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"  After 2 hours exploring an abandoned copper mine, emerging into the afternoon sun dialed our pupils down to pencil points. We were fascinated by the descent into upper Michigan&amp;#039;s underground history, but we were on a motorcycle trip and were eager to log more miles in the aboveground present. We were three days into our journey, roughing out an itinerary on the fly with nothing more than a map, a rough sense of direction and the kindness of strangers.  We had spent most of our time on paved roads, but we were curious about the local dirt. &amp;quot;Is there a decent off-road trail around here anywhere?&amp;quot; we asked the owner of the Adventure Mining Company, a 37-year-old engineer named Matt Portfleet. He ferries tourists around the mines with two ex\u2014Swiss Army Pinzgauer 4WD troop trucks, so we figured he would know. &amp;quot;How near were you thinking?&amp;quot; he asked. &amp;quot;Because if you turn left at the end of this parking lot, the trail will take you about 75 miles off-road almost into Houghton.&amp;quot; No matter which route we took, there would be a hotel room, a shower and a happy hour waiting for us in town. Taking the road would get us there in 2 hours; the trail would take at least 4. Naturally, the trail won. We had our choice of routes, thanks to the motorcycles we were riding. Adventure-touring bikes are motorcycling&amp;#039;s SUVs: dirt-and-pavement Swiss Army knives with long-travel suspension, hard-wearing bodywork and torquey powerplants. These bikes aren&amp;#039;t dirt machines per se, but they&amp;#039;re capable off-road, especially with street-legal knobby tires. They can also easily rip off an 800-mile day cruising the highway. Buy one, the thinking goes, and you can ride to Panama and back without getting sore. Or tear off into the woods of Michigan&amp;#039;s Upper Peninsula and indulge, as we did, in a few days of unplanned exploring.  If statistics are any judge, this kind of motorcycling has pretty wide appeal. Sales for adventure tourers, also known as dual-purpose motorcycles, rose nearly 25 percent in the first quarter of 2011. It used to be that the BMW R1200 GS ruled this category, but there is now a host of new players in the game.  Adventure tourers run the gamut from $6000 650-cc single-cylinders to $15,000 1200-cc monsters weighing 600 pounds or more. For our journey, we gathered five new motorcycles, each representing a different way to explore on two wheels: a BMW F800 GS, a Kawasaki KLR650, a Suzuki V-Strom 650 ABS, a Triumph Tiger 800XC and a Yamaha Super Tenere.  Why Michigan? First off, it&amp;#039;s a big place; the state encompasses two enormous peninsulas, each of which is culturally distinct enough to be its own country. Combined, they hold around 3200 miles of off-road-vehicle trails. Second, with three Great Lakes and 3288 miles of shoreline, there&amp;#039;s a lot of pristine space to get lost in. When our group bombed out of Ann Arbor, Mich., one June morning, sun blazing and bikes freshly washed, we had no idea we were headed to the depths of a copper mine.  &amp;amp;gt;  If you&amp;#039;re traveling to Michigan&amp;#039;s Upper Peninsula (locals just call it the U.P.), you&amp;#039;ll spend a lot of time crossing the rest of the state. Ann Arbor is 280 miles from the 5-mile-long Mackinac Bridge, which connects the state&amp;#039;s two land masses, and on a map the roads look like graph paper. The counties in Michigan&amp;#039;s top half are hilly, sparsely populated and covered in a rolling carpet of trees and wildflowers.  The bridge crossing\u2014narrow, windy and nerve-racking even in pleasant weather\u2014is a rite of passage for Michiganders. An engineering marvel, the 26,372-foot-long, 552-foot-tall Mackinac is the third-longest suspension bridge in the world and the longest in the Western Hemisphere. When it opened in 1957, it marked the end of the slow ferry ride across the Straits of Mackinac, the narrow slice of water between the state&amp;#039;s two peninsulas.  In the interest of gaining seat time and not wasting daylight, we set our sights on the southern shore of Lake Superior and the town of Munising, 120 miles of wide, razor-straight pavement from the bridge. The asphalt, while smooth, is an odd cross between Zen moment and solitary confinement. You can spend hours riding without seeing another car or a curve in the road. It&amp;#039;s like Nebraska with pine trees. All the bikes easily cruised at 70 mph, but some were more skilled at this mindless task than others. On one end, the Kawasaki&amp;#039;s relatively low-powered single-cylinder engine annoyingly buzzed and let the rider know there wasn&amp;#039;t much speed left to be tapped. The Yamaha, however, has a sail-size fairing and plenty of power in reserve\u2014a perfect tool for covering distance.  The U.P.&amp;#039;s towns are all ghosts of what they once were; a century ago, the peninsula was chock-full of thriving fishing communities, active copper mines and sawmills. Now dried-up vestiges of the original settlements\u2014Canadian-accented vowel jumbles such as Escanaba and Ishpeming\u2014dot the landscape, while vacation homes line the coast. Munising, an old lumber town in a sheltered bay, is the jumping-off point for the shoreline&amp;#039;s dramatic cliffs and the 114-square-mile Pictured Rocks national park.  You can rent a room in Munising without too much trouble; the town&amp;#039;s population is a whopping 2983, and motels are on almost every corner. We picked a small one on the town&amp;#039;s harbor, surrounded by hundred-year-old buildings and a Dairy Queen with a mile-long line. The air was that impossible blue you get only in northern summers, the water of Lake Superior cold enough to numb your toes. We ate our weight in buttery local lake trout, drank beer named after sunken Superior freighters (Great Lakes Brewing&amp;#039;s Edmund Fitzgerald Porter tastes of coffee and impressive seamanship) and generally toasted the art of modern motorcycle design. &amp;amp;gt; CONTINUED &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;   Leaving Munising the next morning, we made for Marquette, the U.P&amp;#039;s largest city, about 50 miles away. Marquette houses Northern Michigan University, but its chief attractions are a quiet harbor, a 19th-century downtown and ore-loading docks so big they dwarf the massive ships that sidle up to them. I wanted to see the latter because I&amp;#039;m a sucker for monster engineering; PM senior automotive editor Mike Allen wanted to see them because his father was a Great Lakes freighter captain. Throughout our trip, he regaled us with tales of men doing manly historical-ship things like navigating life-threatening storms in the middle of the night. Coincidentally, these stories emerged whenever I began to think that motorcycling was making me brave and awesome. As my dad used to say, perspective is everything.  Our trail to Houghton traces back to a plate of scrambled eggs in a diner in Munising. Over breakfast on the second day, we were pondering where to go when the waitress mentioned the mines. The U.P. boasts one of the world&amp;#039;s largest copper veins, and mines have existed on the peninsula&amp;#039;s western half, Copper Country, since prehistoric times. Some of them are played out, but many have simply become too expensive to be kept running. Owners often fall back on tourism. Portfleet&amp;#039;s mine is near the hamlet of Greenland. Portfleet and his wife, Vicky, bought the 160-year-old, 1300-foot-deep mine in 2005. We first met him in the parking lot, where he spotted the bikes and came to chat.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been thinking about getting a BMW GS,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I have a lot of friends who want sportbikes, but you can&amp;#039;t really use &amp;#039;em up here. These bikes make sense on this kind of terrain.&amp;quot; His tour of the mine proved to be the kind of fascinating, history-drenched thing that you always mean to do on vacation but never actually get around to doing. Amazingly, the mine was originally excavated by candlelight using sledgehammers and broom-handle-size steel spikes. Portfleet allowed that if we had more time, we could rappel down one of the deeper shafts\u2014he offers a tour that does just that\u2014and head into the mine&amp;#039;s guts.  &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t want an office job,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;This won&amp;#039;t make me rich, but it&amp;#039;s fun.&amp;quot; Then he pointed us toward the dirt.  &amp;amp;gt;  This is the best part about these motorcycles: You can ride wherever, whenever, sometimes just to see where a road goes. Following Portfleet&amp;#039;s tip, we blasted onto the trail that once served as a railroad right-of-way. From the parking lot of Adventure Mining, the trail disappeared into a series of deep valleys. The trail to Houghton\u2014itself an old mining camp that has evolved into a college town\u2014leads through a series of gravel switchbacks and gorge-spanning railroad trestles. At one point we popped out of the forest, grabbed fresh pasties (an up-north meat pie, not unlike a supersize Hot Pocket) at a gas station and dove back onto 70-mph dirt straights. The kicks kept on coming. All of us fell\u2014it&amp;#039;s almost impossible not to\u2014but we were well-geared-up for both bad weather and close contact with the terrain. We wore armored all-weather riding gear from Rev-It, Alpinestars and BMW. With removable thermal and rain liners, we were warm and dry regardless of the weather. One of our more experienced riders remarked that he&amp;#039;d never gone so fast off-asphalt before. Five miles later, we were standing on the pegs and poking through knee-high grass in first gear. A few hours after that, exhaling dust from our nostrils, we were checking into an old-style motel on Houghton&amp;#039;s main drag and having the proprietress introduce us to her duffel-bag-size house cat.  Funny thing about dirt: You cover yourself in it, people assume you&amp;#039;re trustworthy. The U.P.&amp;#039;s vaguely reserved Scandinavian nature was tempered by the extreme friendliness that the bikes brought out in the locals.  In the end, though, for all we felt at home, the PM crew may as well have been on the moon. We ate random regional food that most of us couldn&amp;#039;t pronounce. (Do you know how to say &amp;quot;cudighi&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;pannukakku&amp;quot;?) We stood inside a mountain and reflected on our trip in the time-travel blackness of a copper mine; we rode over a railroad trestle spanning a 200-foot ravine. Best of all, we stayed in clean hotel rooms every night, got satisfyingly filthy during the day and discovered a strangely foreign American land within spitting distance of civilization. All of it impromptu.  &amp;amp;gt; 5 Tough Touring Bikes &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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