The Three Amigos: Trail Riders

I miss dirt bike riding.  I'm not talking about bicycles either--I'm talking motorcycles.  I used to go dirt bike riding a lot.  A lot.  Why don't I any more? Well, it's not something that you should do alone--Especially the way I used to do it.  I was a very aggressive trail rider, and in addition there would be no telling where I might end up when I left my truck behind and hit the boonies on two wheels.  The further out, the better.

There was a time when I think we went riding every other weekend.  I say "we" because it was almost always the three of us: Myself, Denis, and Dan. Denis is my youngest brother, and Dan was my best friend from high school.  We were a team.  Many times we even looked alike--All wearing identical dark green Air Force field jackets (compliments of me).  Occasionally, we would have guest riders with us, and it was always fun to see if they could keep up when we were playing cat & mouse at high speed on twisty trails through the trees.

Our favorite times were the weekends with rain in the forecast.  Rain = mud.  We didn't like to ride in the rain, but we sure liked riding right after the rain.  The soupier (is that a word?) the better in our eyes.  I remember one Saturday morning I called Dan at his house:
"You ready to go?" I asked.
"You wanna go in this? It's pouring down!" he countered, hoping I would say no.
"Sure--It'll stop by the time we get way out there." I said.

I was right.  It was a great day of riding.

Here's a shot of Dan trying out the track at the Thurston County ORV park near Olympia before we headed for the trails:

Denis always had a knack of having a seemingly endless supply of munchies in his pockets.  One time we were taking a break under a tree on a particularly cold, rainy day.  While we were huddled under the tree we all had our gloves parked atop our exhaust pipes.  Even though they would still be soaking wet when we put them back on, at least they'd be warm.  Anyway, we were sitting there listening to the rain, wishing we were warm and dry.  We were hungry too.
"Candy bar?" Denis asked, holding a fistful of candy bars out.
Talk about perfect timing!  We could have kissed him.

We enjoyed challenging terrain.  Hills were especially fun.  We were trail riders, not track racers/motocross wannabe's.  I remember more than once slamming on the brakes when we passed a trail that had a "TRAIL CLOSED" sign on it.  To us that meant a challenge.  Trees down? No problem.  Trail washed out? Yeah, okay, that could be a problem. It was not unusual for us to have to literally drag our bikes over obstacles like trees or logs.  Yes, we also had to turn around and go back a lot of times too.

I heard it said one time by a guy I used to work with that kinda summed up dirt biking:
"If a ride doesn't cost you a 30-dollar bill every time you go out, it'll cost you a 60 the time after that."
He was not too far off.  All it took was a broken lever on the handlebars to set you back.  A crash via missing a turn was not uncommon (those hurt), but the costly ones where when you were climbing a steep hill and the front end would come up on you.  If you weren't able to hold on, swing it around, and ride it back down you might have to watch helplessly as your baby tumbled end over end down the hill.  Like I said, those were bad on the pocketbook--And worse on the poor bike.  Add to that the fact that you may have some serious trouble getting back to the sanctuary of the transport truck.  We tried to never let go of the bike on those circumstances.

There were lots of close calls.  There always is if you do a lot of dirt bike riding and ride the way we did.  One particular "close call" had nothing to do with our riding style though.  We went out to a semi-famous place among riders one morning--The Crater near Orting, Washington.  Before leaving home, Dan neglected to turn the fuel petcock off on his bike, so by the time we go there the whole cylinder of the engine was swimming in raw fuel.  He pulled the spark plug out and kicked it over a few times to blow the excess fuel out, but wasn't getting good results.  In a moment of rare brilliance (I'm not sure which of us geniuses came up with it) we decided to hook a tie-down strap to him and, with the spark plug still out, I would pull him around with his bike in gear to get all the fuel blown out of the engine.  The problem: We forgot to ground the spark plug wire.  I just got going pulling him and heard a FOOP sound behind me.  I quickly spun around in time to see Dan and his bike in the midst of a small fireball.  We both bailed off and luckily got it put out quickly. He wasn't hurt and just had to repair a few melted wires and a fuel hose before having a good day of riding.  Whew!  Here is a shot of us at The Crater, getting ready in the morning sun (before the fireball I think), and a shot of The Crater (notice I capitalized it out of reverence? R.I.P. Crater... It's all houses now):

Me and Dan knew to never let Denis get far enough in front of us that he was out of our sight.  To do so might find either of us screaming around a corner only to find him sitting right in the middle of a mud hole waiting for us.  Slamming on the brakes never seemed to be "in time".  We'd come sliding up behind him with a tiny voice screaming in our mind, "Oh ----, not again!"  Just as we got within range he hammered the gas wide open and did a mud-filled rooster tail right in front of us.  All we could do is make sure to keep our mouth shut.

Not too many pictures were ever taken of us riding.  It was before the age of digital cameras after all...  Occasionally I did take my trusty Nikon SLR along and managed to snap a few shots, and I'm grateful for those few memories.  Here's another Crater shot, this one of Denis blasting his way up out of it.

Denis was always hard to keep up with.  He's not a big guy at all, and when he was astride a powerful bike he was practically unstoppable.  When he bought the bike in this picture he couldn't quite handle the tall suspension when we were trail riding (and it had a lot of suspension!).  When we would be in a tough spot on a trail and he would try to get off the bike without losing his balance, the suspension would "follow" his butt upward as he tried to dismount.  To gain a little fit, he took his seat apart and, using a hacksaw blade, literally filleted about a 2-inch layer of the seat off and put the cover back on.  We determined after he bought it that the bike was apparently some sort of dealer-prepped race bike because it had a bit of engine work done inside.  It was some kind of "handful" when you twisted the throttle.

One time we went on a poker run down near the little town of Rainier, Washington.  (For those of you that don't know, a poker run consists of a marked course with checkpoints.  At each checkpoint you draw a card.  At the end of the run, prizes are handed out after the hands are verified.) It was a pretty rainy day, and as with most events of this nature, most of the people went as fast as they possibly could.  We were in no hurry, because winning was strictly a game of chance anyway.  Because we were so far back in the pack, the course was extremely bad by the time we got to it and very muddy. At one point we were riding along and I seemed to be losing power.  I had to keep increasing the gas and couldn't figure out what was going on. I happened to glance down at my front wheel at one point and noticed it wasn't turning!  Because of the muddiness of the course, we were riding in grooves much like a slot car. Because my bike at that time had a front fender that was mounted very close to the tire, it had packed up with mud and locked it up tight.  I had to lay the bike down and dig all the mud out of the front fender with a stick so I could resume.

That wasn't all that happened during the event that day.  The previous problem put us even farther back in the pack. We saw fewer and fewer other riders.  We started to wonder why we hadn't seen a checkpoint in a while. Our gas cans were at the mid point of the course and we began to wonder if we were going to even make it before running out of gas.  Then it happened--Dan had the bike with the biggest engine and his ran out. I took my gas tank off (it had a quick-release feature to aid in maintenance) and poured some into his.  A little further, Denis' bike ran out. Again, I took my tank off, surrendering a bit of fuel.  After a while we were all dead in the water and all we could do it wait for one of the course officials to find us and pick us up. They were "sweeping" the course on a regular basis for riders with problems and would radio for a truck to pick them up. It took a while, but we finally got scooped up by the sweep team and were riding back to the starting point in the truck.  It was then I noticed that my wallet was gone.
"Great," I thought, "what else is going to go wrong?"
It turns out that someone during the race had switched a bunch of the trail markers ahead of us. We weren't the only ones foiled by it, but were apparently the worst affected.  When we got back to the starting/finish point everyone else had gone, but because of all the trouble they let us do all the card draws for the checkpoints we missed.  None of us got diddly.  There was a bright spot in the story though: At some time during the day someone had found my wallet and turned it in!  It was complete and only a little muddy.  What a day.

One thing Denis and some of his work cohorts used to do was go on a special ride the day before Christmas every year.  I usually didn't get to partake of it because of my work schedule back then, but one time it worked for me and I was able to go.  The night before the ride, Denis and I partied in my garage as we readied our bikes for the next-day ride.  The preparation:  We each used our cordless drills and carefully screwed a hex-head screw into each knob of our knobby tires.  That was over 100 screws per tire!  Why did we do it?  Because the area we ride in is frozen by December 24th!  You know what?  It's amazing what kind of traction you can get on glare ice when your knobby tires are full of hex-head sheet metal screws. We had a great day out there in the cold.  There was one fool riding with us that was on a Honda Trail 90, which is an underpowered, little-or-no suspension, grandpa-style hunting bikes usually seen on motorhome bumpers (like the picture on the right). As I recall, he came with no gloves, no helmet, and only a thin jacket.  By the end of the day he was a human popsicle. Not smart.  Oh, and he was the only one without studs in his tires too, and I know he fell at least twice.

See?  With times like those, is it any wonder that I miss it so much?