 Evolution
of a Motorcycle Touring Book
The Sound RIDER! Guide to Motorcycling in the Columbia River
Gorge: 3rd Edition
Born in 2004, the first edition of this travel guide was
originally developed as a bag stuffer for the 2004 Sportbike
Northwest Rally. It featured half a dozen rides, a chapter on places
to visit in the area and a chapter of suggested gear to wear in the
Gorge. It was 48 pages.
In 2006 the book was updated to include dualsport routes and it
was again inserted into rally goers bags at Sportbike Northwest and
Dualsport Northwest. With the addition of the dualsport routes the
book grew to 80 pages.
But we weren’t done with this guide which was still a work in
progress. Up to now the maps were cobbled together using various
sources; the gear chapter became very outdated when we published
Packing Light/Packing Right in 2007 and we still were discovering
roads in and around The Gorge. By late 2007 it was obvious the book
was once again ready for a makeover.
We began by generating more than a half dozen routes bringing the
final count up from the original 6 to 20. We could have gone to a
full 24, but opted to hold a few back as exclusives for rally goers
in the coming years. Those who took advantage of The Roads Less
Travelled ride at the 2008 Rally Week in The Gorge, got a taste of
one such route. Nonetheless, if you attempt to ride all 20 routes in
one trip there you’ll need about 10 days.
 The
next thing we did was take every map and start over using our own in
house cartography. Every route was run through no less than three
mapping software programs and every road was hand drawn, labeled, and
and numbered by cartographers Tim Pizzino and Ryan Barnett. For the
dualsport routes, gravel roads were indicated with a reversed out
text/number format. At the same time every route was created in
MapSource GPS format utilizing waypoints, rather than via points to
‘harden’ the routes and not allow the software to send you backwards
when starting a loop ride. A separate USB Flash Card is now
available with all the MapSource files, which can be converted to
other formats using the GPSbabel.org website.
 Then we chucked the entire gear chapter. Want some advice of
riding and touring gear? You can get plenty of that in Packing Light
Packing Right.
The book is a general guide for anyone visiting The Gorge, but it
can also be a key tool to our Rally Week in The Gorge event. In 2007
we saw no less than twelve crashes with half of those resulting in
hospital visits. The Gorge is not a place you ride carelessly in.
It’s a region that can graduate you to your next level of riding
skills, or it can eat you for lunch. Considering the crash activity
of 2007, a chapter was authored outlining the ten most common causes
for crashes in the area and how to avoid them. It seems to have
worked. When the book was provided to rally goers in 2008 we
experienced only four crashes, with zero hospital visits.
In past editions we’d held off on running restaurant guides and
accommodation suggestions. Restaurants have a way of coming and
going, especially new ones. So we took the position that if an
establishment had stood the test of time, three years in this case,
we’d give it consideration. Ditto on accommodations. The book now
sports ten pages of restaurant suggestions and six pages of
accommodations. One place we like a lot is still too new to get in
the guide, but if you’re in the Mosier area, be sure to stop in at
the Good River for lunch or dinner some time.
 We now have more than 5,000 photographs of riders in The Gorge.
The third edition was a chance to expand our usage of photos and
update where necessary.
Since 2003 we’ve created more than 15 poker run routes through
The Gorge. With the expanded edition we felt it might be good to
share a little insight on how we put the runs together and some tips
on making up your own.
Finally we created an index on the last page so the user can
easily locate a route in the book or information about a point of
interest.
The book has now grown to a healthy 128 pages and is spiral bound
making it easy to slip into a tank bag. Even with the latest
expansion we held the price at $19.95. We suspect this may not be
the last edition of the SR! Guide to Motorcycling in the Columbia
River Gorge, but it’s probably reached a point where it won’t need
an update every two years.
Whether you’re coming to the next Rally Week in the Gorge, or
planning to do a little traveling on your own, the book is certain
to get you off the main routes and into some scenic riding, while
providing a lot of common sense suggestions to make the most of your
time there.
SR!/Summer 2008
For more information and to purchase a copy of The Sound
RIDER! Guide to Motorcycling in the Columbia River Gorge
CLICK HERE. |
