MeTube?

First stab at YouTube videos: footage from the helmetcam… audio converted in MediaCoder… then chopped to bits in Sony Vegas video editor to make each clip fit under YouTubes 10-minute limit:

Part 1 – Trip to the Lookout and back, and some time at the Sand Hill

Part 2 – Trip to the Falls and back

My batteries ran out just after lunch… hopefully by the time I go out again my second battery will have arrived in the mail!

3 Wheels: Best of Both Worlds?

I spent yesterday out at the Ganny again, at an event organized by my friend BJ. He had recently finished rebuilding his ATC (i.e. three-wheeler, aka “trike”) and organized a ride for other ATC owners (and whoever else wanted to come, bikes and quads too!).

I showed up around 10am, and many people were already there: machines of all shapes and sizes:

Just before we were ready to roll out, a dirtbike rider pulled up and asked if somebody could help pull one of his friends out of the forest. Apparently the bike couldn’t move under its own power. So we delayed the main start of the ride while one of the quads in our group went to find the broken bike… while the rest of us went to a local lookout and back. There were already a few other people at the lookout when we arrived, so parking became an issue. But we still wanted to get a picture of the ATC riders and their machines.

BJs ride wanted to roll down the hill, so arranging the machines became a question of: “How many ATC riders does it take to push a trike backwards up a hill?”…

…while others supervised (and laughed at the pushers 🙂 )…

…until finally we got 5 in a row. BJ (the organizer) is out front in his white jersey (and left foot strategically placed to keep his ATC from rolling)… though even after taking 4 pictures I couldn’t get everyone looking in the right direction 🙂

From there we looped back to the start point to wait for the rescue team on the quad to come back…

…and a few minutes later they rolled in, bike in tow:

From there we headed out again and looped through the trails to some dirt hillclimbs… on to the local “Sand Hill”…

…and finally on the “The Falls” (that I forgot to take pictures of this time: though you can see some of the parking issues we ran into)

And finally back to the parking lot for lunch. It seemed everyone brought some food for themselves… but it didn’t take long before Ross and Shannon’s BBQ became the local hotspot (for hot dogs!).

There was also time for some ad-hoc maintenance: such as when White Rat alternated between trying to fix his ride…

…and trying to burn it to the ground 🙂

We also some more horses come through. We had seen horses a few times that day: but all we had to do was pull to the side of the trails with engines off and let them pass. Ganaraska is a multi-use forest: so we always went out of our way to be “the good guys” and put a friendly face on the sport. And the horse riders were without exception welcoming, chatty, and appreciative that we gave their horses the respect they deserved.

Also, over lunch we eventually saw some members we lost along the way pull in. Although we had the “when you get to a corner, wait for the guy behind you” system in place… it sounds like we crossed paths (literally) with another group of riders at some point… and part of group ended up following them instead. I know I’ve accidentally done that before… when you’re riding with a new group of people it’s hard to recognize if others are in “your group” or not.

I had a blast, and in the end we didn’t have any major breakdowns or other problems. I did take some video with my camera and helmetcam… but I don’t know how to edit or post it yet… some may eventually make it to YouTube. Special thanks to BJ (aka “Xhumeka”) for organizing the event: here he is again on his new ride:

P.S: someone let him know that somebody welded a piece of scrap metal to the back of his ATC when he wasn’t looking 🙂

EDIT: !!! There’s many more pictures and video clips available in the main thread about this ride on 3wheelerworldforums.com !!!

Buy good boots!

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!

Building Character…

Yesterday I went on the Northumberland Spring Trail Ride, and made it home unscathed, for the most part. It was 5 degrees when I left the apartment at 6am, and I had to stop to warm my hands on the way there since it got to the point I couldn’t move my fingers. Other than the cold and forgetting my sunglasses (riding the whole way into the rising sun) the trip out was easy.

There were way more bikes there than I had ever seen before before: almost all green-plate (dirt-only) though I did see some street-legal models as well. Lots of KTMs, and lots of 2-strokes! I arrived around 8:30am, and after meeting up with a few guys I had ridden with before we were on our way by about 10am.

The trails were for the most part well marked with green/orange/pink arrows, and I managed to follow Tony the whole day, and also Chris after lunch. Our entire “group” was around 7 people, but we seemed to have lost track of each other fairly early on in the event 🙂 . After +-60 KM everyone met up for lunch:

Lunch was excellent: subs, lots of water and juices to drink, and cookies for dessert! But here’s where I started to realize I may have a problem. I had never really tested the range of my bike to determine just how far I could ride it… so I did some quick calculations based on prior rides and determined I could run the entire route and still make it to the gas station. Because I wasn’t sure, Chris offered me his extra gas at lunch for an extra margin of safety.

With that taken care of Chris, Tony and I finished off the rest of the course together: including some “pink” (more difficult) sections that didn’t seem any harder than the rest of the course, but had some interesting hill climbs to spice things up: it was the best riding of the day! Then I repacked my things, put in my earplugs, said my goodbyes and started back home: tired but glad to be heading back to Toronto.

Then the “character building” began. Before leaving I took another look at my tank, and decided I had “lots of gas” to make it back to where the main road hit highway 115, where there were 3 gas stations nearby, including a Sunoco that sells the 94 octane gas I normally fill up with. So I confidently rode past the first and only gas station between the trail ride and the 115.

You can guess where this is going.

About 90% of my way to the 115 the bike sputtered and stalled. Well, now I knew how far I could get on the main tank, so I switched to reserve and pushed on: a bit less sure about may range calculations, but looking at the GPS I knew I was almost there.

A couple hundred feet from the onramp to highway 115 the bike stalled for the second and last time: I literally coasted up to the onramp of the highway, out of gas. Crap. What to do now? Well, the GPS showed about 1.5 roads/overpasses North of me was a Petro Canada. Salvation! And the GPS screen made it look so close: the dot for the gas station was so close to the dot for where I currently was!

I must have had the GPS zoomed out pretty damn far to get that idea. It took me just under 1.5 hours to walk to that station in my offroad boots (which aren’t exactly HushPuppies), buy a $8 jerrycan that only held $6.50 in gas, and walk back. Here you can see where I ended up: the onramp in the background, and my shiny new jerrycan in front:

After all that walking the growl when the bike started back up was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard! The rest of the ride home was tiring, but uneventful. I slept well that night.

In all I had a fantastic day riding: I’m learning to be more confident on the bike, which is making it less tiring to ride, and also more fun. Running out of gas was a stupid mistake, one that I’m highly motivated not to make again.

At least I better not: there’s another club ride next weekend!

Try try again…

The only way to get better is practice, right? With that in mind, and having Friday off to use up an extra vacation day… I decided to go poke around Ganaraska and try to learn the forest by myself.

I pulled out of the parking garage around 6:30am on Friday, which put me at the P2 entrance around 8:15 (give or take a few minutes to gas up). Maybe that was a bit early… since most of the ride there was through fog along Taunton road. That meant a fine mist of water on my goggles, and generally being a bit cool and damp the whole way there. But I had the forest to myself, and some nice views from some of the higher points:

Still, next time I could leave an hour later and let some of the fog burn off 🙂

At first I stopped often, trying to reconcile the forest map I bought with the GPS… trying to actually put some thought in how to navigate the trails. But it turned out to be more fun to just wander about using the GPS to tell me direction and give the “big picture” view of where I was in the West Forest. Follow a forest road until I found double-track trails… follow them until I found single-track… and watch the little dots on the GPS to make sure I was heading someplace new. And stop to have a drink and nibble on a snack bar whenever I felt like it:

Around 10:30-11am I decided to swing back to the entrance, mostly to make sure I could find it, and to take a break. While I was there Randy, Connie, and Rudy found me, looking for some other ODSC members. After taking a break I ended up joining them. And we spent the next few hours riding together through various trails and trying some hillclimbs (I only tried the one large sandhill… and it took me 3 tries to get 90% up it before looping the bike and throwing myslef into the sand 🙂 )

Here’s Randy and Connie at lunch on their TEs…

…Rudy on his DR:

…and Chris and Alex on their RMs:

I didn’t take many pictures while out with them, but Randy took some and posted them to the site. You can see where I dumped the bike in the sand… too tired at the moment to even pick it up 🙂

I left the group around 2pm, which got me back home around 4, a good time to take the dog out for a walk since she had been indoors all day. I had a great time riding with some new friends, and the Ganny seems a little less mysterious than it did before!

Spring Cleaning

For a few days last week the temperature was well above zero… most of the snow has melted, and a bit of rain has washed lots of the grit and salt from the roads. Which got me thinking of motorcycles!

I had ordered some parts for both bikes and it seemed warm enough to start working on them in the underground garage. Since my first ride last year was mid-March, I’d rather get a jump on things now and be ready… then spend the first nice day playing mechanic. New spring for the rear shock, clean and lube the swingarm, and replace the chain. How hard could it be?

That’s a picture with the bike about half disassembled. I couldn’t believe how much stuff has to come off to get the shock out! Oh well, it’s the long weekend so I have the time. Tomorrow hopefully I’ll get the rest of it stripped down and fixed up.

Update:

Day 2: got the tank and swingarm off to get the shock out…

…took everything upstairs to warm up…

…cleaned everything up…

…and, success! Now to get it all back together, put on the new chain, and set the preload correctly.

Rocky Mountain Quad Squad

When I was in Phoenix for awhile I kept myself amused with motorcycle rentals. When I learned I’d be in the Denver area for 5 weeks I was going to do the same thing: but it’s a bit late in the season. Instead I looked around for other activities, and found the Rocky Mountain Quad Squad.

Yesterday I managed to get in on one of their 2-hour quad tours with two other people. They’re in Idaho Springs… a little town that was part of the gold rush a long time ago. It wasn’t too far from Denver: I left at noon for the tour at 1pm and arrived in plenty of time: first a bit of a drive out of the flats of Denver up towards the mountains:

The tour starts at a related business: Rocky Mountain Trout Hunters…

…where we met our guide Tyler Hawks (one of the owners of the Quad Squad) and signed all the paperwork. From then it only took about 20 minutes to load our gear into the truck, drive out of town, and unload the quads at the beginning of the trail. All safety gear like gloves and helmets was provided:

Compared to riding in Ontario there was a lot more rocks. And obviously much bigger hills to climb 🙂 The were very few places where you could speed up at all (unlike in Oregon where you bombed around in the sand): most of the time you were weaving around the trail at slow speeds trying to dodge the worst of the boulders… but that was mostle for a smooth ride… nothing you couldn’t have just rode over anyways. We stopped for several breaks to drink some water and ask questions: here’s one of the first:

I took too many pictures along the way: here are some from one of the highest points we reached… looking back down into the valley towards Highway 70 (the road I drove in on to get to Idaho Springs)


Here’s another shot pitstop where we had a good view crossing the side of a hill:

…and at a hub between many of the trails…

On our way back down we stopped at an old mine entrance (well secured). There were a couple old buildings: one still sturdy enough to get into and one in shambles on the side of the hill. There was also a really old (as in it had metal wheels) air pump that used to be used to force fresh air down into the mine.


From the mine it was an easy path back down the mountain looping back down the trail we came up, then we loaded up the quads and headed back to Idaho Springs.

I had a fantastic time. I first thought of trying to take one of the longer tours… but 2 hours was perfect! I’d really like to thank Randy Simpson at the Rocky Mountain Quad Squad (part owner) for getting back to me weeks after I first inquired about the tour, to make sure I could go… and special thanks to the other owner Tyler Hawks for being a great guide (and all around funny guy)!

If I get back to Denver I’d definitely go again!

Ganaraska, and TrailTours v3

Two weekends ago I was invited out for another Ganaraska ride with 4 other guys. The weather was perfect… and because there wasn’t so much rain I didn’t crash once! :). Other than a short problem with gas pouring out the side of the bike… and new gearing that was a bit too high… it was a perfect day: here’s some pictures:



Then last weekend I attended a TrailTours Dual-Sport training day – it was a special price for ODSC members: for $50 I couldn’t say no! I learned I needed a lot more practice at low-speed cornering (slow as you can go, lock-to-lock). I was expecting a lot of larger DS bikes… but almost all were 450cc or lower dirt-oriented models.


I drove out to Ganaraska an back both days and had no problems on the road with the WR. The only issue was the batttery died (brand new one-week-old model) at TrailTours, so I had to kick-start it whenever I stalled… which was a lot with road gearing installed. I’m not 100% sure if it was a battery failure… or if maybe something else was screwed up (i.e. a problem with the charging system). I’ll look into that this weekend.

Barely… have energy… to type…

Since the new bike was 99% ready to go I made a post to the ODSC forum saying hi to everyone. I got some positive messages: the most interesting being from “Joe” offering to let me come out with his regular group of guys on a beginners ride. How could I say no?

I took Friday afternoon off work to drive to Royal Distributing in Barrie to get some pieces I was missing: I also picked up a new helmet, filter oil, and knee pads. Then spent Friday evening fixing things up. Saturday morning at 8:00am I was off to Joes to get a ride to Ganaraska!

Here’s a pic unloading the bikes (Derek in the black truck just backing in), another with Joe ready to go and Derek putting on his gear on the tailgate, and finally all 3 bikes parked during a rest+gas break:

The forecast called for the rain to end at 7am last I checked… but instead it rained until at least noon. I hadn’t been on dirt trails since last fall: so I was very rusty… and between the constant blur of rain on my goggles and my glasses fogging up I could see very little. More than once I had to stop just to wipe everything down so I could see enough to continue. But it was incredibly fun!

It got a bit less fun when I botched riding through a rut and laid the bike down sideways off a very small corner… widening the trail by a few feet where the bike mowed down the saplings. I wasn’t hurt: but had trouble starting the bike again. I kicked and kicked and kicked (and swore to fix the battery since I’m supposed to have electric start) and kicked and kicked… to no avail. Eventually Joe came back looking for me and started the bike in about 2 kicks (and a cloud of black smoke coming out of the exhaust). It had flooded when it fell over: teaching me the lesson that if you fall off and are unhurt… pick up the bike ASAP!

We looped back to the starting area for a break and to top off the tanks: then headed out again. I was tired, and soon made another mistake: went on the outside of a corner and tapped a tree with my handlebars, and fell over. Got back up and was fine until we were _almost_ done for the day: somehow came out of a rut heading at 45% angle towards the bush… on a trail wide enough to drive a car on… and laid down the front and slid into the bush… fast enough that when the front end hit a tree and stopped dead… I got a mini-toss over the bike and went rolling into the brush.

I wasn’t hurt at all in any of those spills: I was armored head-to-toe… but you’re a bit scared after… breathing heavy… then you have to pick up the bike fast so it doesn’t flood (bikes aren’t light)… then kick the snot out of it to start it (again, no electic start for me: curse the dead battery)… then fight the urge to drive fast to catch up to others… because you know you’re even more tired now and you’ll just end up in the weeds again 🙂

That being said, I had a blast! I would do it all again in a heartbeat!

Back where we started I threw all my extra gear into my packsack, lashed it to the rack, bolted on the GPS, and headed back to Toronto. Here I am topping off the tank:

And 2 hours later, after a short stop at Walmart to buy some earplugs… I was safe at home… bike covered in mud… so tired I was ready to fall over as soon as I set foot in the door. This picture is for Nicoli Garner, who thought my other Facebook pic of the bike was too clean 🙂 …

Can’t wait to go again!

Tired of tires…

Yesterday it took me 5 hours to change 2 tires: 1.5 hours for the front and 3.5 for the back. That rear tire just didn’t want to come off the rim… nor did the new one want to go back on. I guess it was a learning experience: I definitely found more than one wrong way of doing things. But now I know the toolkit I carry has everything I need for the job, and I have a better idea of what to do if I get a flat in the middle of nowhere.

But now that I’ve done it once myself: from now on I’m paying for a shop to swap them 🙂

Went for a short ride to scrub them up a little and took a pic of the final package: ready to go for some dualsport rides!