Between a skin rash and a bum knee… I hadn’t been out on either bike for a few weeks. Today I made the rounds of Ganaraska again, and the day started like any other…
Falling over on some slick trails (it had rained constantly the day before)… bit too much gas turning to go up a short hill had the back end come around and point me into the bush: tossing me off..
Stopped at the Forest Center to buy a new map. But there were lots of buildings… not sure which one was open (if any) on a Sunday… and didn’t feel like walking all over the place with motocross boots… so left empty handed…
Had lunch at the chip truck again. This is becoming a habit when I go alone: $5 for lunch is easier than carrying food with me, as my CamelBak is pretty much full with water, first aid kit, and extra gloves/batteries…
Then came the “interesting” part. After lunch I was starting to get tired, so I decided to only go out for another hour, on some trails I had never been down before. There’s residential land surrounding Ganaraska, but there are trails/roads that loop around the forbidden sections, and I wanted to poke around the edge of some of the closed off sections.
So off I went… nice trails that didn’t look used as much as those in the core of the park… with more small trees/logs crossing them, since they weren’t as well maintained. I came across one trail that was starting to grow in, and at one point it had a couple small 2″ logs across the trail that grass had start to grow around. When I came to them, I should have realized they were part of a barrier….but I was moving along at a good pace and I had gone over lots of small fallen logs…
…so I rolled right over them… and kept riding. No big deal.
About 10 seconds farther down the trail, it had really started to grow in, and 1-foot tall grass and weeds had grown over the tracks. Figuring I had wandered onto private property I turned around and drove back the way I came.
So, now I’m coming back to the pile of logs, and it dawns on me that it’s not just some fallen trees… somebody had put the logs there. But it was easy enough crossing them the first time… so I snuck up on them then gave it a bit of gas so I could roll up and over them…
…and as I crossed them I felt a sharp pull downwards on my boot, then before I can realize was was happening I was yanked down to the right, and thrown to the ground with the bike on top of me. What the hell?
Laying there my right leg pinned under the bike… I realized I was OK, I didn’t even twist my knee… and my foot didn’t hurt at all. But I couldn’t free myself. Since I was already on the ground anyways, I peeked under the bike, and could see what happened. On my way back over my right boot had looped through a section of barbed wire, and as I moved forward over it, it pulled my boot down into the peg, then continued to drag the rest of the bike over. So I still had a loop of barbed wire across the front of my ankle, keeping me from getting my foot out.
After some wiggling around, I got my foot most of the way out, and managed to push the bike back upright. Then I left it on the sidestand for a second to figure out what I did wrong.
The overgrown grass around the logs had hidden the flattened remains of an old barbed-wire fence. It looks like someone pushed the fence to the ground, then threw some log over it to keep it from popping back up again. The other parts of the fence were still hidden in the grass, but now that I had dragged a good chunk of it out into the open it was easy enough to see.
Two sections had also wrapped around my back tire… so if my foot hadn’t dragged me over I would have come to an abrupt stop shortly anyways…
In some ways I was lucky: that wire could have wrapped into my chain and sprockets, and the way that it was stuck between the knobs in the rear tire it also could have given me a flat. I was VERY luck to be wearing good boots: the barbed wire wrapped across my ankle hard enough to drag me and a moving 300lb dirtbike to the ground, but my foot was fine. It also protected my ankle from the weight of the bike as I had to wiggle around under it to free myself.
I bought some good boots: Gaerne SG-10’s, when I decided to ride off-road… and they’re worth every penny. They had already protected me from stumps, rocks, and other small crashes… but they really saved my ass today. Some people ride around with street shoes, even regular runners… can you imagine how much worse this could have been?
If you’re going to ride a dirtbike, buy good boots!