OBDR Day Eight

Saturday, July 16, 2011 (or see the previous day, or start from the very beginning)

I was on a jeep trail that clung to the sides of Mt. Emily, rain-slickened rocks crunching quietly underneath my wheels, when I came upon an old landslide that had washed away half the trail, leaving a path a foot wide next to a thousand-foot cliff. As my wheels spun inches away from the edge, death was only a bad bounce away.

The morning sun peeked over the mountain ridges that surrounded us as we packed up camp and said goodbye to the lovely John Day River. The OBDR led us up and along the ridgeline overlooking the river until a sharp hairpin turned us north toward the Winom Frazier OHV Complex. I’ve read several ride reports where people have found themselves on some ridiculously steep OHV trails while crossing this area, but our GPS track kept us on more sedate gravel roads. After yesterday’s OHV shenanigans I didn’t mind missing those black diamond trails.

Another day, another ride up to a fire lookout.

This one was impressively tall.

The view to the northeast was pretty, in an ominous kind of way.

Yep, that’s where we’re headed, all right.

Unfazed by the storm clouds ahead, we continued on until we reached a three-way intersection of gravel roads at the northern edge of the OHV area.

I glanced at the GPS and picked a way that looked likely, but quickly began to look un-likely.

“I don’t think this is the right way. Let’s turn around,” I said to Daren. So we did and backtracked back to the intersection, where I proceeded to ride around in a circle in an attempt to make sense of the GPS.

I picked another way. It led to a campground and seemed even less likely than the first way. “This isn’t right either. We have to turn around.” I said this with as much confidence as I could muster while hiding my sheepish dismay.

Daren, exhibiting infinite patience, simply followed along until I puzzled out the correct route. Just another case of the GPS track not quite matching up with the Garmin’s maps.

Not too long afterwards, I was cruising along a wide gravel road when shit seriously hit the fan.

The sweeping left hander was like any of the thousands of sweeping left handers I’d taken over the past seven days. I was in the middle of the turn when the front wheel began to let go, but unlike any of the hundreds of times I’d powered out of dicey traction, this time I couldn’t save it. Everything moved very fast.

I felt the front wheel wash out and the bike tip over to the left in a lowside.

I remembered that Daren was riding in formation just over my left shoulder, and thought, “Shit! I’m taking Daren out.”

I saw a culvert and a deep gully on the left side of the road grow alarmingly closer. Suddenly, the rear wheel regained traction and flipped the bike over into a highside which threw me into the air.

I felt the back of my helmet slam into the road hard enough for me to see stars and my right arm whip down to crack my knuckles.

All this happened in a second. It was my first highside ever, and now I understand why everyone says highsides suck.

As I took a few minutes to regain my senses, Daren matter-of-factly recounted the incident from his perspective. How he saw my front wheel wash out and my bike start to go down. How the lowside turned into a highside. How he was worried that my bike would slide off the road and down into the gully so he rode the front tire of his KLR over my rear wheel to keep my bike from going over the edge…

Wait, what?

I looked down at the bikes, which were both on their sides in the road. Sure enough, the front tire of the KLR¹ was holding the rear tire of my bike down, while my front tire dangled over the edge of the gully.

Clearly, time moves at a different speed in Daren’s continuum.

The sweeping line in the lower left corner of the photo above is the track left by my bike when I crashed. I’d been riding at least 35mph and it was the hardest crash of the trip. Unfortunately, it seriously messed with my gravel mojo. It’s been a couple of months since it happened and I still tense up a little on roads with deep gravel in corners.

We pushed on, and the GPS eventually led us off the gravel and on to a decommissioned road.

Unlike other such roads we’d encountered, this one featured large tank traps² every hundred yards along the way. I suppose we should have heeded the warning, but what’s the fun in that?

Sometimes the road disappeared.

Sometimes there were logs.

But there were always tank traps.

The tank traps were usually in pairs, which required careful traversal. Too fast and you’d jump the first berm and risk hitting the second berm on the landing. Too slow and you wouldn’t have enough momentum to climb out of the ditch between the berms.

The road continued to deteriorate until it disappeared in the middle of a stony hillside. I took this photo so I could blame the GPS track for leading us here.

Daren scouted ahead but was blocked by a large pile of rocks. It looked like someone had taken a backhoe and scraped up what was left of the road. We considered bushwhacking, but ruled that out when we couldn’t be certain that there was even a road up ahead to bushwhack to.

I looked for alternate routes.

Daren helped me pull my bike around so it pointed back the way we came.

Daren himself had an interesting method of turning around: he hopped on his bike and turned so it pointed straight up the hillside, intending to use gravity to roll downhill so he could turn back around. Unfortunately, the spot he chose to ride uphill left him stuck with his wheels in a position that left his feet dangling in the air. Amazingly, he kept his fully loaded KLR in perfect balance while he slammed his butt down on the seat repeatedly to jolt the bike rolling backwards. Daren’s exploits truly are the stuff of legend.

As thunder boomed closer and closer, we found a detour around the troublesome hillside. This dumped us onto McIntyre Road, one of the few true gravel superhighways we encountered on the route. We needed every bit of speed to outrun the weather.

We’d planned on heading into Starkey Station for gas and resupply, but decided to press on into LaGrande for something hot to eat. There may have been a little incident where someone lost the key to their bike in Safeway and we tore around the store for 45 minutes looking for it until it appeared in the lost and found.

We rewarded ourselves by having a hot meal in a restaurant. While we were eating, the sky opened up and absolutely dumped rain for several minutes.

This would have been a full day on its own, but we had a few hours of daylight left and figured we could avoid having to backtrack 50 miles by taking a road out of LaGrande that headed due north up Mt. Emily which would put us back on the OBDR.

We soon discovered that the area around Mt. Emily was actually a small OHV area. This wouldn’t usually be a problem, but I seriously underestimated the difficulty of navigating without the breadcrumbs left by a proper GPS track. The maps on the Garmin made no distinction between roads and OHV trails, and our paper maps weren’t detailed enough to help, so when I turned down a green circle trail — you know where this is heading, don’t you? — it wasn’t obvious that I’d made a mistake.

That is, until the trail started heading downhill in the opposite direction we wanted, but by then it was too muddy and slippery to turn around until we reached the bottom.

Mud offers the rider an exquisite bouquet of sensations. Wheels sliding in random directions. A certain sense of heaviness from riding through a thick substance. The feel of power being transmitted to the rear wheel and going nowhere as the tire spins toothlessly.

It’s truly a wonder that Daren didn’t kill me on the spot when I admitted that we had to turn around and go back the way we came: back up that muddy fucking hill.

Riding up that hill was an exercise in perception and execution. Anything that didn’t look like mud was fair game for tires desperate for traction. Small patches of rocks offered salvation, and I hopped between them like a tourist with a checklist of Hawaiian islands. Slowing down meant certain disaster, so I didn’t. Not until I reached safety.

Eventually, we found a large trail map that showed a jeep trail that looked promising. It looked correct on the GPS and the paper map showed it as a passable 4wD route. Besides, after the muddy trail, a few wet rocks didn’t seem so bad.

Until the jeep trail showed its teeth, that is. Which brings us to a rain-soaked cliff high above the Grande Ronde Valley. I’d had a lot of adventure the past week, but nothing that made me feel like I could die at any moment. This one did.

So I did the same thing that had served me so very well the past 900 miles: I pointed my bike on the path of least resistance and looked where I wanted to go.

I cleared the washed out area and an amazing feeling welled up inside me, equal parts Ohmygod, I can’t believe I just did that! and I’m really glad I didn’t just tumble down that fucking cliff. The trail remained challenging enough to discourage stopping, so I continued on until I realized that Daren was no longer behind me.

I stopped and smelled some flowers.

But there was no sign of Daren, and I didn’t hear his bike either. I heard nothing but the quiet sounds of a forest at dusk, until it was broken by a loud shout. I ran back down the trail and spotted the KLR on its side. Daren had found himself high centered, hung up by the skidplate on a large rock, and there was nowhere to go but tip over.

We had to unload the pack mule before we could lift it back up.

All the while a stream of rain runoff ran down the center of the trail.

The KLR seemed fine, until we started up again and heard a terrible grinding coming from the rear fender. The subframe of Daren’s bike seemed to hang abnormally low and the license plate was nearly bent in half. A few minutes of inspection revealed that his rear shock was blown.

This was the nadir of a very long day. We were still miles away from a suitable camp and the sun was setting fast. Not to mention the blown shock. I was almost spent, but we had no choice but to carry on.

Finally the jeep trail met up with a gravel road that ran for miles along the ridge overlooking the Grande Ronde Valley. The views were extraordinary in the golden hour before sunset and the turbulent weather cast dramatic shadows and directed atmospheric effects like a scene out of a movie. I wanted badly to take some photos of what I was seeing, but I knew my skills would never be able to capture anything even close. I settled for the next best thing: looking as intently as my tired brain could — and remembering.

The top of an exposed ridge is the last place you’d want to stop (or camp) when surrounded by unpredictable weather, so we kept moving until we reached Hwy 204. The sun had set and the rain-soaked air was now bitingly cold. My memory unraveled into a blur during the last stretch of pavement. I recall stopping at the first decent looking campground, setting up my tent in a light rain, trying to warm up by a fire made of damp wood, and falling asleep as soon as my head hit my cot knowing that tomorrow would be our last day on the trail.

Continued in OBDR Day Nine…

• Total Distance: 148.72 miles
• Uphill Distance: 56.51 miles
• Downhill Distance: 92.36 miles
• Maximum Speed: 58 mph
• Average Moving Speed: 27 mph
• Average Speed: 15 mph
• Total Time: 10:08:56
• Total Elevation Gain: 17211 ft
• Total Elevation Loss: 15502 ft
• Maximum Elevation: 6834 ft
• Minimum Elevation: 2769 ft

1. I want to take a moment to offer some words of appreciation for Daren’s KLR, which Daren has (intentionally) dumped as a direct result of me crashing far more times than I care to admit. [↩]
2. Tank traps: large earthen berms dug across the road to impede vehicles from passing. [↩]