Floribama Riders

In 2005, I went on a guided dual sport tour across portions of the California desert to celebrate turning 50. The next few posts are excerpts from an article I wrote when I returned.

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Hey, buddy”, Bill said, “me and some of my old college roommates are planning a ride in the desert to celebrate turning 50 next year. Want to come?”

“Count me in” I said. “I’m turning 50 next year, too”.

Really, what dirt rider of a certain age, who grew up watching “On Any Sunday” and reading magazines about desert rides and desert races, wouldn’t want to do a desert ride? Especially someone who grew up in the deep south, riding sandy trails between pine trees. How could I resist?

We had several conference calls and a lot of email back and forth, to discuss where we wanted to go, and when. Ron had spent a lot of time in the California desert in Jeeps and dune buggies wanted to go to Mexico. The rest of the group, having never been in the desert, weren’t so sure. I said that I would prefer to go to California, since I am a desert neophyte, I would prefer to be in a country where everyone spoke English, in case something went wrong. These words would come back to haunt me later.

We decided to stay in the US, and Bill went to work figuring out how to make this happen. After looking around a bit, he came up with the Desert Dash, a 4 day desert ride put on by RawHyde Adventures through the Beach’s Motorcycle Adventures Company. We settled on a time of mid-April, 2005, sent in our deposits, and went to work trying to talk our buddies into coming.

For one reason or another, none of my usual riding buddies were interested, but word got to Jack, an old friend I hadn’t ridden with in years, and he was interested. We signed him up, but I was a little worried. I hadn’t ridden with Jack in probably 15 years, and didn’t know how much he had ridden off road in recent years. At 56, he would be the oldest guy in the group. We decided to make him our chaperone.

A few weeks before the ride, I met Jack and some other old riding buddies at a private ORV park between my house in Birmingham, and his home in Mobile. The ORV area is not real challenging, but it has some rocks and hills to test a flatlander like Jack. After a day of riding together, I figured that Jack would be fine. Well, at least as fine as I would be. I still didn’t know what to expect in the desert.

Wednesday evening, finally the time had arrived. I wnet out to dinner with my wife Ruthie, and hit Wal-Mart for a couple of last minute items. Finished packing. Oh, yeah, and finish and e-file the taxes. Shower, shave and early to bed for a 4 AM wake up. I decided to cash in some frequent flyer miles to get out to L.A. but had to accept this early morning flight out to do it.

Thursday morning, 3:30 AM. I can't sleep any more. I get up and check the weather, and wait on 4 AM for Ruthie to get up. She has volunteered to take me to the airport. We're dressed and out of the house by 4:20. Thank God for curbside luggage check so I don't have to lug that gigantic gearbag through the airport. No problems going through security. Since I'm not hauling a laptop like I usually do, it's much more pleasant going through the airport. The first flight, Birmingham to Cincinnati, has only 11 passengers on a 50 seat plane. We're loaded and in the air early, and arrive a bit early. In Cincinnati, I have a bit of a walk to the next gate, but the exercise feels good, and all I'm carrying is a paperback book and my boarding pass. Nice.

The next flight is Cincinnati to Salt Lake City. I'm on an exit row, which oddly enough has only 1 seat on the row on my side of the plane. Also nice. This is a 3 hour flight. They are showing a movie 'National Treasure' , sort of an 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Dumb'. We get to Salt Lake City early, but can't get off the plane because there are no open gates. After sitting on the plane an extra 20 minutes, we finally get off. I stroll to the next flight and find it is already boarding. I forgot the timing was that close. I make it on board and hope my luggage does.

I get to Burbank after a flight of 1.5 hours. It’s a bit bumpy coming into the L.A. area, as usual. The Burbank airport is surprisingly small and compact.

RawHyde has pre-paid for a shuttle service to bring me to the ranch. There's a little bit of confusion among the shuttle employees, all of whom speak something like English as a second language. There are 2 locals on the shuttle going more or less in the same direction, me, and the possibly Pakistani driver. The driver has no clue, and barely speaks the language well enough to understand the directions. I suspect he may not read English at all, as he won’t even look at the printed directions I got from RawHyde. Fortunately the last local to get out looks at my directions and gives the driver enough instructions to get back to I-5 headed north. The driver gets upset when we go 5 miles past the town he thought he was going to, and then had to drive about a mile up a dirt driveway to the Rawhyde’s compound. We couldn't communicate well enough to really do anything but for me to tell him to keep going. He didn't like it at all, and I thought I was going to have to walk the last mile, but we made it. He threw my luggage out and hauled butt before this band of desperados could attack him for his van, going the wrong way at first. A GPS would work wonders for that guy.

On arrival, I met Jim Hyde, the owner of RawHyde Adventures and his wife, daughter, chef, guides and other co-horts. Jim is a tall guy with Steve Martin-like white hair, and the voice of a radio DJ. He and his employees are scrambling to adapt to a closing of the National Forest nearby, the result of unusually heavy spring rains. Normally we would ride out of the ranch into the National Forest and up to the desert, but now we're going to trailer to the desert instead of riding these dirt bikes, ATK 605s, 25 miles up I-5.

The RawHyde folks complete their preparations, and the two guys who will be our trail guides, Curt and Brad, decide to take a little ride around the ranch to cool off. They invite me to go along, probably really to get a handle on the sort of back east bozos they’ll be herding through the desert this time. There are some interesting trails and obstacles on the ranch, and some great views. It turns out that RawHyde runs a variety of events, including some off road riding clinics for people with big adventure tourers like the BMW GS. Much of the training is done on site at Jim’s 42 Bar Ranch.

I do OK on the test ride, and I think that relaxes Curt and Brad a bit.

The one guy not from our group arrives. GT, from Minneapolis shows up in his van with a KTM 625. GT is an interesting guy, a retired investor with apparently plenty of money he's spending on adventure rides around the world. My kind of retirement.

Around 6:30, the rest of the Half Century guys show up, Jack, Tom and Bill I know, and Ron and Roger I've never met. We give them a beer, a tour of the equipment, pick sleeping quarters and go inside for appetizers.

RawHyde brings a chef along on these trips, a surprisingly slim woman called 'Ge Ge'. I say surprisingly slim because of the quantity and quality of the food she puts out. After appetizers, we had a salad course, and white wine, and dinner is ribeye steaks and sides, and a very good Australian red wine, followed by a brownie sundae. No chance of losing weight this trip. Well stuffed and jet lagged, after a few more lies it's off to bed.

Just a quick word about the sleeping quarters. RawHyde has 2 big trailers. One trailer has a sort of a lounge area, 2 bathrooms and showers. On top of that are 4 sleeping berths. They are about 5 feet wide, 7 feet long, and 4 feet high. They have sort of a miniature motorhome type screen door and regular door arrangement and a couple of windows. Inside is a bed, a set of shelves for your wallet, glasses, beer, etc. and some lights for reading. I choose one of these on the advice of the guides, at least partially because I like to read at night before going to sleep. They seem to be reasonably good at minimizing the sound of your neighbor's snores.

The second trailer is a sort of a big utility trailer. It is set up to haul bikes, carry gear and other essentials. On top of the utility cabinets on either side of the trailer are platforms with mattresses attached. On top of the platforms they erect heavy canvas tents. The remainder of the party will sleep in the tents. The tents have velcro flaps making it easy to adjust the airflow for the temperature, and to allow a view of the desert sky at night.

Our original plan was to ride out of the ranch to the desert via about 30 miles of abandoned paved road along a ridge, called the Grapevine Road, through National Forest land. However, the Forest 'Service' have closed all the Forest Service land for public safety as a result of all the rain damage caused by the unusual weather they had earlier in the year. To get around that, we're going to trailer to the edge of the Mojave and start there.

Friday: Up at daylight, I dress for the day's ride. It's quite cool and windy. My riding gear is warm enough, but not overly warm. Ge Ge lays out a huge spread for breakfast, and we plan the day's ride as we stuff ourselves. After breakfast there is a bit of delay as they finish loading all the stuff into the trailers, then we pile into 2 trucks to head to the starting point. We have a crew cab pickup with our guides’ bikes in the bed, and a converted car trailer with 8 bikes on it. The rest ride out to the site in a Suburban. We unload, and finally get rolling about 10 AM.