill Distance: 63.16 miles
• Downhill Distance: 85.35 miles
• Maximum Speed: 58 mph
• Average Moving Speed: 30 mph
• Average Speed: 21 mph
• Total Time: 07:11:13
• Total Elevation Gain: 15676 ft
• Total Elevation Loss: 15548 ft
• Maximum Elevation: 6549 ft
• Minimum Elevation: 3002 ft

Related Posts:

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