Thinking back over the National ride this month, I've decided that there's far too much to actually write a typical "ride report" - too many days and too many things for me to remember, since I slacked off on the road and didn't write in my journal. Next trip I'll remedy that. But for the moment, I'll be content with a few brief vignettes relating some of the more memorable experiences I had on the road.
The most memorable, of course, were the previously-alluded-to encounters with the military in the Black Hills on our day ride out of Custer. Colleen (DantesDame), Robert and Trina (BMW-K and Mrs. BMW-K) and Jim (JimWilliamson) and I decided to spend that day playing around on the network of dirt roads stretching between Custer and Deadwood, and when discussing the trip the night before was warned to "watch out for the Army." I thought "yeah, whatever, dude" to that warning, but it turned out to be prophetic, as the exercises that were being done in the area were on a much larger scale than I'd thought.
We hit the roads and had an amazing time. The dirt meanders through dense woodlands, is very lightly travelled, and offers a lot of challenges to a new dirt-rider like myself. Colleen and Jim provided a nice swift pace to match, and I had just started to get comfortable with letting the rear slide around corners on our dirt ride in Montana a few days before, so I was pushing myself up a bit and moving at a good clip, sliding tires and having a ball.
Coming into a corner I noticed a sign to the right of the road which read "Military Police Checkpoint Ahead: SLOW DOWN NOW." Sensing that this particular traffic sign meant serious business, I got on the brakes, scrubbed some speed, and came around the corner to be greeted by a barbed-wire fence along the left side of the road, and a gate in the fence. Behind the gate was parked a very large and imposing vehicle painted in olive drab, and sitting in the cupola was a gunner looking straight at me down the barrel of his machine gun - I believe it was a pintel-mount M249, but Robert apparently ID'd it as an M60. Behind the guard was a temporary field camp of some sort, and a large open field upon which were two Blackhawk transport helicopters with a couple of infantry squads arrayed in formation in front of them.
On my list of Things To See Beside The Road, this was pretty low. Surprising at best, and quite intimidating. Obviously no harm came to your humble narrator, but when one is prepared for deer as the day's threat, and faced instead with machineguns, it does tend to rattle.
Later on in that same ride, we found ourselves coming toward a three-way intersection. I was ahead of the group and had stopped to take pictures of the other riders as they approached, and as I saw them coming I also saw traffic from the other direction - a convoy of military Humvees, in olive and desert tan, coming towards us. I mounted up as the others passed, followed them through the turn-off that would take us back towards home, and then noticed that the Army had also taken the turn and was following us.
On the straightaways, we were keeping a faster pace than the Humvees, but their nice 8' width and low center of gravity meant that they never had to slow down for turns. Not so with us riders. I gunned it up quick and headed to the front of the line, but Trina, who was riding sweep, tells me it was quite an experience loking back over her shoulder ever turn and expecting to see the huge grill of a big truck right behind her. On the way back to Custer we passed several big field camps.
In addition, parked at one corner on the road the Humvees were travelling on, was a small pickup truck - a Ford Ranger or something like it. In the front seat were two men, both wearing checkered Arab keffiyeh headdresses. Either we saw a pair of actors, dressed up as part of a training exercise for the convoy, or we saw the two most unlucky terrorists of all time, camped on a deserted dirt road in the center of a major military training operation. I'm assuming the first is correct, but the second would be so poetic...
There were a number of other amazing experiences in this trip, but I seem to remember the times spent on the dirt better than the rest. On the very last day of the trip, Colleen and I spent a fair bit of time on muddy dirt backroads in British Columbia. A grey and cold day, and a wet one; big puddles stood in all the potholes, and the roads were quite slippery as well. I'd never ridden in the mud before and it was a great time sliding around, though I must admit to some worries at times. All well in the end, though, and the Vstrom was dirtier after that leg of the trip than it's ever been.
Overall, it was an amazing time with some really great riders. I feel my skills, especially offroad, have really been sharpened by this trip, and I was very glad for the chance to get so far from home and see so many amazing roads. I'm very much looking forward to the next attempt, although a trip this size doesn't come along all that often. More's the pity.
This coming weekend (tomorrow!) I'm off to British Columbia again for another mostly-offroad ride, again with Colleen and friends (from advrider.com, this time). Wish me luck...