Another Sun­day in the Pacific North­west, it looks like so many of it’s brethren, damp, over­cast, and dark. But it’s not rain­ing, so it’s not as bad as it could be. I put the rest of my gear (cof­fee, lunch, the few nearly for­got­ten items) in the truck, snug down the tie downs on the bike, and head for Walker Val­ley ORV. Today is our last offi­cial club event of the year; our sched­ule hav­ing been abbre­vi­ated by our dif­fi­cul­ties in get­ting per­mits and per­mis­sion to hold events in the region.

90 min­utes finds me pulling into the park­ing area, find­ing about 15–20 folks already there, unload­ing, bull­shit­ting, get­ting ready, ya know: the stuff rid­ers do when they’re get­ting ready to ride! I sign up for the Advanced class and get the bike ready, tak­ing a few min­utes to put a few neces­si­ties into a day pack: extra water, snack bars, energy goo, and a liter of extra pre­mix. Our loop today will take us 3.5 miles up the moun­tain, through three loops of sec­tions, and back down to the park­ing area. We have per­mis­sion to ride, but not to park up there, appar­ently. Gary, the co-marshall today, tells me that we’ll be doing group check, so I want to make sure I have every­thing I need with me, don’t want to be a drag on my rid­ing buddies.

Head­ing out for a bit of prac­tice, I note that my left knee is com­plain­ing on mod­er­ate bend­ing under load. Hmm, not too good, I’ll have to be care­full of that today. Other than that, things felt good, if a bit rusty. I head back to the truck, top the fuel tank up to the very top, and go look­ing for my lit­tle pill box that has the sodium naproxen and ibupro­fen in it. Rum­mage, Rum­mage, Rum­mage, crap! left it at home. At that moment, they sig­nal the rid­ers meet­ing. Oh well, i’ll sponge some off of some­one later. We get our instruc­tions, find our groups, mud­dle around for a few min­utes when one of our num­ber arrives a bit late, and head up the mountain.

A pleas­ant mean­der up the moun­tain finds us at sec­tion 1: a twisty, tech­ni­cal lit­tle job­bie with a truly unfor­tu­nately placed 24” high stump right after a sharp uphill right hand u-turn. That pretty much set the tone for the day: Not a lot of awe-inspiring obsta­cles for the Advanced class (a few expert lines looked a bit more, er, pucker-inducing), but tight turns and tricky obsta­cles strung together. Sec­tion 6 was a bit of an excep­tion to that, more later. I strug­gled get­ting my rhythm for most of the first loop, then started to loosen up a bit. My knee was still com­plain­ing, but it turned out that walk­ing the sec­tions was the hard­est part, after the first loop, when we cut down on the stum­bling around, it felt bet­ter. I was still very care­ful not to stress it lat­er­ally at all, but it didn’t hin­der me too much.

And then there was sec­tion 6: We’ve all seen then “over the log, turn, over the log again, turn, over the log…” sec­tions, often with some other lit­tle gim­mick throw in: water, rocks, mud, you name it. Well this sec­tion didn’t rely on any gim­micks: the log is the thing. around 48” in diam­e­ter and a cou­ple of tricky approaches, oh, and yes, here an added twist: an absolute root-infested off-camber climb to the exit. Many of us found our attempts to scale the log sum­mar­ily rejected mul­ti­ple times, In one observed case, plug­ging the exhaust of the bike ques­tion so tightly that the bike wouldn’t start! many egos, and a few fend­ers were abused in that sec­tion. I finally man­aged to strug­gle through with a ‘3’ on my last attempt, and was ecsta­tic with that!

We finally get the sec­tions fin­ished, with only a mod­er­ate num­ber of cuts, bruises, and com­pletely cramped fore­arms, gather our packs and head down the moun­tain. I’ve been keep­ing an eye on fuel in my bike, and knew I’d be close to get­ting back to camp. Sure enough, about ½ mile from the pits, bwaaaaaaaaaaaa…. urp. I fum­ble for reserve, get it run­ning, and wob­ble in. Count­ing the score tells the tale: a rough event: 82 points with only 3 cleans on the day. But it was good enough for 3rd, and only 3 points off of 2nd (which makes the last ‘5’ in Sec­tion 10, from just a bit too much front brake on a easy part of the sec­tion, really annoy­ing. I was on a clean, which would’ve given me 2nd place cleanly!) oh well, that’s the way it goes.

Thanks to Gary and Jon for all their work, as well as the efforts of other club mem­bers to get us per­mis­sion to use this area. It was a cool event, thanks!

black­dog