Al's Moto Log

Beav2Soda

This year’s Beav2Soda ride was pretty spectacular, conditions were very good.

We got up early and left home just after 6am. We were on the trail rolling at 7:30am and back to the truck just before 8pm. Everything was really wet at first and the trail was a little greasy. Sink Hollow was great, but we chickened out on dropping snow slide and up St. Charles, which is one of my favorite sections, but with how wet it was and how many miles we had yet to go, we decided it would be better to add sections at the end of the ride if we wanted to rather than the beginning.

Our route: Sink Hollow -> Highline until we got close to Copenhagen Basin, then we cut off to go see our Salamander pond via Green Pass -> Liberty Creek back to Copenhagen Basin -> Lunch at the truck in Copenhagen Basin campground -> Highline again all the way to Soda Peak -> Down the Wilson Creek Single track, then we burned some jeep roads back towards Emigration/Copenhagen -> Highline back to Egan Basin -> then for a last little fling, we dropped into Gibson Basin and took the Higline back to Beaver Creek campground.

Crew: Neil, Porter and me. The only other dirt bikers we saw on the trail all day were Charles Rhodes and Jake Lee.

Posted by al on August 9, 2014 in Trails

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Providence and 016

August 06

Took my bike to Brock at Brockstar Performance and he added some magic sauce to my bike by way of new Brockstar Suspension (new springs for fork/shock and custom valving) and the custom RK Tech head.

What better way to test them out than to try to chase Brandon up Providence Canyon and over to burn the 016 trail? The morning rain meant conditions were awesome and the new mods felt really good! I’d ridden Prov a few weeks ago and this time it felt like a was able to get up on top of the rocks and keep the momentum up a lot better than last time. Low end grunt seemed really good to me and the bike sounds a little bit different, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to detect a difference in the head, but it seemed notable. Overall, I’d highly recommend getting your suspension done for your weight and riding style (http://www.brockstarperformance.com/) and if you have a 3-hundy and like to ride nasty trails, the RK Tech head is awesome (Brock can hook you up on that as well).

Crew: Brandon and me.

Posted by al on August 6, 2014 in Trails

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Sink Hollow – Beaver Creek – Pat’s Hollow with Kids

August 02

My son Logan and I had a great time riding with the Sessions crew. The rain a couple of days ago left some great conditions, there were still a few puddles in the trees and dust was minimal.

The boys did awesome on the trail and even though some parts were pushing their envelopes, they conquered all the sections and everybody had a good time by the end.

Crew: Neil, Porter, Stone, Logan and me.

Posted by al on August 2, 2014 in Trails

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Sink Hollow to Fish Haven

June 12

Had a great ride and busted a few snow drifts. There are a couple of really big trees down in the middle of Sink Hollow that will need a chain saw. We went down Fish Haven until we reached the Jeep road, then turned around and come back up. Coming back from Fish Haven, we took the Old Logan road up around Pat’s Hollow, over the top and came out above Egan Basin, there was a bunch of snow up there too, but nothing we couldn’t get through. Sections in between the snow were already pretty dusty, we could use a rain storm already.

Crew: Zac, Lance and me.

*Forgot my GPSr this day, so no map of tracks.

Check out the video from Zac’s helmet (you may get better quality if you click to go to vimeo):

Posted by al on June 12, 2014 in Tracks

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2014 Idaho City ISDE Qualifier – Race Report

May 31

I finished it! I feel like I should thank my sponsors… my wife and kids for letting me ride, my moto buddies for encouraging (taunting) me to try it, Robert and Chad for being an awesome pit crew, Chris @ Pocatello Power Sports for the deal on my awesome KTM bike, without their support, I never could have come in 166th place out of 307 starters! Seriously though, probably the most physically demanding thing I’ve ever done and it was an awesome sense of accomplishment to cross that finish line.

Race Details: this year it was 125.5 miles, started and ended in Idaho City, ID. Almost all single track, see map and elevation profile below, if you weren’t climbing, you were descending with your brakes locked up.

Here’s my stats:
40+ B Class – 8th Place out of 24, Bronze Medal
Overall B Class – 29th Place out of 116
Overall Long Course – 166th out of 307 total riders (there were 123 DNF’s!)
My Starting minute: 10:46am, crossed the finish line at 6:40pm

Crew stats:
Brock – 1st Place and Gold Medal in the 30+ A Class! (although there is a scoring error, they didn’t check him in after the finish at the bike impound, they’re working on fixing it)
Brandon – 40+ A Class, 8th Place and Silver Medal! Barely missed the Gold Medal by 27 seconds
Rich and Chase – followed some bad arrows and ended up “houring-out”

Photo Album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alhill/sets/72157644995185742/

Things I learned:

Do NOT make adjustments to bike before the race, I adjusted my rear brake in the garage before loading up. Ended up too tight and it got hot and locked up my rear wheel in the middle of the first special test. I had to pull out my tools to adjust it so it would release, took probably 5-8 minutes or so. A ton of people passed me, my time in that ST was horrible and I came in 6 minutes behind on the first check.
Simple math is hard when you’re exhausted. If you miss your time on one check, you have to adjust all the other times by the differential. I ended up 35 minutes off my original time sheet.
Drink a lot. I went through two full camelbaks and added more water at each stop and still didn’t get enough.
Cramps suck! I started getting them with 45 miles left to go, in weird places too.
I only went over the bars once, I was right on a guy’s wheel on a nasty descent and it was too dusty to see the ruts, got crossed up and ended up superman style with my bike on top of me. Worst part was that both my legs decided to cramp up while I was sliding down the hill… haha, ouch!