Today, we’re mostly thinking about the Earle Alaskan

In case you didn’t know, a sizeable chunk of Australians are confined to their homes at the moment, thanks to the, ahem, obvious.

And, while facing the same four walls for weeks on end, thoughts naturally turn to how all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Um, that is to say, getting very much out of the house, ideally as far away from that increasingly constricting box and into whichever bits of nature haven’t been completely ruined by man’s arrival and avarice.

But how to get there? While locked-down Australians might suggest ‘by any means necessary, up to and including moonwalking’, we can do a bit better for those hapless, upside-down souls.

A car is the obvious solution, of course, but it does raise a serious, two-part question: why would you free yourself from confinement in a house, only to voluntarily confine yourself in a car for the journey to wide open spaces? Why not immediately cast off the shackles of confinement in its entirety, from the outset, and throw a leg (or two, if you’re feeling avant-garde) over a motorbike?

Generally, in Australia, it’s dry and warm enough that anything with two wheels and some form of motive force will get you to parts of the country where the wildlife goes from regular-strength deadly to genuinely unfair. But it’s winter at the moment, so everywhere south of Chris Hemsworth’s house is actually a bit parky. In fact, down in the southern climes, things are downright wet and miserable, like a Black Mirror episode set in Glasgow.

The solution, then – apart from thermals and some serious wet-weather gear – is a bike that can handle the frozen conditions of the aptly named Snowy Mountains, or the one-slip-and-that’s-it goat tracks of the Victorian High Country. Something like the Earle Alaskan, then.

The Alaskan starts off as a Ducati Desert Sled, a scrambler-styled slice of absolute deliciousness. The Sled is already pretty handy on dirt roads and in, as you might imagine, flat, American-style deserts. But that clearly wasn’t enough for Alex Earle, who wanted a bike that’d be able to handle an unsupported trek through Alaska. This, aside from serving as a handy explainer of how the bike was named, required a bit of hands-on.

There’s a hand-formed, six-gallon fuel tank up front, as well as a two-gallon auxiliary secreted away in the tail, helpfully avoiding rather long strolls with a jerry can. The wheels were upsized to 21” front, 18” rear, as per the gospel of Going Off Road and Actually Making it Home Again. Crash bars and a Kevlar skid plate stave off most of the trip-ending mechanical injuries, and a three-inch extension to the rear swingarm beefs up the wheelbase and off-road stability.

Happily, the best parts of the donor Ducati are left well enough alone in the Alaskan, so the lovely air-cooled 800cc longitudinal V-twin (or L-twin, as Ducatisti insist on calling it) stays, as well as the Desert Sled’s already beefed-up frame and suspension. That means you’re able to exploit every one of the 70-odd horsepower on offer as often as you dare; mechanical sympathy isn’t the limiting factor here – self-preservation is.

Now, if this were one of those florid arthouse-style motorbike videos, we’d be arriving at the point where we make the footage look like it was shot on Super 8 and devolve into some nonsense about discovering the soul of the machine and how you can only find yourself by getting lost.

Instead, we’re just going to mention that Alex Earle actually designed the original Ducati Desert Sled concept, which a) pretty much automatically makes him a TG hero, and b) would suggest he knows what he’s on about. Oh, and the fact that he proved his work in (where else?) Alaska probably means that it’ll handle whichever adventures Australians dream up during lockdown.