Hey There! It's 12:36 PM MST, 70°F, sunny
Yesterday was an interesting day. Lots of adventure and maybe a little danger.
After my morning ritual was complete, I had an early interview for the podcast. It went OK, not my best, but we'll get by. Once I got done with that, I had the rest of the day free, and since we've only got about 10 more days here before we hit the road, I decided to take one more motorcycle ride through some trails I had never been on. I spent too much time, as it turned out, futzing with my Garmin devices and trying to get them to talk to each other, but finally I just relied on my 66i to sent tracking points to my wife so she could follow my ride. Garmin devices are notoriously finnick, and Garmin software is sometimes not the best.
The route I had mapped beforehand was on my phone using GaiaGPS, so I felt I would always know where I was. However, it turns out that knowing where I was was not the same as knowing the conditions I was in. The ride started off great, with awesome fews of the mountains surrounding the valley I was in. I was doing fine until I hit a gate with cattle on the other side. Mistake #1 - not checking the route before I went through the gate. It turned out that the road I was on was not the road I needed to be on, and by the time I got to a steep gravel and rock downhill, I realized I had to turn back. So back to the original gate and the livestock area that was pretty full of fresh cowpies.
I found the road I needed to be on pretty quickly. I had missed a very sharp U-turn that led down into the canyon below. Once I got back on the trail I thought everything would be fine.
It turns out this trail was a double-track trail, but it was also a trail that was highly technical in nature, which meant that it was covered in rocks and gravel. I kept going forward, mistakenly thinking the trail would smooth out. I was dead wrong. I should have turned back much sooner.
During the subsequent journey I dropped the bike four times, I believe. The first time I dropped it, it was sitting on the edge of a ledge just above something like a 40 foot drop. At the bottom of this large hole was some sort of car - a van, I believe - that was rusted out and had been sitting there for some time. I felt like my motorcycle was going to join it. I had to slowly drag the bike onto the road, moving the rear end and then the front end alternately, before I could even attempt to get it on its tires. After much struggle, I managed to do just that. I ride a Honda Trail CT 125, which weighs 262 pounds wet, and while that is about as light a bike as you can buy, it's still heavy for an old guy.
It was at this point that I realized I was probably in over my head. Again, I should have turned back, but turning around on that hill was not immediately possible, and once I managed to get moving forward again, I decided to keep going, thinking it wasn't going to get worse. After all, I was in a canyon where I could see grass all around, so it did not seem to me that the trail could continue to be that rocky. Wrong.
In short, I dropped the bike three more times while proceeding on an agonizingly slow pace so as to maintain the bike upright. I had never been on such technical terrain for so long before, and after awhile my arms began to ache, and my ankles and shins were taking a beating from all the duckwalking I was doing to keep going forward. At one point, after I had dropped the bike a third time, I found myself sitting on a rock under a tree in a dry wash, wondering if I was going to make it out in one piece, or at all. I have a Garmin 66i which has an SOS feature, but I also knew anyone trying to extract me from where I was was going to take time. At this point it was about 3:30 PM, so I was also in a race against time. I ran the bike into a thorn bush and miraculously did not get a flat tire. With no choice but to keep moving forward, I pushed on. My map told me where I was, and I could see that if I could make it to a certain intersection, I could reverse my route, and take a shorter and safer route back home.
I don't know what time it was, but I finally reached that intersection, and from there I was essentially home free. I took the road to the next junction, finished the rest of the water I had, ate half a protein bar, and headed home. I texted DW as if nothing was wrong, and she had been following me making slow progress on the Garmin map, so that was the best part of the adventure - she was really unaware. I made one more stop to air my tires back up to street pressure, and finally got home far too close to sunset for comfort.
I'll confess that there were times I thought I would not make it out of the desert without calling for help. My biggest fear was having to spend the night or be there in the dark and cold, as I was not prepared for such an outcome. I had expected a fun ride through some desert trails, but what I got was hard riding that punished my body and beat it up badly. The Honda Trail? It never missed a beat except one time where I could start it but it wouldn't stay running at idle. But once I managed to coax it down the trail a bit, the engine cleared up and became normal. I wouldn't trade this bike for anything.
I spent the evening nursing my wounds and recovering. Dinner was a tofu stir fry, which I ate, but as I don't much care for tofu, it wasn't terribly enjoyable. My ankles had a few cuts and many bruises, and DW washed the wounds out with soap and water and covered them in Neosporin. I took three Advil, and eventually got in bed, all stiff and sore, by 10:15 PM. I slept OK, surprisingly. I needed the sleep, and felt pretty damn lucky to be sleeping in a bed in a house.
Notable deaths: Bruce Froemming, MLB umpire, 86; Lou Holtz, legendary football coach of Notre Dame and other universities, 89; John P. Hammond, blues guitarist and musician, 83.
'Til We Meet Again!