Awright, I've had my Tiger for just over a year now and finally have a trip to report on. As I have recorded previously I went through some annoyance trying to get the beast running for most of the winter and it ended up being a botched 24k service by a dealer in its place of origin near Scottsdale, AZ. I bought her and rode her home to Idaho and have only taken road trips up until now.

My hunting buddy and I drew antelope tags for this season and decided this weekend to go out and do a little scouting. My buddy has an ATV, but rather than ride around on the back of someone's ATV I decided to try out my DS in the dirt. The plan was to drive down to Riddle, just south of Grasmere about 60 miles south of Mountain Home, ID (yeah, up until we submitted for our tags I would have said "where the heck is Riddle, ID" too!). We parked the pickup and offloaded our machines with a route laid out on the Garmins to head in about 20 miles. Piece of cake, right? Here's the route we took:

Hopefully that is clear enough to give you an idea where we were. Now I have very little experience with off-road MC'ing, but I rode a little CRF250 around when we scouted for elk last year and had a blast! Needless to say riding my 500lb 98 Tiger around was a tad different. I have to say after some initial trepidation it was an absolute blast! She handled herself quite well even on uneven terrain, through the sand and even through muddy spots through the bogs. Unfortunately I had forgotten my camera and had to rely on my buddy to snap some pics. Here's what I got:

Granted it was only an afternoon's ride, but the experience was a good one to show me how the bike would behave on a variety of terrain and gain confidence to take it on longer trips. This was a shot of the only good road that we had and where my buddy would stop long enough to snap a picture.

I didn't need to load up much since it was only a ride out and back, but I did log 53 miles on dirt. Woohoo!

Left them poor ATVs behind on the better stretches of dirt, but they caught up to me on the really rough stuff. I got some good experience on transition between hard track and sand. It was a bit unnerving to get squirrley in the softer stuff, but nice to have it straigthen right out with throttle application.

Next trip: off-road overnighter!