observations

This turned out to be an inter­est­ing day for a vari­ety of rea­sons, not the least of which was the park­ing and loops sit­u­a­tion. There was appar­ently some last minute con­fu­sion between the club and the land man­agers about where we were sup­posed to park, and as a result, we wound up park­ing near the west­ern entrance to Walker Val­ley, and rid­ing a loop of sec­tions that were all at higher ele­va­tions. I mis­un­der­stood the instruc­tions in the flyer, which indi­cated that rid­ers needed to be pre­pared to carry an extra liter of fuel ( thought it said ‘after­noon’ rid­ers), and so arrived with no con­ve­nient way of car­ry­ing fuel. Any­way, got signed up, for Senior Inter­me­di­ate, as I hadn’t been on a dirt bike of any kind for over 6 weeks and Regional Points events are known for being pretty tough. That was when they let me know that morn­ing rid­ers too, need to carry extra fuel!

did a lit­tle warm­ing up, deter­mined that i had for­got to let any air out the back tire after air­ing it up to put it on the rack. Yep, 7 PSI is way too much! i let it down to my nor­mal 3–1/4 or so; ah, much bet­ter trac­tion and bite! Then i went back to the truck to fig­ure out how i was going to deal with this fuel issue, as i have no aux tank my bike, and i had no fuel bot­tle. ah, well, here’s a big plas­tic sack, i’ll just wrap my 1 gal jug in that and carry it in the day pack. With that prob­lem solved, I com­pletely for­got about car­ry­ing any extra water or snacks in my day pack, and headed out with­out either. The loop was what i call a ‘lol­lipop’ loop: ride a longish trail ride to the start of the sec­tions, ride all 10 sec­tions 3 times, and then ride the longish trail back to the pits. This means you get back to wher­ever you dumped the day­pack every loop, but not back to your vehi­cle. It wasn’t until the end of the first loop that I real­ized the I was going to run out of water, and had no snacks or other nutri­tion what­so­ever. argh.

Oh well, sec­tion 1 was a pretty easy tra­verse of a pile of sharp rocks, but I got through OK, so that’s a good start. In gen­eral, I rode pretty well, but I had some incon­sis­tent moments: stalled the bike in one sec­tion, a really stu­pid mis­take, and didn’t plan an ade­quate safety mar­gin into my line in another sec­tion the 3rd time through, and wound up sky­div­ing off of a 10-foot high rock into the bushes below. I rolled to a stop, picked the bike up, and when asked if the bike was OK (yes, they asked if I was OK first), replied, ‘of course: it’s a Sherco, you can’t hurt these things!” Got through three loops with lit­tle drama, picked my pack up from sec­tion 1, and headed back down the moun­tain. Got back to the pits, and drank about a liter of water, right then. had lunch, and went to col­lect my punch for my after­noon observ­ing assign­ment, I had sec­tion 3. About 1pm, I head back up the moun­tain, find sec­tion 3, and am then informed that there’s been a switch, I’m to observe sec­tion 4, a bit far­ther up the hill. Nor­mally, this would be a triv­ial change, except that I’m already tired, and seper­at­ing the two is about 1/4 mile of some of the nas­ti­est trail at walker val­ley. wind­ing through the trees, over the roots, and really, seri­ously steep uphill. sign at the bot­tom reads “up, turn, up, up, turn, turn, up, up, up”. ha. you a funny man, Ron! But I climb the moun­tain and find my sec­tion: a really inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tion of sharp turns and a vari­ety of paths, depend­ing on class, over a rock the size of a small cot­tage. The experts in par­tic­u­lar, I thought, had a nasty chal­lenge: a really sharp left u-turn fol­lowed by a rock climb with lit­tle run at the bot­tom, and only about a 6″ wide line. I spot­ted for quite a few folks there dur­ing the day, but had to catch sur­pris­ingly few bikes.

All in all, a very enjoy­able day, great fun to watch folks like Max and WIll do absolutely amaz­ing things with a motor­cy­cle. I can’t wait to head out to Funny Rocks for our next event.

keep those feet up!
black­dog

walk­a­bout day 4. today was vis­it­ing day. lunch with an old high school friend, tea with an author/teacher friend in oak­land, cof­fee with another old high school friend, and then din­ner with motor­cy­cle friends in Galt. not much rid­ing, only about 185 miles, but a busy day non­the­less.
spent some time check­ing out road con­di­tions in the Sierra Nevada, doesn’t look pur­dent to try to make it to Mono Lake tomor­row. So i’ll head south, skirt­ing the foothills on the Sier­ras, prob­a­bly end­ing some­where around bak­ers­field of so, giv­ing me all sort of options for thurs­day, depend­ing on whether of not i can con­nect with my friends in Escondido.

Check­ing the weather fore­cast on sat­ur­day con­vince me to take the chance and leave my portable shel­ter at home: 10% chance of pre­cip­i­ta­tion, highs in the upper 50s. If that actu­ally held up, it would be one of the nicest rid­ing days we’ve had in quite a while.

Sun­day dawns way too early, and chilly: about 36 degrees at Black Dog Farm. Break­fast, cof­fee, put the last few things in the car (lunch cooler, wal­let, phone, etc.) except for the water bot­tles to fit in my fanny pack. This omis­sion will be impor­tant later.

Cinch the tie-downs on the bike down, and boo­gie north­ward. Only about 10 min­utes behind planned depar­ture time, should put me there right after 8 AM. Get up to the turn-off, expect­ing another 3 miles of dirt road, and whoa, here’s the whole gang, just parked right here in front of the gate. I park and ask why we’re down here and not up at our pre­vi­ous loca­tion, and I’m told that they don’t want street-licensed vehi­cles past the gate. Oh well.

I unload, check the bike over, and gear-up for a lit­tle warm up. There’s not much at the gate, so I head up the road a bit, find­ing a turn-out with some downed logs in it, and warm up. Sec­ond attempt over a 20″ log, the front end digs in and over the bars I go! and onto my back­side on the soggy ground, to add sog­gi­ness to cha­grin. Well, hope­fully I’ve got­ten *that* out of my sys­tem for the day! But no, 3 min­utes later, drop the front wheel into the same hole, and over I go. Well, this is either good, in that I’m get­ting this out of my sys­tem, or this day is doomed to be a com­edy rou­tine from start to fin­ish. I ride over the log a few more times, just to teach it a thing or two, and head back to the truck to get ready.

I get my punch, pack a hat, good­ies, tools, etc. into my day-pack. Water, I should take some water.… Shit, where are my water bot­tles? at home, on the laun­dry room floor… oh well, I’ll deal with that later. Head up the road a cou­ple of miles, and fol­low the rugged loop trail into the deep woods to Sec­tion #6. It’s right next to 5, so I have another observer to chat with when things are slow. Pretty straight-forward sec­tion, a climb and descent, fol­lowed by a cou­ple of tight, tricky cor­ners to the exit.
Most Novice and Inter­me­di­ate com­peti­tors do well in my sec­tion, i punch lots of cleans, and only a few fives, a cou­ple of folks lost the front end and sam­pled the dirt, and one gen­tle­man for­got where the sec­tion went and ended up rid­ing part of it back­wards. oops, I hate it when that happens!

Around noon we’re done, head back to the pits to get ready for my turn. Now I must deal with the fact that my water bot­tles, which fit so nicely into my fanny-pack, were I also carry a few tools and spare levers, are sit­ting at home on the laun­dry room floor. Well, I decide i’ll just put my fanny pack and my gallon-sized water cooler in my day-pack, carry it up to sec­tion 1 and leave it there until I’m fin­ished, and the retrieve it for the ride back down. Ok, that’s a plan, not a great one though: it means only hav­ing access to water once per loop, not opti­mal hydration.

Off to the rid­ers meet­ing, get a quick run-down of where the sec­tions are, and we’re off. Grab my pack and up to Sec­tion 1. A tricky sec­tion with a rock step, and a cou­ple of diag­o­nal log cross­ings near the end, depend­ing on how you tack­led it. I get into the sec­tion, and my per­cep­tion is all off, I’m way behind the bike, and end up with a 3. Much of the first loop was like that, I only really started get­ting in the groove on the sec­ond loop. By the time the third loop started, I was feel­ing pretty con­fi­dent and had really started to ride up to my abil­i­ties. My judge­ment how­ever, remained at it’s his­tor­i­cally low­ish lev­els. I enter sec­tion 1 the third time, resolv­ing to clean it this time: around the tree, over the rock, so far so good, up the chute, hey feelin’ good, right turn here and out.… front wheel starts to slide and instead of just tak­ing the dab and escap­ing with my 1, I chase it with the throt­tle and wind up on my head! Cost me a 5, some bruises, a smashed fin­ger, and (i would later find out) 3rd place! stoopid.

Over­all, it was a well done event: good, well-marked, and chal­leng­ing loop trail. Good sec­tions with­ouit too many dan­ger­ous obsta­cles. Wish my rid­ing had been up to the chal­lenge. It seems obvi­ous from look­ing at the scores that my prob­lem is prac­tice and being ready to ride. As I get ‘back in the groove’, my scores go down every loop. Seems clear that I need more prac­tice. Now to develop the dis­ci­pline to do it!

On an admin­is­tra­tive note, this is the last event report you’ll be see­ing here for a while. In cel­e­bra­tion of achiev­ing ‘a cer­tain age’, I have tak­ing 4 weeks off in May and trav­el­ling around the west­ern states on my KTM 950. I’ll be using this space to chron­i­cle my prepa­ra­tions and progress as I go. Uni­verse will­ing, I should be able to make at least one day of the PST round of the PNTA cham­pi­onship, in early June. Watch this space!

keep those feet up!
black­dog

A short story of deferred main­te­nance, dirty carbs, and bro­ken kickstarters.

At the last tri­als a few weeks ago, I noticed that my ’04 sherco was becom­ming a lit­tle hard to start and was occa­sion­ally kick­ing back dur­ing starting.

So I got on the horn and ordered a few parts for some main­te­nance, and some improve­ments. One of the improve­ments was a 9-tooth cout­ner­shaft sprocket to slow the thing down a lit­tle. So I changed the sprocket and was going for a short test ride. Got the bike started, but it wouldn’t run with­out the choke on. uh-oh, this doesn’t sound good. it died, and when I re-started it, it kicked back, and I heard some­thing go ‘ting!’. When it imme­di­ately died, I looked down for the kick­starter, and the end of it was gone! When the bike kicked back against my foot, it snapped the ‘foot’ part of the kick­starter off! cap­i­tal CRAP. lucky i wasn’t wear­ing trainers!

so. next step is to order some parts. so i place an order for some new spark plugs, a kick­starter , and just to be safe, a cou­ple of woodruff keys. The woodruff keys are because one of the things that can make a 2-stroke kick back is bad tim­ing. on a mod­ern engine like our bikes, the only way the tim­ing gets inac­cu­rate is for the woodruf key to shear and the fly­wheel to slip on the crank­shaft. Maybe that’s what happened…

While wait­ing for my parts, I pulled the carb, the air­box, and the fly­wheel. The woodruf key was good, every­thing looked clean inside the engine. The carb was a dif­fer­ent mat­ter though, crud in the float bowl, and and appar­ently a plugged pilot jet. a good clean­ing later, i reassem­bled and rein­stalled the carb, and waited for the parts.

When the parts arrived, I put a new woodruf key in, just on gen­eral prin­ci­ples, poped in a new spark plug, and reassem­bled enough of the bike to start it. Got it started, tuned the low-speed jet a bit, and it runs great.

So the morale of the story is: buy your bike a new spark plug and clean it’s car­beu­ra­tor every few years, it will thank you. oh, and be very care­ful kick-starting a bike in trainers!

Well, here we are at the start of a new tri­als sea­son. I hadn’t got­ten nearly as much prac­tice over the win­ter as I’d hoped, partly due to the pres­sures of my job, and partly due to the 2 FEET of snow we had around christ­mas! yikes. That is really unusual for west­ern Wash­ing­ton, and brought a lot of the area to a halt.

Any­way, finally got off my keis­ter the week before the event and put a clean fil­ter in the bike, a new spark plug, and turned the rear tire around, so as to wear the sharp edges off of the other side of the knobs. Only took 3 tries to get the rim band to seat prop­erly and hold air. Need­less to say, it was a bit frus­trat­ing. Those Montesa-style flanged wheels look bet­ter and bet­ter all the time! Oh, and I also replaced the fork oil, and while doing so, I added an extra 50cc of oil to each leg hop­ing it would give me a bit more pre­load and spring pro­gres­sion than before. I weigh a bit more than you aver­age tri­als expert, so I fig­ured this might stop some of the bot­tom­ing that I’d been feel­ing. I also cranked up the pre­load on the rear shock about 1/4″. I might actu­ally need a slightly heav­ier spring in the back, but more on that later.

Got out to the site, found a park­ing place and unloaded. Accord­ing to Edward, it was about 38 degrees F. Pretty chilly, but at least it wasn’t rain­ing or snow­ing on us. Went through my morn­ing rit­ual: unload, sign-up, dress, set tire pres­sure, warm up, more cof­fee, warm up, and wait for start. I felt pretty good, although not ter­ri­bly relaxed on the bike, and the slightly stiffer sus­pen­sion felt really good, more respon­sive to my weight trans­fers and a bit quicker. Had a short dis­cus­sion with another rider about Group Check vs. Cross Check. I’ve made my opin­ions about Group Check known on this forum before, but this time I allowed as how I prob­a­bly dis­liked the idea of stand­ing around in 38-degree weather more than I dis­liked group check. It’s all about per­spec­tive, folks!

A short rid­ers meet­ing, explain­ing the new mark­ing sys­tem, and we’re ready. For those who haven’t seen it, the new mark­ing sys­tem we’re using here in PST works like this: for each group (morn­ing, after­noon), each class is assigned a color. When you are walk­ing a sec­tion, all you have to do is fol­low the arrows that are your color. For exam­ple, Advanced class was white. So I sim­ply had to fol­low the white arrows all day. Pretty sim­ple, and I thought it was easy to use. It’s still pos­si­ble to miss a marker, but it’s harder to mis-understand a sec­tion this way.

Gather up into groups and we’re off. Bit of a traf­fic jam at Sec­tion 1, but that’s give a chance to what other rid­ers a bit. Looks like a typ­i­cal Gold Bar “Tech­ni­cal” sec­tion: lots of jumbly rocks, but noth­ing scary. Should be a cake­walk. Right. My back wheel gets kicked off line at the entrance gate, and I’m so stiff that I floun­der through with a 3. Many of the rest of the sec­tions were sim­i­lar, jumbly, slick, sharp rocks. Noth­ing dra­matic, noth­ing scary, but chal­leng­ing of bike con­trol and line con­trol. There were really only two excep­tions, Sec­tion 8 and Sec­tion 9. Sec­tion 8 was the Log Sec­tion. 3 Cross­ings of a slick log, seper­ated by 180-degree tight turns; The first cross­ing was easy, but you could get spooked going off of it, if you weren’t back far enough on the bike. My first time over, I wasn’t and felt the back end get very light and try to start to go over my head. The sec­ond cross­ing was the chal­lenge, as it was under­cut and the approach was lit­tered with a root and some rocks; you had to be per­fectly on line and have good tim­ing on the throt­tle and rear-end weight­ing. I flubbed this the last loop, didn’t get the clutch out in time; by the time the power hit the rear wheel, the sus­pen­sion has already started to set­tle up front and I plowed right into the log! ooof! I tried to recover by doing a stand­ing bounce up onto the log, but didn’t quite get ‘er up on top! dang! oh well. Sec­tion 9 was inter­est­ing in that it had some logs and some rocks, mixed together with some tight turns. Never did get a clean here, as I couldn’t get the first sharp left-turn log cross­ing just right, took 1 every time. Ended the event feel­ing pretty good, I tight­ened up dur­ing the sec­ond loop for some rea­son, then had a decent third loop, except for the above 5.

Over­all it was a very tech­ni­cal trial, and a bit eas­ier than a lot of last years advanced tri­als. I believe the win­ning score was 34, whereas a lot of win­ning scores last year we’re in the 45–60 range. I don’t have a strong opin­ion about the score range, although I very much like the very tech­ni­cal tri­als, as opposed to the event with lots of big-scary obsta­cles. On one hand, the tech­ni­cal tri­als give me a bet­ter chance of going back to work on Mon­day with all my body parts intact, but I also under­stand the sen­ti­ment that these types of events don’t really pre­pare our up-and-coming younger rid­ers to com­pete at the expert level. I’d very much like to hear what you folks think about this.

All in all a good start to year. I’m excited for the next event, have some ideas for a few more improve­ments to the bike, and plan on get­ting at least one prac­tice ses­sion in before that event.

Keep those feet up!
black­dog

I pur­chased these boots last win­ter, replac­ing a pair of well-worn Gaerne’s that had finally sprung a leak. For Tri­als rid­ers in West­ern Wash­ing­ton, leaky boots are a real downer, since we spend sub­stan­tial time walk­ing through muddy/wet sec­tions. I’ve now rid­den 5 or 6 events with these boots, so I fig­ured it was time to share my impres­sions and thoughts about them.

Fit: I have aize 10.5 feet, I ordered the size 11 boot, and they fit fine. I can wear a thin sock under them for sum­mer events, or by loos­en­ing the latches a notch or two, wear a heav­ier sock for cooler rides. These boots are pretty easy to get snug over the entire foot, lead­ing to a very sup­port­ive and secure feel­ing while wear­ing them.

Water­proof­ness: So far, no water intake. This includes the bit­ter cold and wet April tri­als. It also includes slog­ging through a small creek at the last Walker Val­ley Trials.

Trac­tion: trac­tion from the soles seems good. Every­thing was really slick at Walker Val­ley last fall and at Gold Bar last week­end, so it was hard to tell, but I have had no prob­lems pre­vi­ous and no prob­lems with them com­ing off of the foot­pegs or any­thing like that.

Buckles/Straps: some cool fea­tures here: the attach­ment clips are on the oppo­site ends from the adjusters, so once they are adjusted for you feet, the just snap on and snap off. Heav­ier or lighter socks might take one or two notches of adjust­ment, but it’s pretty easy to make.

The only down­side I’ve dis­cov­ered so far is that due to the way the boots tighten up on my feet (your feet may vary ), there is a rather con­spicous fold of leather on the inside of each ankle. So far I don’t notice it while rid­ing, but I have noticed that it rubs on the frame of the bike, and has already taken the smooth fin­ish off of the leather on that area of the boot. A pretty minor thing, and it might be that some­one with dif­fer­ently shaped feet and ankles may not run into any of this.

Con­clu­sions: This is a high qual­ity boot with good pro­tec­tion and good com­fort. Not cheap, but good quality.