To start, I want to say thanks to all of the folks who worked their butts off to put this event on. It was orig­i­nally planned for Deer Flats, about 5 miles up the road and, more crit­i­cally, abouit 1500 feet higher in ele­va­tion. We’re hav­ing a late, kinda crazy spring here in west­ern Wash­ing­ton, and we had snow in the low­lands last week, and pretty much got snowed out of Deer Flats. But folks ral­lied around, and put on a great event.

Sun­day morn­ing dawns with typ­i­cally spring weather for around here, maybe a bit chilly. 45 degrees and driz­zling off and on. A quick bite, gather my lunch, cof­fee, etc.,
and i’m out the door. I’m dri­ving the Rover today with the box trailer behind it, because when the weather is nasy, there’s noth­ing nicer than going into the trailer at lunch break, fir­ing up the Kero­sun heater, and get­ting truly thawed out. After an unevent­ful drive to Gold Bar, I pull off the pave­ment at Reiter Pit, and head for our rid­ing area; holy pot­holes, bat­man, this road is really going to hell! Later I’ll see a com­peti­tor pull in dri­ving a BMW 5-series sedan; I won­der how he got it up the road with­out rip­ping out one of it’s key organs?

Find a spot to park, untie the bike, but it’s driz­zling, so I leave it in trailer, no sense get­ting soaked before I need to! Get my gear on, go say “Hi” to the famil­iar faces, and stretch out a bit. Go out and warm up, prac­tice a few easy things and head back to the pits. Sign up, and have a bit of a dis­cus­sion about group check vs. cross check. I grudg­ingly admit that the weather makes group check­ing a bit more attrac­tive today, but reg­u­lar read­ers know that I always ride worse dur­ing group check, so I’m not a huge fan. After some dis­cus­sion, it is decided that we will cross check. So i get my assigned duties, and head out to my sec­tion. Sec­tion 6, I find it eas­ily enough, and dis­cover, in what would become a theme for the day, that it is long, I can just barely see the start gate from the end! A lit­tle bit of walk­ing around reveals a good spot to observe from, which allows get­ting to the end gate to mark the rid­ers card in only a few steps. Ah, my first rider, here comes Ted, almost always our first novice/intermediate rider, he just flys! He puts in a good ride, and motors on. Through the morn­ing, I had a few fives (stalled motors mostly), one of which was an actual dis­mount from the machine. Front tire went this-a-way, rider went that-a-way. No injuries, so it’s all good. All in all, though every­one rode well, and most improved their scores as the morn­ing pro­gressed. It was great to see the new faces, as well, wel­come every­one, hope to see you at another event soon.

Back to the pits, grab lunch, in this case beef stew and some french bread. Hav­ing a ther­mos that will keep stew or soup warm is really nice on these soggy 42 degree spring days. Change into some dry gear, gas the bike, and get ready to go. Oh, wait, tire pres­sures. Check them again, decide I’m happy with 4lbs in the front and 3lbs in the rear. That’s a bit lower than usual, but I fig­ured trac­tion was going be a bit scarce, and it seems like the Dun­lop tire likes to run a bit lower pres­sure than the Miche­lin I used to use. We get our score cards and the rid­ers meet­ing, and one of the Mar­shalls vaguely waves a hand and says ‘loop is yel­low rib­bon, and starts over there’. Find the sec­tion, and start fig­ur­ing things out. This ones on a hill, pre­dom­i­nately down­hill, with some turns and climbs in it, and it ends with a series of tight turns
left 90, right 180, then right 90, over a set of tree roots and logs. I get a bit out of shape early, due to over-enthusiastic use of the front brake, and end up with a 3. Not bad, but I can do bet­ter. Back out on the loop and away we go. The next three are log and turn sec­tions, I like the logs, but the turns are really tight. In #3, I take a planned dab early in the sec­tion and it works out pretty well. The small logs where the bark is gone are really slick though. Very del­i­cate get­ting over them at any kind of angle. Work­ing though the rest of the loop, mostly rock-jumble type sec­tions. Things are really slick today, and for me, at least, it’s way too easy to pick up more speed than I can smoothly scrub off. I have been slowly com­ing to the real­iza­tion that my bike may be too quick for my rid­ing style, and maybe I need to do a bit more to slow down the ini­tial hit off idle. I’ve changed to a slower throt­tle grip, but I’m think­ing a gear­ing change or a small change in the igni­tion tim­ing might be just the thing. We’ll see.

Fin­ish­ing out the first loop, sec­tions 8 and 9 are rock jum­bles, and really tight turns; I strug­gle through both with 3’s. Then to sec­tion 10. This one deserves spe­cial men­tion, mostly due to the fact that it had two chal­leng­ing climbs, and two downhill/dropoff obsta­cles that looked like they would gen­er­ate fender-puckering fear. The entrance was tricky, over a rock then a log at 45-degrees, then some wind­ing around over some logs, and up an S-shaped climb up the hill, and the last 6–8 feet are com­pletely loose mud. I never got past this point, all day. 3 attempts, 3 fives. On the last one, I asked, humor­ously, the checker if I could yell a cuss-word? “I didn’t hear nothin”, sez he! When I was done vent­ing my frus­tra­tion, he asks “Is that going to be in the blog?”. Yes, Ted, it’s in the blog: F*CK! That said, I did notice from the posted scores that sev­eral folks got through it much bet­ter, and there were sev­eral cleans there on the day. A hearty ‘Nice job’ to those guys, that one was tough!

Any­way the next two loops went rea­son­ably well, get­ting close to clean­ing a cou­ple of sec­tions, improv­ing my score in a few oth­ers, and com­pletely floun­der­ing though a few. Just as I went out for the third loop, it started rain­ing. By the time I got to #2 the third time, the logs had got­ten really slick, expe­cially the big one right at the entrance, and my dreams of a clean there were washed away! I fin­ished the trial with a decent loop, except for sec­tion 10, and headed back to the pits. Adding up the scores, I had to stop and do real math at one point, as I counted 17 ‘3’s on my score card! At that point in the day 3 times 17 was more than my wee brain could han­dle! That’s a ton of threes, with the upside that some of those coiuld have degen­er­ated into ‘5’s, and the down­side that some of them should have been ‘1’s or ‘2’s, but isn’t that how it always goes? Totalled up to 76 with 2 cleans, which I felt OK about, but didn’t really think it would put me in con­tention.
A bit later, as they are hand­ing out the awards, I dis­cover that 76 and 2 was good enough for 2nd place in advanced on that Sun­day in April. wooT!

All in all, a fun day, and I’m really look­ing for­ward to the Colum­bia Cup. It will be in Gold­en­dale, WA, May 3rd and 4th. Love to see you there!

Keep those feet up!

black­dog