Twisting One

Labor Day is only a couple of weeks away and already I’m dreading the end of the riding season. I don’t remember the exact date that I officially called the season D.O.A. last year but I distinctly remember the day. I took off for a short ride on a Sunday, hoping for a little luck with the intermittent showers we’d been experiencing and I found just enough luck to get several miles from home before the skies dumped a steady stream of icy rain on me. I limped home half frozen and sent an email to a friend announcing the end of my first Northwest motorcycle season.

Even though it was hot and dry yesterday, that wet day last winter was in the back of my mind when I headed for the east side of Mt. St. Helens. I’ve done NF-25 several times this year, which is a good riding road south of the Windy Ridge turnoff but is in terrible shape between there and Randall with sporadic spine jarring drops where the road is trying to break away and slide down the hillside. So it was that I decided to do some breaking off myself onto some of the spur roads in the area.

I’d been told that one road leads to a great ride if you can endure a couple of miles of dirt roads. I’m not real sure what the name of this road is and I’d probably have had better luck finding it if I were but I knew I was on the wrong one when it took seven miles to again find pavement. A couple more miles down the road the pavement ended at a campground, confirming that this was not the road I was seeking.

I back tracked to the “Y” where the blacktop had first reappeared and took the other spur and soon found myself committed to 30 more miles of dirt riding. Now I cut my teeth on dirt biking but the CX650C is no dirt bike and my new Dunlop’s are great road tires but they are completely worthless on the dirt.

Nevertheless, I did survive the 30 white knuckled miles and managed to find some top-notch twisties for some low-level flying before the day was done. Fact is, if you can’t find a few top-notch twisties in Lewis County, Washington, you’re just not trying.

I don’t know if it was the specter of winter looming in the distance or the freedom at the end of a torturous work week but I was really on my game. So much so that I accomplished two firsts; I scraped the foot pegs for the very first time in three years of aggressive twisty runs on this bike.

I was forever dragging foot pegs on my old Virago 1100, until I looked like Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of Independence Day sparklers instead of bread crumbs in winding steams through the San Bernardino mountains. In a way, I guess I was. But I’ve ridden the CX much more aggressively with never a trace of metal parts coming in contact with blacktop. Until yesterday, I had pretty much concluded it couldn’t be done.

The second first was hitting a curve so hot that both tires screamed at me. I like to think of myself as a 90 percenter, in that I try to ride at about 90 percent of the combined ability of myself and my bike. That other 10 percent is the part that keeps you alive.

At 90 percent, your tires definitely talk during in a hot turn. They sing, they whistle and they even whine a bit and those are the irresistible sounds that I live for while blazing through a snaky mountain road. When they stop singing and start screaming, I know I’m eating into my 10 percent and it’s time to crank up the concentration.

Despite 30 white-knuckled miles of floating traction-less atop dirt roads, all in all, it was a banner riding day. I ended the day by having dinner with some biker friends and then stopping in at the County Fair to see Herman’s Hermits, which I suppose was actually the third first of the day.

One of the first records I ever owned and really got into was “The Best of Herman’s Hermits.” Who ever would have guessed that 30+ years later I’d be in Chehalis, Washington listening to Herman’s Hermits and singing along to all 1 million verses of “Henry the Eighth” with my Gen-X wife?

So it was a great day to twist one, so to speak, at the end of which one thing was abundantly clear; Rumors of this season’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Did I hear someone say “Icicle Run”?