Matt Spears handed a woman in Anchorage a thousand dollars in cash, watched her hand over a 1977 Suzuki 250 dual sport, and immediately started fixing things that should have been dealbreakers before the money changed hands. The front brake did not work. The exhaust was loose. The air filter snapped off when he touched it. And the carburetor was quietly pouring fuel onto the ground. That is the opening chapter of a 1,000-mile push to Prudhoe Bay, the northernmost drivable point in the United States, on a budget bike and a plan held together with JB Weld and optimism.
The carburetor, the blown piston, and a man with 60 bikes in his barn
The carburetor repair took three attempts and two separate trips before a replacement part surfaced from the back shelf of a motorcycle shop in Anchorage. Sarah, the shop employee who found it, dug through the warehouse for a new-old-stock component for a 47-year-old bike. The odds of finding it in Alaska at all, let alone brand new, were, in Spears’ own words, ‘crazy.’
With the fuel leak solved, the journey north began in earnest. Spears named the Suzuki the Honeybee and pushed into Hatcher’s Pass, a mountain crossing that dated to a gold rush in 1906. The bike could only hold 45 mph on flat ground and dropped to around 20 mph on climbs, which was a problem with snow and ice passes still ahead. A bent float in the carburetor and a broken air filter, snapped again during the fix, kept him in camp for a full night. The air filter repair involved JB Weld curing overnight inside a sleeping bag because the temperature outside was too cold for the adhesive to set.
The oil line came apart next. The chain had wrapped around the premix hose and destroyed it. Spears poured what premix he had directly into the tank and limped to a small hardware store to improvise a repair with a connector fitting. A few miles later, the engine went boom on the freeway. The piston had a hole through the top of it. A broken crank seal had let air into the engine, leaned out the fuel mixture, and melted the metal.
That phone call went back to Frank, a Facebook Marketplace contact who had already fixed the carburetor in ten minutes after Spears had spent two days on it. Frank had somewhere north of a hundred motorcycles stored across a workshop, a barn, and a van. He dug through his parts pile and found a matching piston, described the odds of that as ‘pretty slim,’ honed the cylinder, sourced a new crank seal from a bearing supplier a couple of hours away, and rebuilt the engine without charging a cent for labor or parts. It turned out the Suzuki had originally belonged to Frank’s family. His grandson Aiden recognized it on sight.
Ice studs, a flat tire, and 300 miles short of Dead Horse
Back on the Dalton Highway, the Honeybee ran better than it ever had. Then the road turned to black ice. A passing worker stopped to report that his coworker had just driven a truck off the road a little further ahead. Spears pulled over and hand-screwed 50 carbide grip studs into the rear tire and 100 into the front without a drill, which left his hand sore and the bike just stable enough to keep moving. The truck was still in the ditch when he rode past.
The rear tire went flat shortly after the ice cleared. With only one spare tube and no tire irons, he changed it using a wrench and whatever else was in the bag, wrapping the old tube around the new one for extra protection. The Honeybee rolled again.
Then the front tire started coming apart. Not flat, but physically splitting, the rubber separating along dry-rot cracks in what may have been the original 1977 tire. The shifter broke at the same moment, leaving Spears stranded on a hill, coaxing the bike into a lower gear with a makeshift tool to get off the road safely. The rear tire was beginning to crack the same way, just not as far along.
With the engine rebuilt and running well, the bike could cruise at 40 to 50 mph. Prudhoe Bay was roughly 300 miles north. But the tires were gone, and there was nothing on hand to replace them.
Frank’s workshop, a Thursday evening
On a workbench somewhere outside Anchorage, a 47-year-old Suzuki piston with a hole through the top of it sat next to the new one Frank had pulled from a pile of parts that had been collecting for decades.
The Honeybee made it further north than most people would have predicted when that carburetor was dripping fuel on day one. Frank rebuilt the engine. Sarah found the impossible part. And somewhere on the Dalton Highway, 300 miles from the finish, a pair of tires that had probably been on the bike since Gerald Ford was president finally gave out.
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