Search the Community

The plan was to join up with a bunch of ADV riding, motocamp loving, carefree throttle jockeys and disappear for 3 days of road and dirt silliness. We camped at Barton Flats Campground off Rim of the World Scenic Byway. That's sounds a lot better than just saying it was on the 38 this side of Big Bear. Here's a little vid of Day one, leaving from the BMW shop and ending at camp. Almost nothing but twisties all the way up. Gary (leader) has a real knack for finding little twisty roads you never knew were there. Day 2 was different. It was planned as an easy intermediate ride off road and turned into how-the-hell-did-we-get-here. A few miles in, the planned route was closed so we stayed on the open trails continuing on. We had to 'ferry' several bikes/riders through a few miles of steep off camber waist deep runoff ditch 'trail'. We would ride the exhausted or weaker members bike a few hundred yards through bottomless sand/gravel/high angle trail, and then hike back in 95 degree heat to get their own bikes, and leap frog like this for miles. Gary was super human in that he was skilled enough to ride 2 up back up some crazy stuff a few times to save the hikers a mile or two. He has amazing skills on these big dogs, but even he dropped it. Everyone dropped bikes, most of us many times. About half way in (10 miles?) we were trying to guess which way out to pavement and two CanAms came up and asked us what the hell we were doing back there..... they gave us 2 bottles of water and a candy bar - we all huddled up wild eyed like a bunch of sailers sharing the last few drops of Rum. "MY TURN .. GIMME THAT!!" We asked them "what about this trail?", to which he replied GAWD NO, not that one. "what about that trail over there?" - Jeebus Cripes do you all want to die??? He was a little helpful in that he gave us verbal instruction on how many lefts and rights and split offs to take to get to pavement. Right. Tossed that out and just kept heading in a general downward direction. Had we known what was ahead, we'd have turned around and fought our way back out. There was plenty of dead clutching the bikes down steep slides with spotters, and other good fun antics. My favorite tactic was to somersault over the bars in an attempt to stop forward progress. I tried a couple times but could never quite stick the landing. Oh Sand, Oh Gravel, how I love your silly antics. I didn't take any pics of the real carnage so you'll have to trust me when I say there were GS's piled up like cord wood in the soupiest sand pots. I was too preoccupied with deadlifting bikes to say "wait right there while I grab a pic?". Late in the day 3 of us split off to find the highway and ''supplies". We left Joris at "the sign" which happened to be the only 3 square feet of shade in the county to post up that corner when the riders got down. Another rider and I went forward to find water, food and hopefully a desert dweller with an ATV that we could throw $100 bills at to persuade him to take said supplies back to the group. We knew we'd never get our bikes back up beyond the shade sign. One feller kept hovering his finger over "the button" on his in-reach. I slapped his hand away and threatened to duct taping his hand to the throttle if he didn't stop that. No ATV's, but we did find an angel that gave us about 3 or 4 gallons of water and a sack full of PBJ sandwiches and headed back to save lives. Everyone was dehydrated if I may say so myself. And exhausted. And y'all know what that looks like. My own exhaustion had me dropping ol' blue 3 times in about 50 feet on the route back up. It's good to have friends at times like that. Turns out we had been about an hour and a half ahead of the rear group and we got back to the sign at about the same time they did. Joris faithfully guarded the shade the whole time, and never left his post. Good dog. We had a good rest stop and found the 'thank you note' that we'd stuffed into the sandwich makers hand laying in the bag under a certain amount of peanut butter and jam. Some folks won't take a dollar for helping others out. Well, Joris was rested and hydrated (he thought) and headed down about 10 minutes ahead of the group. Somewhere in the mile long stretch of deep pea gravel his mount swung her head hard left and rolled on him. I gotta give him props for not crying like a school girl. He just stood her up and gave it hell. On 3 nice fractures. The Xray looks to me like fibula, ankle and foot. When I met him on the pavement he just looked at me and said "remember how we were saying not to ever dab your foot?" And I responded "better not take that boot off until we get back to camp" He's a tough bird in that he rode past medical help in Big Bear and back to camp. We loaded him up with some particularly effective painkillers that I keep for just such emergencies and tucked him into bed with a half gallon urine bottle, a bag of ice and a bottle of whiskey, with repeated instructions to Lay Down!, .... STAY!.... good dog. My bruised pelvis is already starting to feel better and Joris is home grumbling about having to cancel his upcoming fly fishing trip. All in all we had a SUPER FANTASTIC time together and all but maybe two of us learned stuff about big bikes, deep sand, and anything less than a full gallon of water is just plain stupid. Just think. If we'd have had skinny bikes it would have just been another dull day of trail riding. Ho hum. I'm already planning my next big ride. Going to spend a weekend riding the B'mer to every Starbucks in the county. Who's in? Apologies again for only filming the G rated stuff. Aint nobody got time for camera's when things get real messy.