VLJ Winter Ride - January 2006
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Early last week, a riding buddy put out an e-mail looking for others to join him on a long weekend out to Moab to do a bit of winter desert riding. Good fortune was with me as I was able to temporarily eschew the responsibilities of employee and head of household to join in and go play in the sand and snow. Woohoo!! Good thing too because everyone else bailed and it ended up being just he and I. The plan was to head out late Thursday and ride Friday, Saturday, and maybe a short morning ride on Sunday before heading back home. Yeah!

Thursday saw a handful of minor crises at the R&D lab, a phone interview that ran long, and then a frantic session of trying to assemble a combination of riding gear stowed for months and cold weather clothing from the ski section of the closet, and prepping a bike that had been mothballed for the season well before Thanksgiving.

I pulled out the CRF250X from the stack of bikes along the far garage wall and started the routine of checking fluids, tire pressure, condition of air filter, etc. and everything was checking out OK for the trip. The battery was pulled off the shelf where the battery tender had been playing round-robin with the collection of batteries from various hibernating bikes, installed and hooked up. A tad of not-so-fresh gas from the lawn mower gas can would at least provide enough juice to see if I could get it to start. Gas on, choke on, a couple of seconds wait to fill the carb along with a few furtive stabs at the electric leg button had the little CRF coming to life and revving away on high idle. While she warmed up, I grab the trusty can of WD-40 and gave the chain a good shot while holding it over on the kickstand with the rear wheel rotating away in first gear. With the chain well bathed, I snicked her back into neutral and rested the back tire on the ground and that's when I saw the long line of drool coming from the fork seal and slobbering down the fork tube. @#&&%)@*!!! It wasn't leaking when I put it to bed last fall.

I tried the old 'feeler gauge around the inside of the seal lip' trick to see if I could pull out any crud but there wasn't any. I pumped the forks to see if things would seal up but it kept a spewing. Damnit. I glanced at the time and I was supposed to be leaving in ten minutes ... phooey, that isn't gonna happen. I made an executive decision to take the CRF450 instead but I was going to have to swap the bars. No way was I going to ride in the cold and maybe up on snowy slick rock without my trusty oversized hand guards and bark busters. It ended up being the fastest bar swap I've ever done with about 10 minutes from start to finish. That being done, I slammed the motojack into the receiver, snugged 'er up, got the big CRF onto the platform and jacked the whole works up into position. After securing the mounts, throwing all the bags of gear, clothes and provisions into the back seat and giving the missus and kids hugs goodbye, I finally left the house a fashionably late hour and fifteen minutes after I was supposed to.

Fifty eight miles later, I was at Curt's place and transferring the bike 'n gear into his rig. We finally launched about two hours behind schedule and headed up into the mountains to joust with the yahoos and flatlanders spinning off into the ditch over an iced-up Vail Pass. Five hours of bs-ing and bench racing later, we found a cheap place in Grand Junction and bedded down for the night.

We awoke the next morning to nippy temperatures and flurries but we came to ride and ride we will. A good lube at a local choke-'n-puke got us carbed up and we headed west for the desert. We turned off the main road before actually getting to Moab and turned up Seven Mile Canyon to stage for riding what is known as the Island area. As Curt got geared up, I warmed up by trying to get the big CRF lit up. After about 37 kicks, nothing. Cold-blooded sob!! ... I didn't get a chance to see if it would start because of the last minute change back in the garage so I was begging "please, please, oh, please." After 37 more kicks, some squirts from the pumper carb, a backfire or two, the beast finally came to life. I dashed into the back of the truck to get my stuff on as it clattered away and warmed up.

We finally got underway and headed towards Monitor and Merrimac Buttes threading our way along the mix of sand and snow. The snow on the sand wasn't much different than just the sand by itself but there wasn't much traction to be had when there was just rock under it. I was hoping that there wasn't a lot more of it up on that slick-rock or it would surely turn into sleigh-rock. We pressed on with the mist and fog obscuring most everything around us. I was glad that Curt knew where he was going because getting a fix on surrounding geologic features was impossible, you just couldn't see any of them. Until you got real close that is. It was way different that when I've been out there in the summer. We had fog, mist and snow but it was way cool to have all of those rock monoliths looming at us through the clouds.

Both Monitor Butte and Merrimac Buttes suddenly loomed through the fog ahead of us and did look like the surreal turrets of the ill-fated civil war battleship namesakes rising above the waves that concealed their hulls. To get up to them, we first had to get up Wipeout Hill ... no snow but the ledges were wet. Curt on his venerable XR200 just popped right up them and I followed with a good burst of throttle from the bottom to let momentum do most of the work. Once we got up on top at the base of the buttes, that wetness turned to snowness. Much snowness. I did have a heavy flywheel on the CRF but finessing the thing through three inches of snow on rock was damn tricky. We slid, skid, paddled, slobbered, fell over more than a few times and had a lot of fun trying to pick the bikes back up when they'd just keep sliding across the rock. It took a while but we finally made it around the shaded North side of the butte and around to where there was considerably less snow.

I gingerly stepped out onto Uranium Arch with a goodly pucker from slipping around on snow and ice with riding boots on. Finally getting a bit of traction, as opposed to zero traction, we started making our way over to Uranium Arch. Again, there was considerable snow making it tricky to get up to the arch so we didn't even try to ride down and around to view it from the bottom. It would have been real easy to slide to the bottom and impossible to get back up until a thaw so I opted just to walk out on it for a photo op. Riding boots on snowy slick rock aren't much of an improvement over a CRF450 knobby on snowy slick rock so I was being veeeerrry veeeeerrry careful.

Having survived the picture and not falling off the arch to my doom, we mounted back up and headed off for the Determination Towers. This had us dropping down in elevation so the snow started to diminish and I was having more fun wheeling over the slick rock bumps and cracks. Past the Determination Towers, we headed through the gap in the cliffs and headed over to Tusher Canyon.   With the Determination Towers in the background, we kept dodging the patches of ice and snow.

At Tusher Canyon, we climbed back up onto the slick rock that was now all dry given its predominately southern exposure. We followed a long ledge that had a pretty good camber to it that had me ready for impending tire slip any instant. The knobbies stuck though ... it's amazing how much traction you get on slick rock. Curt showed me a great time running slick rock ledges.

Nearing the end of the ledge, we kicked up on a short section of single track through the rock and sand to get onto the other side where dropping off a ledge and down would get us pointed over towards Bartlett Wash. On a previous ride, there was spirited debate on whether dropping off that ledge was such a good idea since nobody was really sure that it would lead to a way off the slick rock ... but it did. So, we had the confidence to do the drop but we were on the north side now and the snow might make getting off a little more interesting. It turned out to be pretty easy since what snow we did have to ride across was on the relatively flat sections.

Back down in the wash, we rode over to where you pop back up onto the slick rock on a nice steep ramp all black colored from tires. Just in front of the ramp was a very pleasing sign restricting what lay beyond to two wheeled modes of conveyance only. :-) Here again, things were mostly dry and we were having all kings of fun riding in 'n out of the bowls, riding big yawing wheelies up one side to take the almost free-fall sensation going down the other side. A big dune provided some climbing fun ... despite pinning the CRF in 3rd, I didn't make it.

It didn't take long to get all the way out on the end where the Butt Crack is but, being shaded, it was full of snow. Making matters worse, there was fresh snow starting to drop snow out of the sky adding to what was on the ground and making the previously dry rock get wet pretty quick. It didn't look like it would let up any time soon so it was time to head back to truck. We didn't get to ride all of the fun stuff ... all the better to enjoy the next time I get out there.

We retraced our steps back along the ledges and down the ramp to the wash. There, back on sand and with not much for snow, we cranked things up and were running the wash bottom at a pretty good clip. Snow was pasting my goggles making for pretty lousy visibility as I was thinking how easy it would be to clip a rock in the wash bottom ... that was about the time I saw Curt going down in a pile of boots, arms, handlebars and sand flying all over the place. Yup, he pinged a rock, went into a tank-slapper and lost the battle on the third oscillation. He was on all fours by the time I pulled alongside and generally OK but was feeling some hurt in the same ankle that was sporting three titanium screws just installed a few months before. Bummer.

We got the bike picked up, all the sand knocked off and out of the controls and stuff. He tested the ankle with some weight and maybe it wasn't broken (again) but just tweaked. He though it was twisted around the wrong way under the bike as he slid along. At least he picked a soft landing in the sand and missed the rocks that were scattered about. We continued, albeit a bit more gingerly. We were riding back over our same tracks we laid down on the way out now and had a couple of icy climbs that were just as much fun coming down earlier. They took some good clutching and paddling but we made them. The snow was picking up even more now and by the time we got back to the truck had put down a fresh inch with more coming.

We decided that given the combination of the weather and the events late in the day that it probably made better sense to head back home rather than stay for more riding. That was OK, cuz we had just had a great day and I had just gotten more riding in than in the previous four months. We got all the wet gear off, got the bikes loaded up and then headed back for Colorado with a bunch more story telling, bench racing and concocting a story about how the new stiff boots made the ankle hurt instead of taking a digger in sand wash at speed to schmooze the missus back home.

Can't wait until the next time ... and now I know about more trails and cool places to ride for the spring gathering coming up in May. Good ridin' to ya, VLJ

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