Sport Touring Corner By Norm Kern, MSTA Editor / ReasonsToRide.com Contributor
Finding Fun Adventure Riding Nearby Last month we discussed how to find nearby twisty roads for day rides. For this month I've been working on a couple of routes that I can use to practice riding my 650 Suzuki V Strom on gravel roads. How do you find gravel roads other than go out looking for them? I started by asking adventure riding friends who provided links to some adventure and gravel road routes. (Facebook is an excellent place to find local and regional adventure riding groups and most of them have a collection of route files you can tap into. Two groups that I belong to are Adventure Riders Ohio and Southern Ohio Adventure Riders.) Although there many gravel roads in Southwest Ohio, Indiana is a different story. The ADVrider.com site has some good resources including a track called South East Indiana Loop, or SEIL for short. The SEIL was created by Chad Christy, of Metamora, Indiana, who has done a LOT of work to create this valuable resource. About ten years ago he was riding hare scrambles and doing other dirt racing events. Some friends encouraged him to put a license plate on one of his dirt bikes so he could ride it on the road. He quickly realized the freedom of being able to go just about anywhere there was a road and it took him in a new direction.
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Chad began planning routes between his home in Metamora and various historical sites in the area. Once he reached the destination, he would take a different route home, exploring roads that caught his interest on the way. As he began concentrating on more obscure historical sites, they led him to even more interesting back roads. Like me, he favors roads that are in low lying areas, following creeks and rivers. Over the next four years he spent a lot of time studying county maps, looking at satellite images on Google Earth and exploring on his bikes.
Chad began inviting friends to go along with him to help check things out and many of them would call him later, wanting the tracks from rides so they could go back and enjoy them again or share with other friends. Since he saves the GPS tracks from every ride, this was easy to do. After a couple of years Chad looked at his growing collection and thought, "I ought to just go ahead and make a project out of this!" He got some help and consolidated his route library into the SEIL, which is over 1200 miles in length. Of course it's not all
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