It's About That TIme of Year

Clumps of yellow leaves are showing up all over town. Well, actually sort of brownish-yellow clumps. These are just some in our yard. There are a lot more at higher elevations. I'm getting some riding in after what I think may be the last trip to Barrow for this field season. I brought back one ActionPacker (just under 50 lbs) of gear from Barrow including a couple of laptops, some tools, several external drives, the Raspberry Pi-3s and some food that will probably go stale. I also brought back my old riding gear. The Kilimanjaro jacket got a lot of use after I removed the protective padding. It is a still a great breathable, waterproof jacket.

The Ural is almost at 50k km so I'm getting ready to do a "major" service i.e. what is specified for 10k km. The owners manual doesn't go beyond something like 32.5k km. Maybe they're not expected to last that long. Rather than deal with the list of compatible spin-on oil filters, I searched on Amazon for the factory filter, a Mann 75/3, and found several listings. I picked the one listed as "Prime" for free shipping. I just cleaned the air cleaner element in my Home Depot PVC fence post air cleaner aka Leftka 3. It was pretty filthy after only being used since Spring. Maybe there was some improvement in airflow from cleaning but probably not as the Moto Guzzi filter element has substantially more surface area than the stock filter. The inside of the filter housing itself was pretty grimy complete with leaves, sand and gravel. I need to hack up some sort of dirt/water trap for the filter housing intake.

I've been averaging 32 mpg since the beginning of May (after the engine had been broken in). Quite an improvement from my road trip last summer when I opted to use the stock filter housing. I'm still considering increasing the size of the main jets one more step as there is a minor flat spot at full throttle. There is actually more power at 80% throttle. In the last 2500 km, I've added no oil so I'll be switching to synthetic in the engine. The transmission and final drive has been running synthetic as long as I've owned the rig.

Today, I'm headed to Anchorage for the day to attend a meeting. I thought about riding down but the non-refundable airline ticket was already purchased. It would've been a great end of summer trip.

This pano was taken in Barrow last Saturday morning. There were a number of barges on the water and I was just curious if any of them were part of the fiber optic cable project. The one on the far left is in the area where the cable is landing but I couldn't tell what it was doing (besides floating).