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Bad Ideas, Poison Oak, and Roxy Girl Backpacks 8

Have you ever made a decision when you were out riding that you wish you could do over?

I have and it’s not for the faint of heart.  It was springtime in 2004.  The SoCal skies were blue, the hills were green and the dirt was perfect after a couple days of rain…it was the kind of day that makes you want to ride.  The trouble was I had no bike in my garage.  I called my friend Donn Maeda, editor of Transworld Motocross magazine, and asked if he had anything in his garage that I could borrow for a while, preferably something he was done testing and didn’t have to return anytime soon.  I must have caught him in a good mood because he told me to come on over…or maybe I had just finished and submitted a story before deadline (Unlike the one you are reading now).

As we loaded what appeared to be a new Yamaha YZ250F into my work truck, Donn assured me that they’d already shot the photos they needed for the story.  The bike was a 314cc “Cheater bike”, from Rick Peterson Motorsports, a So Cal shop that specialized in building overbores that were often undetectable.  The only clue on this bike was a small spacer between the cylinder and crankcase to allow the longer connecting rod.  I couldn’t wait to ride it.

“You’re gonna love this bike.  It’s Rick Peterson’s personal bike and it’s barely been ridden.  All I ask is that you wash it and clean the air filter before you bring it back.  Let me know if you need anything and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks!” Donn said, adding, “And NO TRAIL RIDING! “ as I drove away.  I remember wondering what the Hell he meant by no trail riding…of course I was going trail riding.  I hadn’t raced MX in twenty years and was out of shape.  The last thing I wanted to do was go pound laps on a track with a bunch of kids.

I planned on skipping work and going riding the next day, but I wasn’t sure where.  I picked up my daughter from school and drove to her mom’s new house in Yucaipa.  As I was taking her inside to get going on homework, I couldn’t help noticing the pristine wet hills not more than two blocks away.  It was like a siren’s call; I don’t even remember driving home to get my gear bag and returning to my ex-wife’s house.  The only clear memories I have of before I took off on the bike were getting Gabbi started on her homework and then borrowing her Roxy Girl backpack (Don’t ask!) to put my cell phone in.

Now, any experienced dirt bike rider knows it’s not smart to go riding alone and I could hear my voice of reason saying, “Hey dipshit, don’t go! It’s almost 5 pm, it’ll be dark soon and you should just wait until tomorrow.”  That’s when I borrowed her tiny backpack, which I tied to the crossbar with my cellphone wrapped up inside, just in case something happened.  Even my kid knew it was a bad idea, but I assured her that I was just going to putt up the hill to try the bike out and she should call 911 if I wasn’t back in a couple hours.  She didn’t like me saying that, so I told her I was only kidding and not to worry, Dad knows what he’s doing.  Besides, I had my cellphone in her Roxy Girl backpack tied to the crossbar pad, which made her even more nervous…

I rode a couple of blocks to the foothills and ended up having to cut through the backyard of one of the model homes to reach the trailhead.  I felt like a kid in a candy store as I wheelied the 314 easily up the narrow trail to the top of the first ridge, then back down, before carving a new route up an untouched face and onto the ridgeline.  The power on the bike was remarkably smooth with tons of torque.  I stopped at the top of the first hill and whipped my phone out of the Roxy Girl pack to call Donn with some feedback, but he didn’t answer.

I felt like I was on top of the world as I took in the view of the then-unfinished Chapman Heights below me.  I could see my company truck parked in front of the ex-wife’s house with the golf course just past that.  It occurred to me that my ex-wife lived on the fifth hole of a golf course and I hadn’t even played there yet...I made a mental note to play a round there soon, fired up the bike and broke new trail along the ridgeline.

I was totally in the zone and having so much fun that I didn’t realize I was getting into some fairly thick Manzanita growth until a branch grabbed my bars and I did a little slow speed endo.  I wasn’t injured, but I was now on a fairly steep slope face approximately 8-10 feet below the narrow ridgeline I’d been riding along.  To make matters worse, the slope was made up of dry, loose shale and I still needed to turn the bike around and head back down the same ridgeline I’d come up.  I tried not to slip further down the slope, but by the time I wrestled the bike around I had slid another 5 feet down.  No big deal, right?

I started the bike and tried to ride it along the slope up to the ridgeline, but the shale was too loose and the rear wheel would not bite.  It was frustrating, because if the slope was anything but shale I could have motored right up with my feet on the pegs.  The more I tried to climb out, the further I slipped down.  It was getting dark, I was a bit dehydrated and losing strength, as well as patience.  I called my kid and told her that I was okay, but running a little bit late.  Her mom would be home soon, so I wasn’t worried about her being alone.

I needed to make a decision.  I could hump the bike up the slope to the ridgeline, which would mean dragging it sideways up the slope, first the front wheel, then the back.  It was at least 25 feet and I was already exhausted.  My other choice was to go down the slope and into a ravine that appeared to be an overgrown, narrow sand wash with steep, 200 foot slopes on both sides.  Even though I couldn’t see it, I knew that it would eventually spill out at the bottom left toe of the slope leading to the ridgeline I had ridden out on.  Confusing, I know.  It gets worse, much worse, because I made the wrong choice.

I decided to take a chance and ride out the bottom of the ravine, but first I had to make sure I could get down there ok.  You need to understand that no one had ever ridden down the slope I was about to go down and although I didn’t know it at the time, no one had ever even walked in the bottom of that ravine, much less tried to ride a dirt bike through it.  I walked down the slope around thirty feet to scout a path to the bottom and it didn’t seem so bad, probably because the sun was down and I was losing light by the second.  Turning the bike around was easier this time because I didn’t care if it slid down while doing so.  I buckled up my chin strap, pulled in the clutch lever and went to bump start it in second gear.  The rear wheel locked up in the shale and the next thing I knew I was doing a dead engine free-fall over a 20-foot dried waterfall that I hadn’t seen.  Crashing with a dead motor is always a creepy experience…you can hear everything and it sounds like deer antlers colliding.

I landed hard on my head on a rock ledge, and then the bike landed on me.  As I came to my senses I knew right away that I’d been knocked out, but worse than the concussion was the damage to my right wrist.  It felt broken, something on my face was bleeding and I wasn’t even to the bottom of the ravine yet.  As it turned out, I had to negotiate two more vertical waterfalls on my way to the bottom.  I recall seeing pictures in old magazines of desert guys “bulldogging” their bike down steep hills, which is walking them down.  Up until that moment I’d never encountered a hill that I couldn’t ride down and I’ve been on some pretty scary rides.  I not only could not ride the bike over these two waterfalls, I had to sit on my butt and push the bike over them ahead of me, using my feet, then sliding down on my ass.  By the time I reached the bottom it was completely dark outside, the temperature was dropping and the bottom of the ravine was worse than a jungle.

My wrist, which I first broke when I was fifteen and had reinjured many times over the course of my 12-year racing career, was throbbing beyond belief.  Besides being broken again I had torn some ligaments, so wrestling the bike over and through the dense foliage at the bottom of the ravine was a slow process and the clutch was starting to fry.  I pressed on; knowing that eventually this canyon would lead to civilization.  Every time I rounded a bend I expected to see houses, only to be greeted by more canyon walls that were too steep to climb out of.  By now I was completely dehydrated, suffering from exhaustion and the aftereffects of the concussion.  I clearly needed water and since I had no idea how much further till I’d be out of the canyon, I thought that if I could get up on the ridge I could have my ex pick me up, or worst case scenario, I could call 911.

The last thing I wanted to do was leave someone else’s motorcycle behind, especially a magazine test bike.  That said, when I finally spotted a place to get out I dropped the bike and started climbing up the slope face, which was now soft, loamy dirt.  It took me about thirty minutes to climb to the top of the ridge, basically crawling on my knees and elbows.  It was really steep and I rested a lot.  Halfway up the slope I was laying there, resting, and I realized that I was literally up to my elbows in poison oak!  I literally laughed out loud, thinking, “WTF else could go wrong?”  I’d had a bad case once before up in Monterey and was oozing pus from huge lesions all over my body, so I keep a poison oak first aid kit at home… I just had to remember to use it as soon as possible!

(Note: If you are a person susceptible to poison oak your only hope is to clean the urushiol oil from your skin before it reacts and there is only one thing that effectively cleans it: Tecnu.)

Finally, I reached the top of the ridge, stood up and looked around, hoping I was in an area reachable by my truck.  Given the way my day had unfolded up to that point, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that I was standing on an orphaned ridge peak, with no direct access from the housing tract, which was now taunting me in full illumination, just a few hundred yards away.

In a way I was relieved, because I knew there was only one thing left to do.  I reached into the Roxy Girl backpack, pulled out my cellphone and dialed 911.  That’s right; I dropped the hammer, brought out the major artillery and did what any other dying man would have done.  As I attempted to describe my location to the 911 operator, my mind was flooded with images of me climbing into a Barcalounger hanging at the end of a rope from a rescue chopper, then watching myself pull the footrest lever and get lowered, still in full recliner position, into the bed of my truck, where my daughter greeted me with a hero’s welcome and a bottle of Fiji water…

My mind was snapped back to reality when I heard the operator say there would be no rescue by air.

“Wait a minute; did you just say that you don’t do rescues by helicopter anymore?  Are you shitting me? What do you mean it’s too dangerous, it’s not even windy up here!”  I tried everything I could to get them to drop me a rope and lift me off that fucking ridge, but they said they had a new policy ever since one of their choppers had gone down a few years back…something about wind currents, I think.  Who knows? Once I heard her say that they couldn’t even drop me a bottle of water I stopped caring.

Here’s how the rest of my tale of woe went down, just in case any of you get any wild ideas about going riding by yourself…

It must have been a slow Sunday night, because they pulled out all the stops for my little dog and pony show.  I watched in amazement as the Fire Department put together a Mobile Command Center on Chapman Heights Blvd, not more than a quarter mile from where I was standing on that orphan ridge, illuminated by the always comforting spotlight of the San Bernardino County Sherriff’s helicopter unit.  I was hopeful that I wouldn’t be billed for the two tanks of fuel he burned through while directing the five-man search team to my location.  I learned later that the only route to my location required them to drive on fire roads from the north, then use ATVs, before traversing the final few miles on foot.

When the operator told me what the plan was I said forget it and offered to go back down the way I’d come up, but they wouldn’t allow it, saying it was too steep and too dangerous.  So I sat shivering on that hill for hours, waiting to be rescued, while I was actually so close I could have hit two of the fire engines below me with a solid 5-iron!

When the rescue team arrived at around 3:00 am, they were shocked to see how close we were to civilization, but not as shocked as I was to find out they’d brought no stretcher with them.  I told them my story and we all agreed I’d have been better off had I dragged the bike back up on the ridge.  They pumped two I.V. bags into my arm and I asked them a few questions as we waited for my vitals to normalize.

“Since you brought no back board or stretcher, what were you guys going to do if I was too weak to hike back with you?” I asked.  “That’s why we asked you if you had any injuries to your legs; we knew you were able to walk, based on your response,” was the reply.  Made sense to me…

I felt much better after the I.V. and we started the trek back, following the markers they’d left earlier.  Soon we were met by more firemen on ATVs and I hopped on the first ride out, who rode me over to a huge SUV belonging to the Fire Chief.  There were at least a half dozen emergency vehicles waiting along with the Chief’s and we were still twenty minutes away from the Chapman Heights Mobile Command Center.  The Chief was very cool and I thanked him for his help and I think I said I hoped all his guys weren’t making Overtime pay and he laughed.  I might have said something about hoping I didn’t get a bill for all this, I don’t remember.

My presence was required for a little debriefing at the Command Center, where there were two full hook and ladder fire engines, several more SUVs and a gaggle of Sheriff’s units, one of which pulled me aside and asked if I knew that it was illegal to ride off-road in the city of Yucaipa.  I said I was unaware of that fact and had just gotten a little sidetracked while dropping my kid off at my ex-wife’s house.  I asked him if he was going to give me a ticket and he said no.  The sun was coming up and I excused myself and joined my new friends in the MCC they’d set up just for me.

After telling all my details and making them all swear not to steal the bike I had abandoned, one of the Firemen gave me a ride to my truck.  My kid and my ex came out and said it was the most excitement they’d seen in the neighborhood since moving to Yucaipa six months earlier.  I was so tired I didn’t even tell them about the Mobile Command Center.

I drove home to Redlands, took a shower and tried to forget about the whole mess.  By the time I dried off it was Monday morning, so I called my old friend, Jim Fishback and asked him if he and his son, Jimmy could go retrieve the RPM Yamaha from the death ravine.  I told him the short version of my ordeal and he sent Jimmy hiking in after it.  When they brought me the bike two hours later, he said that Jimmy had only walked around two corners of the canyon and there was the bike!  If I had kept going around just one more corner I’d have seen the houses and avoided the humiliation of calling 9-1-1 and the ensuing wait.

Oh, and I wouldn’t have woken up the next day with my arms covered with poison oak blisters.

[img]https://p.vitalmx.com/photos/forums/2013/08/06/28636/s1200_080613baueroak.jpg[/img]

I was such a mess, between my broken wrist, thrashed back and body, poison oak and everything else that I could not physically take the bike to get washed, but I’m pretty sure the air filter never got dirty.  Bringing that awesome bike back to Donn with everything dirty, bent and gouged was the lowest point of the entire ordeal.  I felt like a total dick, but I couldn’t even help unload it from my truck.  He told me later that he it looked like a puma had attacked it and he had to replace every piece of plastic on the bike.  He also reminded me that he’d said, “NO TRAIL RIDING”.  He did enjoy my suffering and Donn always loves a good story, especially ones with Roxy Girl backpacks, so that was good.

Like a gift that keeps on giving, a couple weeks later I received a citation in the mail from the San Bernardino County Sheriff, for riding off-road in the city of Yucaipa.  I appeared in court with a cast on my wrist and arms still oozing poison oak pus and told the judge my tale of woe.  He loved it and said I’d suffered enough.

Case Dismissed.
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