The Great Motorcycle Adventure

Going to the cabin is always an adventure, but I had no idea the kind adventures we had in store for us.

There are a number of guys I work with who own dirt bikes and work was slowing down this week, and it was a Friday off, so I thought I should invite a couple of them up for a couple nights and a full day of motorcycle riding up at the cabin!  I'd never been very far from the cabin, but I knew there were a lot of trails out there.

I was able to talk Larry Cooley into coming up for the trip.  We left work early on Thursday and loaded everything up in his truck and trailer, and then headed up to the cabin.  My dad was already up there and was just walking up the meadow from a fishing trip when we rode in on the bikes.  It was perfect timing! We had  a nice dinner of spaghetti and fresh rainbow trout, which went surprisingly well together!  Larry also had canned peas for the first time in decades...  That evening my dad made some of his famous cabin popcorn, which was delicious!

Larry took the california king bed down stairs which he described as sleeping in a cloud.  After breakfast we decided to head out on the bikes.  We took the trail up Bear Creek and checked out the plane crash at the top of the ridge.  There are 2 trails that go from there.  We decided to take the one on the right, which is called the Table Springs trail.  It was  a nice ride, and the table springs area is absolutely beautiful!  We saw tons of wildlife tracks in the dirt and it was super green. 

When we got to the end of that trail, we ended up on a forest service road.  So we rode around there for a while and ended up going to the right a ways.  We followed a trail off the end of the road, and before we knew it we were heading down very steep and extremely rocky slope.  Larry was ahead of me and signaled we needed to turn around.  So I rode down to the flat spot he was at and turned my bike around.  After a few try's and with his help pushing we got my bike back up the hill.  I parked my bike up the trail a ways and then walked back to help Larry.

When I got down there, he was 10-20 yards further down the hill.  That was not good.  There was no good place to get traction or to start riding up the hill where he was at.  It was just too steep and rocky.  So he decided to head down to the bottom of the hill (about 1/2 mile down) and start down there where it was flat again.  This proved to be a long, painful decision.

It was more level at the bottom, but there were no good trails going up.  After multiple attempts thwarted by rocks that his tires would spin out on, I started clearing the trail up the hill.  I moved a lot of rocks out of the way, and Larry was making pretty good progress up the hill.  Unfortunately the trail had to cut through some trees.  I did my best to clear it of loose rocks and sticks, and I was even pulling a giant branch back so he could ride by.

Everything was looking good.  He had plenty of speed, there weren't any loose rocks, but he had to make a pretty sharp turn to stay on the game trail and keep going up the hill.  When we went around the turn, he hit a rock or something that tossed him and his bike down the hill!  He was sliding on the rocks, and the bike was laying there just above him, still running, with gas pouring out.  I jump down, like I'm sliding in to home plate to hit the kill switch on the bike.  And then Larry points to the gas and says we better get the bike back up or he won't have any gas to get back to the cabin!  We get the bike back up, and the hill is so steep that his seat is above my head!  Larry had a pretty good fall, but he had his, boots, elbow pads and knee pads on to absorb most of the fall.

There was no good place to start so we decide to push the bike up the hill back to the original place we started our climb from.  It was another 5-10 yards straight up and it was hard!  We finally made it back to the starting place, and after a bit, Larry decided to make another attempt at the last part of the hill.  After a couple tries, we ended up walking the bike up the hill.  He was on one side running the controls, and I was pushing from behind.  We made it up, but it took about 2 hours in total to get up the hill. 

After some water we decided to head back to the cabin, have some lunch and try some more trails after that.  One thing we thought would have been really nice was a trail map.  And my dad said he had one, so he brought it out and gave it to us.  We were able to see what trail we took, and thought we knew where we were at when we went down the fateful hill.  And we also picked some trails that looked like they'd be a nice loop for after lunch.

Little did we know that the map would probably have qualified for antique status... 

We refilled the tanks and our water, and headed out at 3pm.  Based on the map it should have been under a 3 hour ride, and we told my dad where we were going and that we'd be back by 6.  We took off up the South Fork Trail, and about an hour later we got a fork in the trail.  Neither direction was marked, but we knew we needed to make a left at about that point for the trail we were looking for so we did.  We continued up the trail, which was a fairly challenging trail, steep in places, but we made it up without any troubles. 

We got to the top of that trail, and it didn't look at all like what we thought it was going to be based on our map.  We looked around a little, looked at the map some more, and figured out where we were at.  We were not on the trail we thought we were.  We had ended up following the South Fork Trail all the way up to the headwaters of the river!  It was beautiful, but we were a long ways from the cabin, and we were not riding back down that trail.

So we tried to interpret the map, which we now were starting to suspect the accuracy of, and had an idea of which way to go.  We were quite surprised to find what was like a 4 lane dirt highway up there.  And we asked a few people for help, showing them our map, and they were just as confused as we were because this giant road wasn't even on the map!  So we spent the next hour and a half (and 14 miles worth of gas) riding around dirt roads and trails looking for either of the trails we know would take us back to the plane crash and then take us home to the cabin.

We finally found the North Fork Trail.  Which we knew was one of the trails to the plane crash.  Unfortunately it was 7:30 at night when we found it.  But we were happy to have at least found a way home!  So we started down the trail.  After we went down 50-100 yards, there was a giant tree that had fallen across the trail.  So Larry blazed a track through the brush, over logs, and finally got around this massive tree.  I followed after, but we burned a lot of daylight that we didn't have just trying to get around this log.

So we hurried down the North Fork Trail as fast as we could.  It was a beautiful trail, and I'd really like to ride it again some day.  After we got down a ways, we came to another fork in the road.  We picked left based on where we thought we were (the map was utterly useless by now) and kept going.  We knew if we could make it back up to the plane crash we were only 3.5 miles from the cabin.

Our enemy was time.  The sun had already set and a lot of the trail is in the forest.  Not long after our split to the left, it got really, REALLY dark.  I was in the lead, and I could usually hear Larry behind me.  At some point, I couldn't hear him any more.  Sometimes he drops back so the trail isn't to dusty, etc, so I didn't think too much of it and kept heading up the trail.  After a few more minutes, I still couldn't hear him and I couldn't see a thing!  I had no idea where the trail was, where the drop off on the side was, or where the slope up the other side was.  So I parked my bike and went back down looking for Larry. 

I found him a few minutes down the trail.  I found out that when the sound of him disappeared, it was because he came around a turn, and the front of his bike went off the trail!  He had to pick his bike back up out of the weeds and then it wouldn't start.  Eventually it did, and he was going up the trail by dragging both feet trying to stay on it.  I told him I couldn't see and didn't want to ride any further.  It didn't take much convincing for Larry to agree it was probably the right thing to do to find a flat piece of dirt and call it a night. 

Remember how this was supposed to be a 3 hour ride (Gilligan's Island "3 hour tour" keeps playing in my mind whenever I say that)?  Well, we only had about half the stuff we needed.  We had some Cliff and Balance bars, as well as enough water in our water bottles and camelbak.  I also had my gerber multi-tool with me and a poncho that I cut in half to make 2 blankets out of.  We had no light other than the indiglo on my watch and no matches or lighter.

Suprisingly motorcycle helmets make pretty comfy pillows!  And they keep your head warm to boot!  But after a couple hours of laying there and not really sleeping, it started to get chilly, and Larry came up with an idea on starting a fire!

There was ZERO visibility which made gathering sticks and kindling quite challenging.  Larry's idea was to dip a stick in his gas tank, and then put it on his exhaust manifold, which gets red hot when he rev's his engine.  One of the challenges was that if I moved away from the kindling at all, I couldn't see it and it was quite hard to find again!  After a couple hours and multiple attempts later, we found a method that worked.  We drained some gas out of his tank into a water bottle.  We tore the worse than useless trail map up for fire starter, and we also dipped long pieces of the map into the tank (one of which still happens to be in the gas tank) to get it nice and flammable.  The gas in the water bottle was used to douse my kindling, and when we finally got the map burning I lit the kindling!  Larry had gone to lean his bike up against a tree, and when he got back I had quite a large fire burning.  He was like, "We're not trying to burn the forest down!"  And I said I didn't want it to go out again on me (recall the multiple attempts and 2 hours...)  One thing the fire did, aside from warm us up was provide plenty of light to gather fire wood for the rest of the night.

After the fire was going, the night was quite a bit warmer.  Larry and I discussed how nothing like this ever has happened to us, how it was our first campout of the year, and how we really, hoped our names wouldn't end up in the paper!

We let the fire die down to a small "cowboy" fire and we subsequently named the place "Cowboy Camp".  We spent the night in and out of sleep (mostly out of), and adding a stick or two to the fire whenever one of us would notice it had died down.  Around 5:00am the sky started to lighten, and by 6 it was pretty light out.  So we got up and started back up the trail.

It ends up we were only about a mile from the plane crash, which put us about 4.5 miles from the cabin.  We had no idea of this though when we called it a night.  We pulled up to the cabin at about 6:55.  My dad was quite relieved to see us!  At 7:00 am he was going to go down to Ehart's cabin and one was going to head out to the end of the road to call the sheriff and the other was going to start the search. 

He was worried, there were all kinds of things that could have happened to us out there.  From a break down, to falling down off the trail, to a bear attack, to being lost, running out of gas, etc.  He was pretty worried.  My HAM radio was at the cabin and he wrote out a little spiel that he was going to broadcast on it.  Unfortunately (or fortunately) he didn't figure it out because he accidentally changed the channel on it, so that distress call never went out.  He'd also written up the press release for us missing as well.  Our names definitely would have been in the paper!

When my dad was in bed that night, he said he was feeling a bit chilly, so he pulled on his 3rd blanket.  Then he thought about us, and if he was chilly we must be freezing!

We made it back safe, and hopefully having learned a bit from the experience.  We were almost prepared, but not quite.  We would have made it home with a light, and a lighter would have made a fire, much, much easier to start.  We learned the importance of having a good map, as well as the tools we needed when the challenges of the trail hit you.  This almost sounds like something out of a Sunday School lesson :)

We were tired, but safe, and I talked to Larry at work today, and he said he was ready for the next trip!

I am too, but I think I'll be asking for new map and a gps for Christmas this year!