Expedition Gadget Lab - 2014 Kawasaki KLR Special Edition

(energetic music)

[Narrator] There are some places

you can't get to without the right gear.

At least, not these days.

If you only got a weekend,

you're not gonna walk 20 miles just to see something.

But if you strap your gear to a motorcycle,

that's almost as nimble as your own feet,

suddenly you find yourself taking in so much more.

I picked the Cascade Mountains of Washington State

because they kind of have everything.

The terrain was just different every time you looked down.

You get sore riding dirts.

Physical.

The bike is moving under you in ways you're not anticipating

because the ground is moving under the bike.

After a while I realized, just relax.

The bike is made for this.

You have to let it react to the ground

in a way that you're not equipped to.

It has the suspension, it has the balance,

and the center of gravity

that's made to soak up these bumps.

So I had to let it out a little bit,

and let the bike go faster than I was comfortable doing.

Outdoor gear is some of the first gear.

From snow shoes that were made out

of strings and animal guts,

to skis made out of roughly carved branches.

These are things that allowed us

to kind of adapt our environment to ourselves.

It made us more human.

The idea behind this trip was to use gear

not just to connect yourself with somebody who is far away,

but to connect yourself with a world

that maybe was a little too far away.

Because we are also surrounded by mountains,

rivers, and hillsides, and sunsets,

and I think that we lose sight of that a little bit.

So when you can find a piece of technology

that gets you away from technology,

I think you found something pretty amazing.