I left Tim’s house in a southern suburb of Salt Lake City at 7am. It was late but I didn’t get to bed until after 1am. The bike service took Tim’s four mechanics and helpers a full three hours to complete. In my sleep I was dreaming deeply and so far from being awake that when I did open my eyes, my body shook, so severe was the dislocation. That’s ok because the ability to shift between different types of reality is my job. 10 days ago I was with my family at home in Wales, wondering whether to have honey or brown sugar on my porridge. Now I am in a hotel room much like any of the thousands that look quite the same. I am in anywhere land with only the hum of the fridge to keep me company.

I filmed myself in the room after which I washed some clothes and then had a bath and shave. It is important to feel each day is a fresh start. As Tim’s father said to him and also mine to me; you get up in the morning, you put your breeches on and you go to work. Tomorrow I go to Mexico. I have recent reports about the violence there and the comments about roadblocks make for disturbing reading. For a few moments, alone in my room, I admit to feeling scared. In all the years of travelling across countries in both remote landscapes and busy cities I have never once been afraid. I am now.

Think about it - 4 times round the world on the toughest routes that exist and never a single problem ever. So the law of averages comes round. You can’t win all the time. The Dalton Highway is no worse than the Didi Gagulu Desert in Northern Kenya, or the Nubia itself. I feel nervous. I had implicit belief in my being able to crack this route - my second attempt - but thoughts in my head this morning were bleak.

I am in Redline Yamaha, Canada’s largest dealership working exclusively with Yamaha. Geoff the Service Manager is in the back trying to isolate the problem. The project could be called off. A three day delay would not be acceptable by my standards. This is a record breaking ride of the Americas and I don’t want to pussy around with a time that could easily be beaten. I welcome the challenge but not with such a delay, especially as I am flying. Never felt faster and smoother and my skill set since 1996 is not comparable. It would be a catastrophe to stop now.

I have 18 hours to Calgary so should get there maybe around 5am where my mate Paul is waiting to help me, after a quick 1 hour rest I’ll continue the 1,300kms to Salt Lake. I need to be there no sooner than noon on Wednesday. After a 3 hour service at Wrights, Tim the chief mechanic will send me on my way and I will do a final 400 miles towards Tucson. I will bed down for the night in a motel for 6 hours and do my blogs and film downloads and then enter Mexico mid morning and try to reach to be south of Mexico City by nightfall.

If I can keep this up - and there a lot of people supporting me in the background, Caroline managing the admin, Will editing, Erik in Buenos Aires, Linda on the website

Stone the size of a fist missed my head but cam from the wheels of a truck I was overtaking last night. Just missed my hand, so was lucky.

Finished download the film clips and blogs at 1.30am, up at 5.45am and I am leaving having sent these pictures to Tim at Wrights Motorcycles in Salt Lake City. I

I have 3,470kms to ride in 54 hours to get there by noon Wednesday, 3 hour service and bike management, blog, short sleep, and then some of the 800 miles to the Mexican border via Tucson.

Now I’m pacing myself. 48 hours on the road and then into a hotel, even for 5 hours. Have to get the downloads done. Have to communicate.

Last night I was restless in the car but slept. In the morning I set off and felt strong. Strange how good I feel. Before the start I was so nervous, afraid I might not have it in me anymore to suffer enough to succeed. Listen, if it were that easy I wouldn’t be alone out here. There are others but they are slower.

22 days, that’s my target, 19 if I didn’t have to film. The fire is beginning to stir in my belly, my loins. It has been a while since I needed like this. I need this one; I have to have this journey as I see it in my head.

Finished with the Dalton Highway, with the pipeline, with Deadhorse, the grime and the oil, the big trucks and the s****y roads. I’ve already passed over the Brookes Range with the magnificent Atigan Pass, over 70 degrees latitude, well on the way to the Arctic Ocean. It’s a different world and it changes daily. I cross into Canada from Alaska, to Beaver Creek (pop 60). I want a fridge magnet, but no one has one, not even at Buckshot Bettys, so I ride on…

The vision is coming into focus. I rode hard all day from Fairbanks, the top of the Alaskan Highway to where I am now, the Yukon River 150 miles west of Watson Lake.

Loads to do before Salt Lake; Calgary late tonight if I’m lucky. Take this evening. I had only 250 miles more to do and the sun was going down in Whitehorse. The animals come out at night; bears, moose, caribou. There are buffalo on the side of the road at Watson Lake.

I rode fast, really fast, swept around the corners on a surface sports bike riders would want to steady themselves with their feet. There is gravel and small round stones and mud and dust that clogs up the radiator. I’m running hot all the time. The bike and me. The focus is intense, scanning each bush on both sides of the highway.

I try to make where I need to be before it gets dark but it’s not to be. Two long days and a morning will get me to Salt Lake. I can ride the bike very hard knowing it will be serviced within an inch of its life; four mechanics at Wrights, in two hours, and then ride late until the Mexican border. I’m not crossing there at night. There is a plan.

The climate has not been friendly. Low cloud hung lower the further north I rode. The sense of growing isolation was impossible to ignore. For two nights I slept rough, wrapped up in my sleeping bag in some truck stop under a veranda. I am still determined to ride this adventure as I always have, hard and fast. Too many hotels soften the soul; too few miles make me weak.

Going up was hard on the bike and I am a little nervous how it will fare on the way down. Mud spray from the front wheel oven baked on the hot radiator and choked the engine of cool air. At one point I caught the temperature gauge showing 120 so stopped and allowed it to cool down. I found a small airstrip and asked if I could sponge off the mud and that seemed to work. It’s still not right but within acceptable parameters. It is hard up here but I will miss it when I’m gone. Why is it like that?

The tundra is turning red and that is a sign of fall. Summer turns into winter in two or three weeks with little in between. I had thought about risking starting in the south but that would have been a disaster. Fortune favours the brave but catastrophes await the stupid. It is said that everything is chance but with preparation you lesson the risk of the unknown.

Trucks batter past, the surface changes from dry to wet, from paved to soft soil. One minute the air is war and dry the next stinging cold rain lashes down. I am tired and tomorrow the journey starts for the south.

A major service is planned for me at Wrights Motorcycles. Tim is waiting with four mechanics. The only snag is the unpredictability of the weather. It’s changed. Yesterday warm and sunny, today it’s dark and stormy. I have 1,000 miles on dirt on an R1. There are animals everywhere, night riding will be slow. I am nervous. It’s time to go.

The ride to Fairbanks was very cold and wet. 200 miles before breakfast and that was only a hot chocolate in a café in some supermarket. I still felt uncoordinated, not quite myself, besieged if you like by nerves. There was so much at stake.

I am in such a place of privilege, I know this. I intend to make the most of every minute, but that doesn’t take away the grit that irritates the way you want to think. Often, the road takes away thinking. Such is the focus of watching the side alleys where cars poke out and the bushes where moose want to rush across your path, the head is empty of distractions, just full of speed calculations of large animals and the co-efficient of a trajectory. Yet nothing, not a bear, no caribou, elk, deer, only squirrels the size of a large hand recklessly flinging themselves across the road.

After buying a fuel container and some straps, an alarm clock and a sleeping bag I left for the Dalton Highway. The route from College Street took me to the lights where I turned left onto the Steese Highway once again. My departure time out of the city was much later than planned and whilst there was plenty of daylight, it soon began to rain. Alaska is a desert and gets very little precipitation a year, but barely a day passes without some falling on Prudhoe Bay. Still the wind was warmer than the morning and my spirits were high. In fact my mindset was determinedly strong. To show weakness now would mean this ride would fail. It could not be allowed not to succeed.

The route undulated, climbing around bends and then sometimes feeling quite sullen on the straights. The bike and I were in some unison and we fitted each others movements well. After so many miles and so many journeys around the world, my body knew it’s way around the tight spaces of this bike well.

The journey to the start line had begun. It was nearly 3,500kms from Calgary to the northern tip of Alaska, Prudhoe Bay; time to get any early problems sorted out. Out of the airport I was directed to go south on the Deerfoot trail without being told to look for highway 16 which leads onto highway 1. After 30 kms I pulled off to a gas station, bought a couple of bungy straps to properly fasten my tripod onto my rack and asked the checkout girl for directions.

“Well sire, I surely have no idea.” Of course, I forgot how geographically localised North Americans in the service industry are, but was cheerfully passed on to a guy who had a Liverpool accent and he immediately invited me back to his for a cuppa. He was a biker and knew what I was up to. It was raining; there had been storms over where I was going at Lake Louise so when he asked me to stay over with his family it was very welcome. Paul was ex military, a service engineer on Jaguars in Norfolk and RAF Valley in Anglesey.

Next day I was up early, 5am, but my body clock made me feel it was nearly midday. This would be the only occasion I would get up so early and feel so bright. I hate early mornings, an unhelpful trait given that it was a pre-requisite for endurance riding. We rode together until Banff and then I was on my own. The weather warmed, it was sunny and the glaciated park between Banff and Jasper was resplendent. Bow Glacier looked extraordinarily crisp in the hot sun and Athabasca Glacier by the Ice Centre brilliantly white. Neither compared with the southern Argentine glacier at the start of Ruta 40. The Perito Moreno Glacier is perhaps the most magnificent in the world, but here the breeze was blowing me along and I began to warm. No problems as yet.

By the Colombia Icefield I had run out of superlatives to describe what I saw as I zoomed by on my R1. Thick slabs of snow lay on top of the front ranges of the Rockies. Comparing it to a topping on a sandwich was the second thought that came into my head; the first was of white marzipan on finely scrumpled layers of cheap chocolate. These sawback mountains towered over lakes reflecting such a mixing of dyes and inks; it was a million conifers in neon green. The colour and the magnificence was on such a level that I was on tiptoes and still couldn’t see the top. The saving grace of such a place is that the large caravans and recreational vehicles, parked up clumsily in every single viewpoint, gave the place some modesty.

Us comprehending the enormity of protecting nature at it’s most commanding is like expecting microbes to understand Shakespeare. Although you could go for walks in Tunnel Mountain or hang around Bow Glacier, or instead ride all day trying to overtake long looking rooms on wheels. Most were rented from a company that decorates the rear end with something pretty; an attractive female canoeist wearing a pigtail or photographs of wild flowers. There was another one with a hill and another with a lake and snow capped peaks. Sometimes the pigtails would hypnotize you as a double yellow line forbade you to overtake. After a while the one began to get mixed up with the other because when I did look around I expected to see girls in pigtails. Perhaps if I rode a foot-forward bike a lot slower I too could watch the back of RV’s for longer.

Suddenly, I was in British Columbia thinking where the hell am I now? There was a sense in my head that the journey was beginning to take shape. Get 900kms done, test drive getting up early. Check my reactions in the field? Am I tired? The wrists, check, neck, back and knees, check, nuts, check because sometimes when I’m pressing hard against the tank squinting through the undergrowth for bears, my nuts begin to ache. Just then, I thought of the self styled explorer Bear Grylls and wanted to ask him a question, ‘what do you think I should do if I drove into a big one?’ Caption competition material. Even the light in this patchy part of BC refused to illuminate the wheat in the way it ought to.

On entering Dawson Creek, there was a new WalMart as you dropped into the city limits. The long sweeping main street, lined with hotels on one side and services on the right, was a compact business zone that would take me to Mile Zero of one of the greatest roads in the world, the Alaskan Highway. Up on the top street, past the grain elevator was my mate Charles’ hotel, The Alaskan.

I’d known him since 1996 when I asked him for sponsored accommodation. Having left Ushuaia 25 days earlier I was four days away from Prudhoe. Way back 15 years ago, on my first ever big bike on my second only motorcycle journey, I had reached Fairbanks in 28 days. It had been raining and I knew I’d not finish. Having fallen off my Daytona and broken my ankle on Day 3, it still hurt, but so disillusioned was I that I hadn’t beaten the then record of three guys in a car, I gave up in disgust. I’d been sleeping under trucks thinking too much sleep would make me soft and still I couldn’t crack it. I knew then I’d have to have another go.

Highway2 goes on interminably, four lanes separated down the middle by a broad dip of grassed reservation. It’s all farming and clapperboard houses in these parts where everyone has planting machinery parked on the lawn in the way we might have a small grass cutter. Tin grain silos about the size and shape of an African mud hut stand in batches, some by enclaves of trees others more isolated in a large plain or maybe by a watercourse. Places come and go and business loops take you into the administrative heart of what look like self-contained communities. There are banks and restaurants car show rooms and on the outskirts of every town a place where you can buy a tractor. Lake tops unfurl in a stiffening breeze unimpeded by tree or fence across a flatness that creates a big horizon. There is nothing to look over, nothing hidden through which you need to peer through. Maybe this is how North Dakotans share their secrets? The train track follows the road and at every intersection, a hamlet of food stores and motels cluster together to attract business.

I crossed North Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin and driving past signs that advertised frozen custard butter burgers as their trade mark food item I slept in the car yet again, still not able to catch up with the four riders I had promised to trail and sweep up if necessary. Within quite a broad vector I could rescue most of those guys ahead of me. The Baltimore’s were at Niagara, Tim was seeing a friend in the east, Mr Oliphant had long since left Tucson and Moffat and others were doing America the way it should be done, slowly. So far no problem texts so in the middle of a Minnesota forest by Leech Lake I spoke to a sheriff in his car and asked him if the area was safe and he nodded that it was. Apart from barking dogs and a few drunks it was fine and I slept well. I have slept on the road all my life and when alone, prefer it to the clutter of a hotel. The next day I drove the 134 miles into Duluth.

Aerostitch sell one of my books and owed me some money and Peter the accountant was kind enough to sign it over to me. One of the girls in the office was Russian and when she found out I was going back to Alaska later in the summer asked if I’d take her. Around the corner from the building I turned right at the lights, crossed a spur of Lake Superior in sight of the Aerial Lift Bridge. Joining highway 53 south for Eau Claire I trundled along considerably slower than the way I ride my R1 and grabbed more emails online in a McDonalds and sorted out a little more business.

Down the road on the 53 I stop to make a call and grab a small chicken combo from A&W a chain specialising in making all American food. The sullen faces of the servers are akin to people resigned to a life of servitude. I don’t know what the options are in the state of Wisconsin, but it’s less than many places elsewhere unless you like fishing. The spread out places and widely separated buildings in small towns create a default separation of people. This is especially evidenced in car people. In the car, across very wide roads, a certain distance transfers into the very nature of everyday interaction. American vehicle owners are so polite to each other, not because Americans are the politest race in the world, but because it’s possible they have forgotten how to reasonably resolve simple misunderstandings on the road. I feel if I make a wrong turn some redneck will pull a gun on me - he surely will have one in his car. But then the opposite view holds that if by advocating you hang a man for stealing a loaf of bread, not only will he not steal the bread, the punishment is so extreme for the crime it also will never get used. The bread thief knows this and just maybe more bread gets stolen than if the punishment was merely a simple beating.

It’s easy to bait the yanks, they do it to themselves. Irony is not understood and they will have driven around the block before it sinks in that someone has taken the piss. Too late to get shot, you’re up the interstate, just like everyone else, driving like a lemming hoping the cops don’t pick you out. And this is how I drove across Wisconsin.

At De Forest I pulled off and found a family restaurant. The difference between a family restaurant and say a McDonalds is waitress service. If you get a very fat waitress it’s definitely a downer but it testifies that the food is good - actually, in America good food is defined by plentiful. Of course the best thing about an American waitress is that she’ll smile at you and laugh at your jokes. Yep, for the promise of a 10% service charge she will also think your ugly child is cute and wish you well as you leave. An English waitress by contrast would rather choke on her own vomit than show such gratuitous hospitality. The way an American waitress speaks also holds a clue to how north mid-west interstate society comports itself. It is upbeat, resonates around a single tonal level with pitch perfect niceness. In the distance I could a waitress circulate, slowly getting nearer, circling around the tables saying exactly the same thing to everyone. Whilst I recognise that she was wishing everyone to have a nice time, she was actually telling them, “you have a great weekend won’t you?” The way she intoned at the end of her sentence sounded like a tax demand and when she finally confronted me and I asked if that was obligatory.

“What’s obli-ga-tory?” she said with surprise.

“That I have to have a great weekend, do I have to?”

She frowned and then suddenly laughed and passed the test. She knew I was joking. “No, you don’t have to,” and she tousled her hair a little, “but, hey, you’re here so you might as well, whadayasay?” Perfect logic in a way and her upbeat view, however unsympathetic to the emotion of the moment (I could have been depressed knowing I was going to drive around Chicago at midnight) was in perfect harmony with the idea that if it’s difficult, we employ the -‘we don’t want to go there do we’ - philosophy of life. “So are you on vacation or what?” she said working hard for her service charge. “Yes, I’ve just come up from Argentina”. Now this was unfair because I didn’t know where the hometown of this restaurant, De Forest was until I got here, equally, I just knew she didn’t know where the hell the Argies lived. “I bet that’s a nice place?”

Goodness, I thought to myself, this conversation was going exactly to plan. “No, it’s cold now, it’s winter.” I was being a bit naughty; I mean who needs to care about the southern hemisphere when you’ve got 429 TV channels and Stannar chairlifts to help fat people get to their bedrooms. Just then, a very fat person tripped up by my food booth as we were chatting and in regaining his balance crashed both feet to the floor, shuddering my table with a bang making my onion ring fly off my fork. “Well look at that, you’ve lost your onion ring,” she said professionally smoothing away the embarrassment, “I’ll just go and get you another.”

The restaurant was now empty and as I got up to leave three people came in to dine. No judgement intended and as part of my unintentional observational study of anyone I saw, thy just happened to be mostly fat and yes, two more walked in. They were not just fat they were morbidly obese. When this fat bloke fell over I thought they were going to call for a tow truck. These two people would take up two seats each on an aircraft and anything they might need to assist them to climb up a set of stairs would require more than a belt drive and something related to a JCB. The less than very fat person looked as if he had lost a chromosome getting out of his car at which point I left scratching my head wondering how on earth these people put men on the moon.

I paid my bill, gave the kind waitress two dollar notes and as I started my drive to Chicago and beyond to find yet another field to sleep in, wondering where on this large continent were my riders, scattered far and wide, and what anyone would make of a free range DIY ‘I-can-do-it’ Nick Sanders tour!

Gary owned the Sealaska and remembered from when I led 22 riders around the world in 2002. He lives in Hyder in the summer and winters in Hawaii. The rest of the time the bad lads come to Hyder to hide. One half of the town disowns the other and if you stayed here for long an edgy feel would quickly gain momentum. We never stay anywhere for long. We move fast and see everything on the move. Having placed into position another important piece of the jigsaw, a clearer picture of the adventure slowly began to come into focus, the true clarity of which would only happen once we got home. Separation from minor problems and squabbles would be essential to gain a grounded perspective for the magnitude of what each rider had achieved. This journey was the Mount Everest of the motorbike world, and I feel qualified to say so.

The route back through the Banff and Jasper national park was spectacular. The Colombian Icefield was as I remembered all those years ago. The entrails of the head of ice retreating presented itself as mounds of grit and scree, everything grey, held frozen for hundreds of years only to be secreted and left scraped by the roadside. Nearby Bow Glacier lay next to Crowfoot Glacier and by Hector Lake, frozen and green, Mosquito Creek looked cold and forbidding. This route between Jasper and Banff is one of the most magnificent routes in North America and as a motorcyclist you almost go down on bended knee wanting to be wedded to such beauty.

Brian’s bike was still without a working rectifier so only by successively exchanging batteries could it be ridden for distances of 150 miles in which time I could charge one for him using my engine. His mindset though was of one having completed the journey and that this was the end of the ride. He rode all the way and put 17 000 miles on the clock of a Tenere in eight weeks. It is only when you start to look back at where these riders have been, and in such a short time, that you begin to establish a respect for what they have done. In all the tours that I have led, this one has been the cruellest, and in all the groups of men and women that have completed their adventure, this final hard core group of riders that I have the privilege to ride with, are without doubt the most understated, and amongst the toughest. As seems to be the prerogative of the talented, they are also a tad temperamental. In the Sandman Hotel at McBride Jonny and Nigel had been arguing ferociously. I can hear Jonny now, shouting how no one wants to ride with him, as his voice starts to get higher and higher. He would drink more beer and bang his fist hard on the table. A man so strong he could open up a clam with his fingers. Nigel, the little bearded one, could survive a ride alone across the Nubian but would last seconds if the large Norwegian really got on a roll. They, along with Steve, Nadine and Tim Hughston are now the back markers of this expedition, behind all of the others who elected to leave a few days sooner.

It is raining and it is cold and Caroline and I are driving to Calgary. I stopped riding in Guatemala to take over the duties driving the support vehicle. Paperwork and the dealing with corrupt policemen and petty officialdom required more experience than Roy yet possessed, and as has happened most nights, end of our workday will be midnight once again.

The next morning it is her time to return home. Everyone is dispensable at some point on a project, and most certainly me, so I dropped her off at Calgary airport. I was then 400 miles behind my small group and we had arranged to try and meet up around Winnipeg. There are final objectives to ride to Niagara Falls but the bikes must be delivered to the shippers near New York in the next five days.

I left Brian in Calgary with a friend of his who lived there and left him equally with an interesting choice, which might not be of his own choosing. Because Tenere’s are not sold in North America his bike could not be fixed. By exchanging batteries, which I could selectively charge and keep swapping, he could keep going to New York. He didn’t fancy that. If I carried his bike to New York without him it would be difficult to save any of the other riders should they befall a catastrophe. He would need to sit in the truck with me so I could get him on the road using our emergency procedure. It was only 4000 miles to the end of the trip but he decided to stay. He was considering leaving his bike here with the view of flying back later in the year bringing back the part he needed and then ride around America. One moment his life had a route he understood, the next moment presented a possible dramatic change of fortune. How interesting. I left and found a Super 8 motel nearby and the next morning set off east, on my own on the Trans Canadian Highway chasing trains.