observations

Departed home slightly after sched­uled time, sit­u­a­tion nor­mal, right? Stopped in mon­roe for fuel and to meet any­one who might have decided to come along and not told me. There is no one there, so about 12:40, I headed east towards stevens pass. light driz­zle, but noth­ing bad. As I get closer to the pass, how­ever, it’s com­ing down harder and harder. pretty soon I’ve folded: out with the glove cov­ers, put the shower caps on the tank and tail bags, and I’ve got the suit liner cranked up to about ‘7’. I stop at the top long enough to shoot a pic­ture, and then boo­gie. About 10–15 miles down the other side, the road is dry,

and I’m start­ing to think I need to dump the heavy gloves and the neck tri­an­gle. By the time I get to wenatchee, it’s about 65 and humid, I ditch the heated liner in a star­bucks park­ing lot and the long johns in their mens room. ah, much bet­ter. Along the way, my brain has been cat­a­loging the things I’ve for­got­ten: so far I’m up to a cup, a spoon, cof­fee, and my flask full of good scotch. the first three are eas­ily remi­died with the help of a safe­way and an ACE hard­ware in chelan. A quick ride out to Lake Chelan State Park, and I find a nice camp­site, right on the lake. I pitch camp, and con­struct my exper­i­men­tal din­ner; one of these freeze dried back­packer meals. I don’t intend to sur­vive on these on my trip, but know­ing if they are edi­ble seems like a good bit of knowl­edge. boil­ing water, a lit­tle packet of oil, and 13 min­utes later: viola, black bean chili pie (there were a few tor­tilla chips, too). not too bad, a lit­tle ‘thin’, but good spice. From this I con­clude: in a pinch, they will do. How­ever, now that I’ve had din­ner, i think of another thing that has been for­got­ten: I could use a cup of tea. oh well, not out here.

well, off for a bit of a walk and some pic­tures before it gets dark.

return­ing to camp, I tidy up, and pre­pare to hit the rack. Next up on the test list, a lit­tle inflat­able pil­low. It comes un a pack­age the size of a juice can, but it works really well. What doesn’t work so well any more is the old Ther­marest sleep­ing pad. Admit­tedly, it’s about 15 years old, but I sup­sect that it’s the age of the back, not the pad! I toss and turn most of the night. finally drop off about 4am, wake up at 7 with both arms numb and trapped under­neath my torso. yukko. OK, that’s some­thing that will need fix­ing.

Get up and about, and try to fig­ure out how to make cof­fee with my new-fangled stove/french press. Mechan­i­cally, this is easy, its a french press right? but it’s been dogs years since I’ve used one. How much cof­fee goes in? how long do I let it sit for. Oh My God, I’ve for­got­ten the recipe for cof­fee! But I mud­dle through, get some­thing mostly drink­able, if a bit weak, out of it, and set about pack­ing my stuff up. Sur­pris­ingly, it all goes back pretty much where it came from, and I head into town to score some break­fast. The Apple Cup cafe in Chelan gets a pass­ing grade: good food and fast, friendly ser­vice.

As I’m gear­ing up to head out, I can’t find the exten­sion con­nec­tion for my heated jacket liner. I paw through all the lug­gage, no lit­tle coiled cord. Oh well, I throw on another shirt and head up the pass. I have a beau­ti­ful ride back over the pass, includ­ing the moment just as I approached the top, a group of rid­ers passed going the other way, giv­ing me the uni­ver­sal ‘law enforce­ment ahead’ sign. Sure enough, the state patrol is at the top, giv­ing our tick­ets to those who can’t read speed limit signs. Not me, today.

So, all in all, a suc­cess­ful shake­down. The bike is comfy and very capa­ble, nearly all of my lug­gage and camp­ing gear works great, and the elec­tri­cal stuff on the bike (heated vest con­nec­tion, and charg­ing port) all work great. If I can fill in the few gaps in my check­list and fix the sleep­ing pad prob­lem, I’m per­fectly set.

See ya on the road!

black­dog on board the Great Pump­klin (aka the Turbo Giraffe)…
shiny side up, y’all!

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

As some you already know, your obe­di­ent scribe is plan­ning a trip, what my wife and I refer to as ‘going walk­a­bout’ after the aus­tralian tra­di­tion of ‘see­ing what’s out there’. In this case, I’ll be using a KTM 950 adven­ture for trans­porta­tion, and ‘out there’ is shap­ing up to mean­ing most states west of the Mis­souri river; cur­rent the roughly plot­ted course doesn’t include kansas, okla­homa, nevada, north dakota or montana.

Grand plan is a rough rec­tan­gle, with seat­tle, san diego, austin, and des moines form­ing the cor­ners. I have friends and/or fam­ily in all those places. The only hard date in the 4 week adven­ture is that I and 3 bud­dies have tick­ets to the World Super­bike races at Miller Motor­sports Park in Utah on memo­r­ial day weekend.

So with this in mind, I sold my BMW F650 (a nice sin­gle, but cross­ing texas on a 650 sin­gle didn’t appeal) and acquired a low-mileage KTM 950 adven­ture and set about set­ting it up for trav­el­ling like I like. This meant replac­ing the bald back tire, chang­ing the oil, adding con­trols for the heated grips (instead of the sim­ple switch) and for con­trol­ling a heated jacket liner Warm-n-Safe makes these great con­trollers . It also includes a GPS mounted some­where easy to reach and easy for 50-year-old eyes to read. Pics in the next installment.

All of this is pow­ered from a ded­i­cated, fused cir­cuit that is run from the bat­tery in the skid plate, up to the under-seat tray, and then dis­trib­uted to the var­i­ous acces­sories from there. also included is a relay to insure that I can’t walk away from the bike with the grips turned on.

The bike already had a lot of what I think I’ll need: fac­tory pan­niers, tank bag, rear bag, hand pro­tec­tors, crash bars, after­mar­ket seat from Renazco Rac­ing, and the fac­tory ‘tour­ing wind­screen’. What it didn’t have was decent lights. A lit­tle read­ing turned up the answer: the USA head­light is but a pale imi­ta­tion of it’s euro­pean coun­ter­part. Soon, a box arrived at the house with a euro head­light and switch, and an H7 low-beam HID con­ver­sion. Install hap­pen­ing soon. Read about it in the next install­ment of ‘prepar­ing to go walkabout’.

Right now, I have to get ready for the April Fool’s Trial! see ya there!

black­dog

So I decided to take a gam­ble and go to Cal­i­for­nia to retrieve the KTM I pur­chased 3 weeks ago. It is a 2006 KTM 950 Adven­ture with 4000 miles on the clock. The weather reports looked OK, if not stel­lar, but I have good gear, and I warned my boss that i might not get back into the office first thing mon­day morn­ing. Fri­day flight to SFO and cab ride to Mark’s place, where the beast was being stored went with only the usual amount of drama asso­ci­ated with air travel these days. I had expected to receive extra atten­tion dur­ing the “Secu­rity The­atre” as I was fly­ing on a one-way ticket, but it was the nor­mal rou­tine.
Upon arriv­ing at Chez Mark, Joe escorts me to the garage and there’s the beast. it’s even orange-er in per­son, if that’s pos­si­ble. And it’s metal­lic orange, with green met­alflake in it! the bike looks exactly as described, only bet­ter: this thing is basi­cally brand new! if it had a new back tire on it, you’d swear it was right off the show­room. I’m very pleased, and set about get­ting my GPS and heated gear hooked up, with the help of Joe and his awe­somely stocked tool­box. first trick: where do they hide the bat­tery on a KTM 950 Adven­ture? Remove the seat, no not there. peer around next to the air­box, not there. hmm, there seems to be a lot of wiring headed towards the front of the skid plate. And the bat­tery ten­der pig­tail is in front of the rear brake lever. remove a cou­ple of bolts, the skid plat piv­ots down and viola, the bat­tery. some jig­gery pok­ery to get wires routed (with­out remov­ing the fuel tanks, which looks like a task), some zip-tie mas­tery, and every­thing lights up the way it should. I stuck a piece of dual-lock on the side of the GPS and stuck the heat-troller to it, and we’re good. A quick run to the ship­ping place to send the stock seat and stock wind­screen home, then it’s off on the shake­down cruise, down to Los Altos and back, stop­ping to have din­ner with an old friend I haven’t seen in 20 years. What a cool bike: feels a lot like my old F650, except it han­dles bet­ter and has twice the HP. wheee!

Joe writes down some route sug­ges­tions for me, and Mark primes the cof­fee maker. I’m the only one mov­ing at 6:30 Sat­ur­day morn­ing as I pack up and get loaded. I leave a scrawled ‘Thank You’ on the din­ing room table, go out­side and start the bike. It’s only as I’m deploy­ing the sky-crane to get my right boot over the seat that the front door opens and Mark appears, wish­ing me safe trav­els and a thumbs-up. And I’m off. First stop: a lit­tle town called Kent­field to meet a friend for Break­fast. It’s about 45 miles of mixed free­way and city dri­ving, and the bike is pretty pleas­ant, it runs well, han­dles pretty good, if a lit­tle slow to respond to the tiller, but i put that down to the 21″ front wheel. It does seem a tad-lean on the pilot/needle tran­si­tion in the carbs, hunt­ing a bit at 35mph or so in 2nd/3rd gear.
Break­fast han­dled, I gas up (twin fuel tanks, and both will gush gas back at you if you’re not care­ful how you have the noz­zle pointed when you pull the trig­ger). I real­ize I have no idea how much fuel it holds, make a note that it’s at least the 4 gal­lons I just put in, and hit the road in earnest, motor­ing up 101 under gray skies. In about 25 miles, my heat-troller is loose, flop­ping around in the wind, and my right earplug is killing me. OK, I can take a hint. I stop in Santa Rosa, remount the HT (black and white dual lock doesn’t play well together), repo­si­tion the earplug and motor on. 350 miles of awe­some roads later, with only about 10 min­utes of rain the whole way, I see the sign that says “wel­come to Ore­gon, Michael and Judy, next left”. I motor up to the Giant Road Bur­rito and greet Michael and Judy. I think i see a smidgen of bike lust in Michael’s eyes.

Michael and Judy took great care of me, pro­vid­ing a hot shower, hot chicken enchi­ladas, and a nice port to round out the evening. A per­fect way to end a great day of riding.

Sun­day broke grey and damp, but not actu­ally rain­ing. A check of the weather fore­cast was incon­clu­sive; change of rain most of the way up the Ore­gon coast. A check of the var­i­ous passes over the coast range showed no antic­i­pated prob­lems cross­ing over to I-5 where ever I decided to. I get my stuff packed and while I’m doing that Michael makes me a ‘bronze’ mocha (in honor of a fallen friend: it’s a 20 oz. quad shot mocha); I thanked him and told him that if the bike didn’t start I’d just push it to Gold Beach. “One handed” sez Michael! I “Mocha up” and get ready to go. I get a rec­om­men­da­tion for a restau­rant to check out for break­fast (appar­ently run by an ADV rider) and hit the road. It’s about 7:15 AM.
A short ride to Gold Beach, search out the “Bar­na­cle Bistro” only to find it closed. Oh well, back-track to The Cape Café and set­tle in with a cof­fee and the 2-egg break­fast. As I chow down, the sun breaks out and the sky turns a lovely blue. I gear up to head out, mak­ing sure to change to the tinted shield, and I’m on my way. For the next 3–4 hours, I work my way up the coast, from small town to pic­turesque bridge to small town. My GPS says Hwy 18 is the ‘short­est’ route home, and it leads through some of my old stomp­ing grounds, so I go that way. Shortly after depart­ing the coast, I have my only near-brush with Offi­cer Friendly. We are climb­ing up the hills out of New­port, and there’s a ditz in a mini­van doing 53.5MPH in a 55 zone, with 7–8 cars backed up behind her. We get to a pass­ing lane, and she camps out in the left lane, so those of us behind (myself and about 6 cars) pro­ceed to go around on the right. As soon as I’m clear, I shift left and get on it, hop­ing to get out of the clot of cages for the run to the sum­mit. As we round a sweep­ing right-hander, with me pulling out in front the pack, at about 80 per, I spot Mr. friendly parked in the turn-out, with his testicle-toaster hang­ing out the win­dow. I gen­tly roll off the gas, as does every­one around me. Whew, no way he’s going to be able to pick me out of that pack. We gen­tly motor past and my heart rate returns to normal.

The rest of the trip was unevent­ful, with two notable events; while stopped for my final gas stop in Chehalis, I put the hel­met on the mir­ror (yes, I know bet­ter; I was get­ting tired) so I could move the bike away from the pump, and while push­ing it, the hel­met bails and lands face-shield down on the tar­mac. ARRRGGG! Oh well, that shield was ready for replac­ing any­way. And the sun’s almost down, so I swapped it out for the clear one that I took off over 350 miles ago. Upon arriv­ing home, I dis­cover that I also cracked the side cover on the hel­met, so I’ll have to fix or replace that. The other note­wor­thy event, even though wholly pre­dictable, was the speed at which the tem­per­a­ture dropped after the sun went down; with no cloud cover to hold heat in, the mer­cury plum­mets! And I dis­cov­ered that the heated grips on this bike are ‘cal­i­for­nia’ heated grips: Ok for tak­ing the morn­ing chill off, but not up to the job of keep­ing your hands warm in the north­west in febu­rary. I arrived home about 7:23 PM, feel­ing a bit tired but not beat up in any way and very pleased with my purchase.

keep those feet up, and the rub­ber side down.
black­dog

Headed out the door at oh-dark-fifteen for our sec­ond club tri­als of the sea­son, the Ice Trial. Weather looks like it won’t live up to it’s name, although it has in past years. Get to the site, get unloaded in a light driz­zle, and warm up. A lit­tle prac­tice, and some time dial­ing the carb in a bit, since it was com­pletely dis­as­sem­bled and cleaned a cou­ple of weeks ago. Focus was on the smoothest pos­si­ble off-idle response i could get, a key char­ac­ter­is­tic for a tri­als engine.

Got geared up and went over to the rider’s meet­ing. learned of an inter­est­ing plan: in order to man­age traf­fic, our tri­als mar­shalls had built an ‘out-n-back’ loop. The plan was to ride the loop to the end, doing sec­tions 1–12 (1–11 for Novices) and then ride it back to the bot­tom, hit­ting the sec­tions in reverse order (12 through 1 on the way back). Then back to the pits for water, fuel, food, what­ever, and then fin­ish with a final 1–12 ride). sounds inter­st­ing. So we divide into groups, and away we go.

We quickly dis­cover that a lot of the road and trails is a soupy, muddy mess. But the sec­tions are chal­leng­ing and fun, with very lit­tle actu­ally dan­ger­ous. It took me a num­ber of sec­tions to loosen up, and to get a bet­ter feel for the gear­ing on the bike, with the new 9-tooth coun­ter­shaft sprocket (down from the stock 10). What I dis­cov­ered is that I now have a choice of gears for a sec­tion, first for really crawl­ing, sec­ond for nor­mal or any­thing with a climb, and third for seri­ous climb­ing. All in all though, the bike ran great and seems a bet­ter fit for my rid­ing style this way. The loop was pretty long and rugged in spots and I was cer­tainly happy to get back to the pits after our first two ‘loops’. Water, a bite to eat, and gas for the bike. And out to fin­ish out with the third loop. At sec­tion 1, we run into the rest of the Advanced class, and they’re already fin­ished! What the.…. turns out they just rode two attempts on all the sec­tions on the way back down, so they only made two trips up and down the loop. smart guys!

In the end, i had some good rides, and a bunch of sloppy rides, 3’s that should have been 1’s, and 1’s that should have been cleans. Fin­ished in 4th or 5th place, I think. I hope to get some prac­tice before the next round, hope­fully that will help keep me a bit sharper.

A ques­tion for all of you: how much do you con­sider the loop trail to be part of the chal­lenge of a tri­als event, in par­tic­u­lar, a local club event? There was some grum­bling around the pits after the event about the folks who didn’t ride the loop trail all 3 (or 4) times, and I’m curi­ous if there’s a con­sen­sus on this issue. I’m not seri­ous enough about it to care that much, but my guess is that my score would have been 5–9 lower with the extra fatigue and arm pump that I had on my thrid loop. What do you folks think? Send me your com­ments, I’d love to hear from you.

keep those feet on the pegs!
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!

As you may have noticed, keep­ing up with this blog didn’t top my hit parade last year. it wasn’t a very good year for tri­als, either, so it didn’t mat­ter much.
I got ill dur­ing the colum­bia cup, then I injured my elbow while prac­tic­ing last june, and it took many months for it to heal, so I didn’t ride very much through the sum­mer. so that’s ’09 in a nut­shell, on to 2010!

THe year started out with our first event, the “Plas­tered Pur­ple Pen­guin” on jan­u­ary 3rd. A new loca­tion for most of us, a pri­vate area in Marysville. We had excel­lent weather for jan­u­ary (45 degrees and not rain­ing) and Tom had a unique event planned with a group check observed tri­als in the morn­ing, and a Scot Trial in the after­noon (a race where you points both for the dabs in the sec­tions and for how far you are behind the tar­get time).

This area has a 3.5 mile scram­bles track laid out, and that’s pretty much what we used for the loop, with the sec­tions in the woods next to the track at var­i­ous places. Really easy to wear your­self out try­ing to go quickly on the scram­bles track; that’s not what a tri­als bike is really good at!

A good selec­tion of sec­tions, with not a lot of splits between advanced and expert, but fun. Once again I proved con­clu­sively that I can­not ride com­peta­tively at the advanced level by just hop­ping on the bike the morn­ing of the event, and call­ing the 30 min­utes warmup ‘prac­tice’. I had fun, but made a num­ber of stu­pid mis­takes, and fin­ished in last place. I also had some issues with the bike being hard to start and kick­ing back while start­ing, so i guess it’s time to catch up with all that deferred main­te­nance. (this will be a sub­ject for a future post)

after lunch, 5 or six folks (all but one on larger enduro machines) tried their hand at the Scot Tri­als. It cer­tainly looked like fun, maybe next year I’ll talk some fool into loan­ing me a WR or some­thing and try my hand.

All in all, though, a fun way to start out the year

Next Event: Walker Val­ley, Feb 7. See you there. Direc­tions are avail­able on the Puget Sound Tri­alers web site.

keep those feet up!
black­dog

The day began with dis­ori­en­ta­tion: April in west­ern wash­ing­ton, clear skies, pre­dicted high of 70 degrees. WTF? oh well, guess we just deal with it as best as we can. For a long time north­west­erner, this was seri­ous cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance ter­ri­tory.

the day before, i’d done some prep on the bike (clean air fil­ter, check tires and flu­ids, etc.) and then taken it for a quick ride around the place. This was of course the time that i mis-judged a log cross­ing and snapped the front fender off, right at the brace. a quick ses­sion with some scrap plas­tic and a few pop-rivets set things right. I had every inten­tion of order­ing a new fender, but the fix worked so well that i might not.

any­way, on to the event. nor­mal morn­ing rou­tine, faith­ful read­ers (both of you!) will know it by heart now: drive up, find a park­ing place, unload, pre­flight the bike, warm up, then off to sign-up. signed up, and when the mar­shall asked me if i could observe, i said “sure”. saw him write my name down for sec­tion 1, but didn’t really think about it too much. of for some more warm up. found most of the morn­ing sec­tions, then went look­ing for the after­noon sec­tions. found 2 and 3, but no oth­ers. 2 and three were both steep hill­climbs, with the exits nor eas­ily reached with­out rid­ing the course (a ‘no-no’). so i walked through 3 and on up the trail. found 4, and fig­ured out that the rest of the sec­tions were laid out along a trail on the side of the moun­tain that would give a moun­tain goat sec­ond thoughts. ‘rugged enough to make a rab­bit crash’ is one phrase i’ve heard. walked back to the bike, and found sec­tion 1; hmm, that looks like a cake­walk. well, sec­tions (the ones i saw, at least) aren’t going to be the tough part of this tri­als, but the loop is going to take a toll. back to the pits to get ready to observe. morn­ing rid­ers meet­ing com­mences, they are call­ing off observers, but my name is not uttered. rrruuh? i let the com­mo­tion ebb a bit, then go talk to the mar­shalls; ah here’s the con­fu­sion: when i singed up, he wrote me down to observe in the after­noon, for­get­ting or not real­iz­ing that i was rid­ing in the Advanced class, in the after­noon. well, looks like they aren’t short of observers, so i’m off the hook. so i head out for a bit of seri­ous practice.

i resolve to focus on things i’m uncom­fort­able with: steep drops, turns over jumbly rocks. I man­age to re-teach by body a few things about stay­ing loose in the bike, and lean­ing the bike over; don’t try to keep it ver­ti­cal all the time, it really does turn bet­ter when it’s leaned over!
after about 45 min­utes, back to the pits for a snack and water. while i’m relax­ing, a friend wan­ders up and is exam­in­ing the back tire of my bike, from the look on his face, i’m guess­ing he’s about to point out a giant hole in the tire, or a torn-off knob or some­thing. but no, he points out that i’ve a bazz­il­lion feet of rusty wire wrapped around the rear sproket, hub, and brake disk! exple­tive. i quickly bor­row a stand and a BA crescent-wrench, whip the rear tire off and start in with the wire cut­ters. a few min­utes of cut­ting and pulling, and it’s all gone, and no dam­age done. we spec­u­lated that it was the wire belt­ing from a tire that some ass­hat prob­a­bly burnt in a ‘camp­fire’ in the area.

a bit more prac­tice, some on the big under­cut log (which resulted in one of slow­est ‘over-the-bars’ i’ve ever had) and i feel like i’m ready. around noon, we get the sig­nal for the rid­ers to meet up at the scor­ing trailer. get our instruc­tions (yel­low rib­bon marks the loop, it starts over yon­der and ends over that­away, ya got 3 hours, now git!), and away we go. off to sec­tion 1, looks like a cake­walk, sure enough start off with a clean. nice. on to 2. sec­tions 2 and three and laid out par­al­lel to each other, up a steep hill­side. 2 is a mixed-media climb, dirt, a big rock step, and the rocky dirt on to the exit. 3 is about twice as long, starts in the water, makes a sig­nif­i­cant right turn 1/2 way up, and has a piece of old log choker cable about an inch in diam­e­ter across the line, about 8 inches off the ground. the cable has some give, so it’s really not much of an obsta­cle, but it makes ya think. back to 2, watch a clean and 3, decide on 2nd gear, and go for it. good trac­tion, i do a lit­tle ‘trac­tion bounce’ just after the rock bit, and get out clean. down the hill and attack #3. 2nd gear, con­cen­trate on get­ting through the turn clean, and then get­ting a bit of momen­tum built up before the cable and the steep steps after it. a lit­tle foot­peg lever­age just after the cable, and i made it out clean! you can see a photo here. (notice the wire cable just under the bike’s front wheel.) yee haw, started off with 3 cleans! but now we get to the meat of the trail. it’s vis­ciously steep, both uphill and down­hill, and requires nearly as much effort to ride as a sec­tion. #4 has a sharp left fol­lowed by a steep climb, 5 has a nasty root-filled uphill left that caught nearly every­body for at least 1, etc. etc. 8 and 9 were a bit note­wor­thy in that they were a con­tin­u­ous sec­tion; 8 has a dev­il­ish lit­tle turn with a per­fectly placed dining-table sized rock right at the apex at foot­peg height, forc­ing you into exactly the wrong place for the exit. very tricky!

fin­ished the first loop in about and hour and 15 min­utes, the entire loop couldn’t have been a half mile long. but it was work. I’ve been rid­ing events over the past year and tried to keep track of what my heart-rate was doing at var­i­ous times and what my calo­rie burn was. One of the things that i’ve learned is that if i’m sit­ting at the entrance to a sec­tion, and my heart-rate is over 145, i should take a lit­tle rest break until it comes down to about 130 or 135. I ride much bet­ter, given the extra 2 min­utes it takes for the rate to come down. so on the sec­ond and third loops, i paid atten­tion to this; the loops was so short and so chal­leng­ing that unless i gave myself forced breaks, i’d just wear myself out. by doing this, i man­aged to get through the event with­out once arriv­ing at the end of a sec­tion and not being able to get my hands unclenched from the grips!

fin­ished out with 39 points, which turned out to be good enough to ace Cur­tis Mann out of 3rd by 1 point. Michael Jor­dan schooled all of us though, with 24 points, topped off with a 4-point loop 3!. Nice ride, Michael. Kyle Lar­son also put in a good ride to take second.

Next event is May 3rd, at Deer Flats, above Gold Bar. Great place to ride, nasty place to get to. about 5 miles of rough, rocky road.
If you’d like to find out what observed tri­als are all about, let me know, i’ll get you detailed direc­tions and you could come up and spectate.

keep those feet up!
black­dog

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

Well, it’s been a long time since my last blog entry. Too much excit­ment on both the job and the fam­ily front has left lit­tle time and energy for think­ing about tri­als. Nonethe­less, I did try my hand at the Deer Flats event in July. I hadn’t been on a tri­als bike for about 2 months, and as expected, I was really rusty. I got through the event with a few decent rides, but never really got in the groove and never really got con­fi­dence in my rid­ing. When it was over, the scores showed how rusty I was, last of the assem­bled Advanced riders.

Time marches on, I was out of the coun­try for the Sep­tem­ber Trial, recov­er­ing from the creep­ing crud for Hal­loween I, which brings us to Hal­loween II, at Gold Bar. I had decided before head­ing out that since I hadn’t rid­den in many weeks, and effec­tively only once since June, that I would ride Sr. inter­me­di­ate instead of Advanced.

Arrive at Gold Bar about 8am, find a park­ing spot and get unloaded. First impres­sion is of strange weather; it was below freez­ing when I left my house out­side of duvall, but there was a warm breeze blow­ing at Gold Bar. Over­all, a fan­tas­tic day weath­er­wise: sun­shine, a bit of wind, and about 58 degrees. it doesn’t get any bet­ter than that on Octo­ber in the Pacific NW.

Went out and warmed up, includ­ing try­ing out a few rocks that have given me trou­ble in the past. not too bad, but obvi­ously out of prac­tice. I take a look at a few Advanced/Expert sec­tions and con­firm my ear­lier deci­sion to ride Sr. Inter­me­di­ate; With no prac­tice or rid­ing time for the last 4 months, those sec­tions didn’t look like a good idea.

Back to the pits, get ready, and away we go. Sec­tion 1 at many tri­als is kind of a gimme, an easy sec­tion to get you warmed up and build up your con­fi­dence, before of course, smash­ing said con­fi­dence like a china bowl on a tile floor. Being a tri­als mar­shall requires just a touch of sadis­tic ten­dan­cies. Not today how­ever; a fun lit­tle sec­tion, but it has a dia­bol­i­cal uphill right turn in it, with a lit­tle exposed rock just where the back wheel will be when you need to lift the front wheel to float the end of the turn. Never did fig­ure that one out; took a point there every time. Had a pretty bad first loop, includ­ing a 5 when I slipped on a slick rock in sec­tion 9, try­ing a dif­fer­ent approach to the slick tree root step. It’s not just the mechan­i­cal rid­ing skills that atro­phy from no prac­tice, it’s also the men­tal parts of the game; line pick­ing and see­ing the cre­ative approaches to obstacles.

Any­way suc­ces­sive loops got bet­ter as I got back in the groove, even post­ing a loop score of 2 on the thrid loop. That’s what the good rid­ers were post­ing from the begin­ning. My even­tual score of 24 was good for 5th or 6th, not a shin­ing per­for­mance for some­one who took home a sec­ond place Advanced back in april! oh well. It was a great event, with good sec­tions and good orga­ni­za­tion; as always: Thanks to Jon and fam­ily! you guys rock!

So all this brings us to the end of the sea­son, and look­ing for­ward, past the hol­i­days, to next sea­son. The way I see it, I have three options as to how to approach next year. I could get off my ass, clean up my trail sys­tem on my prop­erty, build some prac­tice ses­sions, get out there and prac­tice, and set my sights on being com­pet­i­tive in Advanced next year. I could con­tinue with my “ride when it’s con­ve­nient” plan and ride Sr. Inter­me­di­ate next year. Or i could take a year off from com­pe­ti­tion, and attend all the events as pho­tog­ra­pher and scribe, try to gen­er­ate even more press and some excite­ment around Observed Tri­als in the Pacific Northwest.

Right now, not sure which way to go. It seems as though work and fam­ily life are going to set­tle down a bit, so the ‘get com­pet­i­tive’ approach might be pos­si­ble. I’m not going to make my deci­sion until after thanks­giv­ing, we’ll see.

See you on the trail, Keep those feet on the pegs!

black­dog