Hey, y’all,
Recently back from the Mountaineers MC 2012 Octoberfest desert ride in Nevada, this year about 40 miles Northwest of Lovelock, Nev., at an old mining site called Placeritas. And I gotta tell ya, I’m very glad to be back and very eager to forget the whole damn thing!
We had to drive about 26 miles of pretty good to pretty bumpy gravel road starting maybe 15 miles out of Lovelock. The smooth parts kind of lulled us into complacency, and Ray drove the motorhome fairly fast the whole 26 miles. When we got to camp, just at dark, we were startled and dismayed to find the right tire on the motorcycle trailer was blown and shredded; the three-leaf spring had broken clean through in front of the axle, and my poor little Honda was gone!
All that had occurred somewhere in that 26 miles and we had no idea where the hell my bike was. We had to quickly disconnect the trailer and drive the motorhome back about 5 miles before we found it in the middle of the road, where it had fallen at maybe 25 or 30mph. Even badly beat-up, that faithful, ol’ Honda started when I tried it and then I had to ride it back to camp, badly-bent bars and all.
Notice the back directional signal is gone, and the handlebars, license plate, and footpeg are badly bent. What you can’t see are the broken headlight lens, front directional signal lens, and front brake lever.
I managed to bend the bars back enough in camp to be able to ride it the next 3 days, and I’m not sure that was the smartest thing I’ve ever done because the riding was a true bitch: rough, hot and dusty as hell, and we seemed to be continually lost and not able to find anything we were looking for.
This is a panoramic shot of our camp taken after a number of guys had left. The camp is on the center right, and a motorhome leaving, is kicking up a dust plume at the center left. That road, the last mile or so into camp, is the next picture …
This is an example of what all-too-much of our riding was: talcum powder-fine dust maybe 4″-to-6″ deep that provided little traction for steering but just enough, if you hit it wrong, to kick the front wheel out of your control and then, FLOP, down you’d go. Notice the disrupted area in the foreground of this shot; that’s where one of our riders crashed coming back into camp. And I flopped in the same kind of stuff the day before and miles from camp and broke the clutch lever; I had to pull the just-replaced front brake lever off to use for the clutch, and then ride — carefully — without a front brake. And you can imagine the dust this stuff kicks up when a guy rides into it, on the gas, trying to power his way through it.
This, I’ll admit, is the compensating positive of this desert ride: the great scenery without anything like a crowd to deal with. That’s our old Scoutmaster, Frank Dickinson, staring back at you.
This is the completely appropriate shot to end this story: A gravesite. I want to bury the memory of this ‘Fest just as finally and fully as these people were laid to rest. Notice, though, the site is given as “Barrel Springs”; trouble is, we thought we were at the site of Scossa, which is actually about 7 or 8 miles away. A good example of how turned-around we got out there, which is not good in the varied desert, with a hundred trails leading who-the-hell-knows-where, small dirt-bike gas tanks with limited range, and my GPS proving to be only marginally effective for a number of reasons.