When I got snowed in in Limon, 83 miles from home, a friend with a trailer came and got me. He had a narrow motorcycle ramp and I wondered how we were going to get the bike up the ramp. No way I would have ridden it up. My friend's theory, which would have worked, was for both us to control the bike while he controlled the clutch and throttle and we let the bike pull itself up. We were about half-way up and making pretty good progress when a BMW-riding ex-marine came along and volunteered to help. This gentleman was big and and had done this sort of thing before. He made very sort work of getting it up and on to the trailer.
We used the tip-over bars as an attachment point for our first set of straps and angled those forward. I think they would have held the bike by themselves if we had had a wheel chock permanently attached to the trailer. As it was, we had a wheel chock, but it wasn't very firmly attached. We used it, and then used another strap to the front corners of the trailer through the wheels, and two more straps from the passenger grab rails to the back corner of the trailer. The bike never moved.
When we took it off the trailer, it was a matter of walking it down using the brake. I've since learned that putting the bike in gear with the engine off and using the clutch to back it down a steep hill/ramp works well also.
BTW, when I crossed Lake Michigan on the USS Badger, I had four tie-down straps, hadn't thought about taking the the tip-over bar guards off and didn't want to use the handlebars. I left the bike in gear on the sides stand, used the passenger grab rails and then "X-ed" the other two straps across the seat and honked down on them. Once again, the bike didn't move.
