When most people head into town to run an errand, they expect to see a familiar face or two along the way. It’s only natural in a small town where long lost friends are never really all that lost. Be it in the hardware store or the grocery store, small talk is inevitable but every once in a while, a brief catching up of moments passed turns into plans for an ambitious adventure. It did for Andy Perkonig this spring.
“I saw [a friend of mine] in town and he mentioned something about always having wanted to go up to the Arctic Circle on a motorcycle,” he said. “His next words were ‘do you want to come?’ and I said yeah, I’d love to come. So we had two and a half weeks to prepare and off we went.”
That friend was Dennis Edmondson and in no time, those two had gathered two more—Gerry Bean and Markus Ulrich—and were on the road north.
“It was a whirlwind preparation, so to speak,” said Perkonig, laughing as he recalled it. “I had just signed up for an OFA [Occupational First Aid] Level 3 course. That’s eight hours in the classroom and then four hours of studying every night so I got out of my exam on a Tuesday and on the Thursday morning we left.”
Shortly after setting off on the journey, however, things headed south for Bean. “He broke down about 130 kilometres up the Cassiar [Highway],” said Perkonig. “His bike was shot, the motor was shot, so we had to get him back down which took most of the day and then we headed on north.”
Edmondson, Perkonig and Ulrich continued on with the goal of being at the Arctic Circle in time for summer solstice on June 21. They made it, but not without pushing their own bikes to the limits through some of the country’s toughest roadways.
“Once you start getting up the Dempster Highway, it can be so dangerous because it can be smooth and hard or you could have mud or you could have really really sharp rocks that cut your tires, or even potholes,” said Perkonig. “It’s all gravel and the shoulders are really soft so you just never know what you’re going to run into. And you have about 400 kilometres of one stretch there with no houses, no gas stations, no nothing.”
The payoff, Perkonig said, was entirely worth it though. “We live in a beautiful country, that’s for sure.”
He, Edmondson and Ulrich not only saw some amazing scenery but a wide assortment of wildlife as well. “When we were starting we had everything from grizzly bears to black bears to moose to elk,” he said. “We saw foxes, wolves, really a lot of different animals.
“One night a bear came sniffing and pushed his nose right up against my tent,” he continued. “He was sniffing around and that gave us a bit of a weird feeling. It’s daylight all the time up there so you can still sort of see the shadow and that was a little interesting.”
As the men ventured farther toward their destination, the animals receded and the climate became more and more unforgiving. By the time they reached the Arctic Circle, both the wildlife and the wilderness had all but gone and in the end, it was mosquitoes that feasted on Perkonig and his biker buddies, not bears.
“We didn’t see many animals up there,” he said. “The biggest things were the mosquitoes. The smaller the trees got the bigger the mosquitoes got and man, when they bite you they take a chunk out of you.”
Nearly three weeks after they set out, the men returned home, each having logged about 8,200 kilometres on their bikes and perhaps a similar number of insect bites. Perkonig said the trip gave him a chance to break in his new toy—no, not an industrial-sized bottle of Calamine lotion, but a new motorcycle. “I just recently got the perfect bike,” he said. “I got a 1200 BMW which is built for this kind of trip, so it was perfect.”
So perfect, in fact, that he’s already eyeing up another trip, hoping to head to the southern hemisphere for his next adventure. “I’ve been riding a motorbike now for 51 years. I’ve ridden in Africa and in Turkey and all over Europe and of course North America, but I haven’t been to South America,” he said. “In fact, that’s one of the things I’d love to go on is a trip around there going down to Chile [and] back up the other side.”
Given that mile zero of the highway to get there is in Lund, it’s not a bad place for Perkonig to start. Perhaps he just needs to head into town for another errand and see who he runs into this time.
