Gone Riding, Part 6 – Wreck-It Ralph

Uh-oh, that title sounds ominous…

This is one of a series of blog posts about my summer motorcycle travels.

We had breakfast at The Corner, arriving as the early rising contractors doing mineral and energy work were leaving  from eating breakfast and taking their sack lunches. (Apparently one of the way The Corner stays in business is by contracting with these companies to provide meals, alcohol not included, to the workers. While the contractors were interesting people to talk with over dinner the night before, they were very non-specific about exactly what they did.)

We were on the road, such as it was, by 8:30, and we were now on a genuine adventure.  We had bought gas the night before from the lady who ran the other bar in town out of a couple of 200-gallon barrels. Gas was 92 octane, no ethanol, $5 a gallon.  We were glad to have it.

How you buy gas in Yellow Pine.

The Backcountry Discovery Route (BDR) at this point was a minimally maintained forest service road that got more and more minimal as we proceeded. At about the 21-mile point, Howard hit an oversized mud puddle, and his bike was not going to get out of it.

Howard’s bike stuck in the mud.

After I parked my bike, we tried to have him run the throttle and have me push, but all that resulted in was covering me with a rooster tail of mud. Eventually we had to completely strip the luggage off of Howard’s KTM and rock it out of the hole backwards. (For those of you reading who ride, he had high-centered the bike on the edge of the hole.) Once we got the bike out, we got it reloaded, and headed again on our way.

Ralph got rooster-tailed with mud trying to help Howard get his bike out of the mud. Eventually we rocked it back out of the hole and went on our way.

After we went over the top of the pass, or perhaps it was two passes, we came down into a valley where there were sandy patches popping up with little warning.  As Howard was taking the lead, he was the first to find them, and he and his bike went down.  Now, I’m a much slower rider than Howard on a smaller bike, so by the time I got to him he had already picked the bike up.  But the auxiliary light on the right side was bent at an unnatural angle, and his aluminum saddlebag had a big dent in it.  Howard also had some doubts about the condition of his ankle. (He didn’t have any real trouble continuing riding, so he likely just twisted it a little, leaving it sore.)

From there, the road became less of a road and more of a trail. I was grateful I had left my big bike (a Yamaha Super Tenere) at home and had ridden my 650 enduro. Despite the challenges of the riding, it was fun and a glorious country to be traveling with. And when we reached Elk Summit, I had somewhat of a feeling of triumph.

Elk Summit

By 1:30 we were getting a bit concerned about being able to cover the full 220 miles of the day, given that we had only made it about 50 of those miles in the morning.  But then the road widened out, started to be a little smoother, and while our pace was not fast, we were actually making progress toward our destination.

When we got near Burgdorf Hot Springs, we were ready for some lunch and fuel for our bikes.  We turned down a gravel road with lots of fresh crushed rock on it, and that’s when I had my problem. In biker-parlance, I lost the back end.  What does that mean? The back tire of my bike tried to go in front of the front tire. Yeah. That didn’t turn out well. I found myself off the bike and sliding through the gravel. A driver in a pickup truck came by shortly and helped me pick up my bike, and soon after that Howard came back for me.  We straightened out the handlebars and rode on into Burgdorf.

We stopped there for about 20 minutes to assess things.  My right ankle and hip hurt. And I couldn’t put real weight on my right leg. Fortunately I could successfully sit on the bike and make it go.  Double fortunately, after riding back across the 2 miles of fresh crushed rock, we were able to take a paved road into the town of McCall. This was really the first bail-out point of the route, so that was good.

We rode into McCall (a lovely tourist town with a major wildland firefighting base) and got checked into a hotel.  Since I couldn’t walk, I just sat outside on my bike. I also used the opportunity to press the “I’m safely in for the night” button on my Spot satellite tracking system. I certainly didn’t want to push that button, marking the end of my ride at a hospital emergency room parking lot. Yes, I would call my dear wife Pamela (the long suffering, ever patient Penelope – look up The Odyssey for the reference if you need it.) eventually, but not until I knew for sure what was going on with me.

I can’t say enough about the wonderful people at St. Luke’s Medical Center’s emergency room. Howard got a wheel chair to get me from the parking lot into the ER. There the trauma nurse did my admittance interview. For the next blessing of the day, she was also a motorcyclist who instead of mocking me for riding said she was glad I wore full gear. (I was glad, too.  Although I would eventually be diagnosed with a slightly broken bone, I didn’t have scratch on me.)

After I got out of my mud-covered gear and into a gown, the radiology staff did an x-ray of my ankle and a CAT scan of my pelvis.  There was a bit of a wait after that as the small ER dealt with a far more serious case came in by ambulance.  I will never complain about having to wait for someone else to be treated in the ER because that means my injuries are not that serious.

Eventually the doctor came back to tell me my ankle was ok but that I had a hairline sacral fracture. In layman’s terms, there was a minor break where my tailbone meets my pelvis. (Interestingly enough, this was exactly what doctor expected following our initial conversation. Apparently he had seen this injury a time or two before between motorcyclists and skiers.)  I was issued a pair of crutches and told to see my local orthopedist in two weeks.

But this also meant I had reached journey’s end. While I could technically sit on a bike, I could not put any weight on my right leg.

Coming up next: Three miracles of the spirit.