Done and Dusted, or Just Dusted

I’m home, and as usual, I’m unable to sleep. What a great weekend. . . actually, it was pretty much an entire week.

After a great sleep in a real bed, I headed out to the site of The Loose Screw Dual Sport Rally. There were very few people there, but I was hoping to find someone to ride with. It was Friday, the day before the ride day, and I wanted to pre-ride one of the routes, or a portion anyway. I parked and set up my tent, and as it turned out, the guys beside me were waiting for one of the organizers to show to take some people out. Well, he never showed, so we decided to head out on our own, since I had the route charts ready. It is a navigational event, but not a race. There are three routes, ‘A’ being the most difficult, and the ‘C’ route was more suited to big off road touring type bikes. The ‘B’ and ‘C’ routes came with GPS files as well as the paper scroll chart, but I was the only one to actually have the chart prepared, and since we decided to do the ‘A’, they were unable to navigate themselves.

As I said, only one of the two guys beside me was willing to ride the ‘A’, but there was another loner like myself camped on the other side, and he was itching to go. I’m not going to go into details, but it was HOT and the route was tough. Nothing we couldn’t handle, but it was unrelenting, and the willows in the clear-cuts were so thick, you often couldn’t see the guy in front even if you could see the rear wheel of his bike. We also rode several miles of fire break, which is where they sink the teeth of a bulldozer and rip up the ground. This was brutally rough, and I wasn’t particularly enjoying myself. Both myself and the bike were overheating.

That’s me bombing through a clear cut.

We were in a wide open clear cut section when my camping neighbour, Bryan, got his first flat tire. Jay (the other guy obviously), and I sat under the shade of an overturned stump while Bryan fixed his tire in the shade of a few very small trees.

Other than that, it was direct sun and 37º.

We rode a while longer, and came out to a decommissioned logging road (usually a good sign of a way out), when I announce that I was done. Bryan thanked me for my swallowing my pride and admitting defeat, as he had come to a similar conclusion a ways back. We used the GPS to take us to the lunch break, which was at Sunpeaks, and then we rode forestry roads back to camp. On the way back to camp, and within site of the highway, but from the top of the mouton, Bryan got his second flat. He hadn’t checked what caused the first flat, but assumed it was a pinch from hitting rock, but then I saw what appeared to be a dusty nail. It was actually an animal tooth! Weird. No picture of the tooth sadly, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Saturday, Bryan, his friend Matt and I headed out on the slighly easier ‘B’ route, but within the first few minutes, there was already a bike traffic jam of people crashing all over a silty hill climb. I was a very easy climb, but it wasn’t suitable for some of the heavy bikes attempting it. While we waited for it to clear, and unbeknownst to me, Matt left. Bryan said he has little patience, so he went off to ride the same route he rode the day before.

Once we got clear of the jam, we passed btween 5 and 10 groups, and had an awesome day. It turned out that the paper roll chart was better for navigation than the GPS, and for me, much more fun. These are the only two other picture I took that day. There is a group of older guys behind Bryan, and we were now up to second (again, not a race, but we were SECOND!). That group of four old geezers could ride! They passed us twice, since after they passed us the first time, they stopped for a snack break. I was riding along, minding my own business when I heard some bikes’a comin’, so I ripped up the steep climb in front of me, which had me wheeling almost out of control at the top, and I pulled off to the side to let them passed. They flew up the climb like it was nothing, and each guy gave a little beep or a wave, and disappeared. Three of the four were at least or pushing 60!

I put my helmet camera on after lunch, and within 10 minutes I had my first of two crashes. Moments before this clip, and while riding up what was described on the chart as ‘a long steep climb, but you should be able to tractor it’, I said out loud something to the extent of “whew! I’m actually quite tired after that big lunch”. No where in the morning sections were there any such notes. Well, about one minute later a cut tree jumped out at me. No footage of the second wipe-out.

The throttle twisted wide open, and it’s funny to see me fiddling with my switches. When your bike is revving to the moon, it’s easy to forget how to turn it off. The kill switch is on the right side, bit it was completely burried and I had to dig to get to it.

A picture Bryan took of a little crummy cabin out in the middle of the know where.

About an hour later, Bryan’s bike broke down ending our ride. We got it running. . . . ish, but the motor was too hot to fix it, so we headed off the trails, and had about 50 kms of highway to get the sick bike back to camp. It ran out of gas due to the carb problem 30 kms out, so I continued back to see if Matt was done (he was), and told him he had to take his truck and go pick up his buddy.

When the truck rolled into camp, I had just finished bathing in the river, and Matt yelled out the window “Look Brian, two Hondas”. Jay and I both Ride KTMs, and both Matt and Bryan were ribbing us about them, since they think KTM riders have a superiority complex. Well, after picking up Bryan’s Honda, they found another Honda broken down on the side of the highway, so they rescued that one as well.

HA HA!