This is an account of our (ETRA) ride last weekend that I wrote for the newletter and, of course, my friends at DRN.
The 27 ½ Hours of Tillamook
By Adam Achepohl
Saturday, October 6, 2001
Tillamook State Forest, OR
Prologue: For more than a few years, the “Till-u-puke” club ride has developed the reputation for being an all-day torture trail through the nastiest sections of the Tillamook State Forest, just an hour west of Portland. In this part of the Coast Range the terrain is heavily wooded, extremely steep and undoubtedly some of the best gnarl to ever feel the tread of a knobby. The Emerald Trail Riders Association happens to have elected a couple of whackos into its leadership and, just to make things worse, we are also the trail bosses of the Till-u-puke. Last year we had 25 riders begin the ride. After 9 ½ hours and 90 miles of trail there were 9 riders left. This year, Johnny (names have been protected to change the innocent) and I decided to make an effort to make sure everyone finished the ride. After all, when the attrition rate gets above fifty percent, people start to talk! As luck would have it, during the same weekend and at the same staging area there was a big trials competition and the course marshal told us about some trails we had never been on! One of them was at the beginning of our planned route and the other was the very last trail to the campground, perfect! What could be better than a couple of trials trails in the mix?
Saturday/The Ride: First of all, Johnny and I were fairly disappointed during the weeks before because we were planning on riding the Trask side of the Tillamook but fire danger was too high, the area was closed. By Saturday morning, however, while we were driving the gas/lunch/diaper truck to the remote stop, Johnny and I were giddy with anticipation to get the ride started. We had formulated an excellent plan that would take us through the most technical trails in the steepest parts of the forest that were still open, some in the wrong direction. Due to rumors of last year’s ride and the fact that many people just don’t like to ride with us, only a dozen hardy souls came up for the ride. This was good, we thought, less is more. Maybe we would break the 100-mile barrier this year.
At 9:00 the ride started at a brisk pace, unfortunately I was leading so I missed out on the first crash of the day. Our youngest rider cross-rutted while blasting up a jeep road and took out some real estate with his forearm. The next section of singletrack brought the blood to a boil and everyone had that “Why am I here?” look. By the 8-mile mark everyone was sweating like Irishmen in a dry county as we dropped off onto the “new” trial trail. The first hundred feet were just fine but then the gravity of the situation took over, no; I mean the GRAVITY of the situation took OVER. Bulldogging was required for quite a while but then we hopped back on. This trail was very old and hadn’t been treaded for quite a while. At one point we had to turn uphill and struggle amongst the rocks and root wads, knowing that there was no way to go back. Once up the hill, where some people had to have there bikes ridden for them, not to mention any names DAVE, we were rewarded with a stream crossing! Perfect! We had managed to go 15 miles in two hours so far and the victims were still looking quite fresh. Now the trail became less technical so we gained some ground and put a few miles on. Oh, that’s if you don’t count the 15 minutes we spent JB welding the cases on Brian’s YZF400, which had encountered a small rock outcropping and began spewing oil. At mile 35, Johnny “I think Tech Tubes are stupid”, got a rear flat and we had to fix it. At this point, I’m sad to say, we lost our first victim. We tried to talk him into continuing on but all we could get out of him was pointed fingers and profanity and something about lawsuits and such. Just kidding! He lent us his own rear tube and took off on the road back to camp. Little did we know that he was very smart in doing so. Well, Ok then. Now Johnny took point and led us straight into a dead end trail that resulted in the premature death of a KX500! This particular hillclimb, at the end of the dead end, was too much for the KX’s cooling system and it managed to blow a plastic bolt straight out of the right-side radiator, stripping the threads and blowing all of the coolant out in a geyser-like fashion. We managed to get the green bike to the remote stop a few miles away.
While refueling and eating some lunch, Johnny and I came to the realization that we would be lucky to get sixty miles in by the end of the daylight hours. We checked out the maps that we had and rerouted the tour a bit, there was still a great deal to be done. And, of course, there was that last trail that we had never been on! For an added bonus we stopped by a small cliff-face known as “Chainbreaker”. Carnage was good at this point. Instead of helping one another, we would just take pictures as the bike and rider would fall backwards and scrape against the rocks while saying “OHHHHH!” By 6:00 we figured there was about 45 minutes of daylight left so we hightailed it to the last trail of the day. Johnny and I knew exactly where we were. We had been down the same ridge before but this new/old trail dropped down at a different point, a little further up the mountainside. If you look at a map, there is a 1500ft. elevation drop from top to bottom. Our trial buddy was “kind” enough to mark the trail for us earlier in the day with a ribbon here and there. Aside from the occasional ribbon, this trail was literally indistinguishable from the natural terrain, one of the nice things about trials bikes. As we passed the familiar trail down (which is a bulldog trail in its own right) the sun set behind the last ridge and dusk began. I was riding sweep at this point and remember thinking that there wasn’t much time left to see, especially in the dense canopy of the forest. After fifteen minutes of extreme off-camber goat trail we came to the point where the trail turned straight downhill. Mind you, it was almost completely dark now but hey, how bad could it be? In fifteen minutes we would all be back at our cozy little campfires, right? I’ve been in this situation before, my friends, so that’s how I knew that we were in deep doodoo. The mountainside was so steep that bulldogging was a major effort. It was about fifty degrees out and all of us were sweating profusely. The dirt (under the ferns and sticks and fir needles) was very soft and offered little traction. Many times the bikes simply washed out from under and went skidding down the hill, ending up with the hangers facing downhill. Instead of yelling out “rock” like mountain climbers do to warn there comrades below, we would here the occasional “Bike”! By the time we had gone 300 yards all vision was gone and we all stood there wondering what the he!! we were doing in this ridiculous position. And then it happened. The realization that we could not get the bikes down and that we would have to try to get down the hill on our own. Hmmmm. Johnny was a few hundred feet further down and had lost all sight of ribbon but was parked in a good spot. I, on the other hand, had to park the 520 on top of another bike just to keep it from going “all the way”. After quite a few moments of silence I heard from below, “Anyone have a flashlight?” I knew I had one but couldn’t believe that nobody else said “I do”. Picture this: I’m walking/falling down a hillside in the dark past abandoned bikes and hapless riders with a penlight in my hand, and I think I’m lucky! We gathered at the lowest bike and began looking for ribbon or signs of trail. After gathering our wits and summing up our problem, we figure that if we go straight downhill we will hit the road to camp. After a few nervous laughs and a couple of tenuous steps we found another ribbon that led us to a big washout. Washouts in this neck of the woods are usually epic landslides from torrential downpours. This was no exception. The good news was that I could finally see the light footprint of a trials tire when I angled the flashlight to enhance the tread. The bad news was that it was going uphill on the opposite side of the bank toward a sidehill path. This was going to be a very difficult section in the morning when we came back, IF we came back. We still didn’t know if we were going to have to camp out overnight or not. After crossing that little adventure we found a few more ribbons every hundred feet or so but then lost them altogether. The range of my feeble flashlight was only about 20-30 feet and every once in a while I would look down into pitch blackness. Knowing that a “void” was probably a fifty foot cliff or worse, we preceded VERY SLOWLY. Picture this: Ten grown men following one small flashlight, arms outstretched and eyes wide open. Falling down, twigs snapping, the occasional thud and heavy breathing, it’s amazing how well you can hear when you can’t see your own fingers in front of your face. Every time I turned around with the flashlight I couldn’t help but chuckle, we looked like a bunch of zombies. Just when I thought things were getting better, they got worse. We came to a point where two creek beds joined into one, we were committed. From here on out we stayed in the creek, sliding down waterfalls, slipping on moss and throwing rocks into eddies to see/hear how deep they were. I thought about turning off the flashlight for a second and saying that the bulb had broken but that would have been a bit cruel. Don’t you think? Besides, I wasn’t too sure about the battery life in the first place. “I see a campfire!” someone said. Sure enough, way down in the valley we could see the faint glow of a fire. We started hooting and hollering. After another half hour the fire didn’t seem to be any closer and even faded from view a few times. After another half hour, however, we came to another creek junction with a lot of undergrowth and log jam. I had the feeling that we were finally at level ground, peered into the blackness ahead and saw a concrete bridge! We made it! After assembling on the road we realized we were only three minutes away from camp. Yahoo! It was now 9:45; we were all soaked with sweat, hungry, bruised, sore and ready for some serious beer drinking and storytelling. It had taken over two hours since we had left the bikes and we probably only hiked a half mile. Our “friends” had been looking for us since dark and were about to start hiking in from the bottom.
Sunday/The Aftermath and Bike Recovery: At approximately 5:12 am I heard the first rain drop on my trailer roof. It was a very faint one but it could have been a large Chinese gong right next to my head for all I cared. I never got back to sleep. The thought of hauling the bikes up the far side of that first washout had me troubled. The rain backed off, however, and the morning hours were spent looking at the sky and talking about how lucky we were to have had a flashlight. If we hadn’t had the flashlight we would have been camping out, no doubt about it. For those of you who are asking why we didn’t use the lights on our bikes by putting it in neutral and jamming a stick in the spokes, you have to realize that we couldn’t keep the bikes pointed in the right direction even if we knew what the right direction was. Also, you can’t keep a bike idling like that for two and a half hours. By 9:00 Sunday morning the trials competition had begun and we started suiting up for what we knew would be an arduous task. I spoke with a few of the competitors, evidently we were the talk of the town as I received many comments and grins from people that knew about our predicament: “Himalayan Death March?”, “Night of the Living Dead?”, “Tree Hugging Hikers!”, “Going hunting? I think I saw some bike sign up the mountain there! Yeah, that’s right, there was a whole heard all hunkered down for the night”. The best part was when we all climbed into the back of a pickup truck to drive a few miles to the top of the ridgeline, everyone in the staging area (a hundred people or so) was laughing. We were famous! After a nice cold drive to the upper trailhead we disembarked and walked, conga line style, to the beginning of the new trail. Looking down the start of the drop off I was appalled at our own stupidity, er, bravery. What couldn’t be seen the night before was painfully evident in broad daylight, perhaps we shouldn’t have done it, d’you think? That first couple hundred yards before we got to the bikes was very surreal. It’s not often that you get the opportunity to watch ten adults in full riding gear reluctantly stumbling down a mountain muttering things like “This was your fault, you jerk” and “The tips of my toes hurt”. As we came to the bikes our mood turned to the matters at hand and we started to actually help one another. When we finally got to the sidehill section that led to the washout, a few of the bikes didn’t want to start. One of the two-strokes had spent the night in such a horrid position that its cylinder had filled up with oil! After changing a few plugs and kicking away for fifteen minutes, it fired. An XR400 had developed a mysterious lack of compression; we gave up on it and pushed it along. A YZ400 suffered from a brain-dead pilot that kept twisting the throttle while trying to start it, but I won’t mention any names BRIAN. So, we managed to get all huddled up at the washout. The first bike to try to get up the other side was a CR500 with a brand new Cheng Shin 4.50, it managed to dig a hopelessly deep trench that pretty much ruined it for all of us! Perfect! There was no run to speak of at the bottom so most of us got as far as we could before summoning the aid of the gigglers and clowns that were standing by watching or catching their breath. There is nothing quite like a good mouthful of Oregon loam and a lungful of point-blank two-stroke exhaust to get you going in the morning. Life is good! It took us an hour and a half to go fifty feet, why, it practically brings tears to my eyes just writing about it! After the washout and footpath that we had followed last night, we came to the point where we had lost the ribbon. First we looked in the direction that we ended up going down, it was UGLY. We already knew that it couldn’t have been the right way so we looked around, sure enough, not fifty yards away was another ribbon, and then another! This way was MUCH easier. As a matter of fact it looked like an old skidder road winding down the mountain, and it was! Soon we came across another sign of civilization, people! And one of them was my brother Cornfed! They had come up from the bottom looking for us, knowing that there might be some excellent “vulturing” to do. As the trail meandered downhill we came to one of the creeks we had stumbled across (pun intended). After a couple of nice features and a four-foot log crossing, our long and strange trip ended, not fifty yards from where we started. It was now 12:30; it took us 3 hours to go less than a mile. Perfect!
Johnny and I were so proud. A few weeks ago it looked like the ride might not have stood up to its lowly reputation, especially compared to last year and the year before when the attrition rate had skyrocketed to 60 percent. Depending on your point of view, however, you could say that we actually hit the 100 percent attrition bell by walking out in pitch black conditions. The zombie line will always be remembered. At first reckoning, you would think that this might be hard to beat but, trust me, we’ll think of something! See you next year!
The 27 ½ Hours of Tillamook
By Adam Achepohl
Saturday, October 6, 2001
Tillamook State Forest, OR
Prologue: For more than a few years, the “Till-u-puke” club ride has developed the reputation for being an all-day torture trail through the nastiest sections of the Tillamook State Forest, just an hour west of Portland. In this part of the Coast Range the terrain is heavily wooded, extremely steep and undoubtedly some of the best gnarl to ever feel the tread of a knobby. The Emerald Trail Riders Association happens to have elected a couple of whackos into its leadership and, just to make things worse, we are also the trail bosses of the Till-u-puke. Last year we had 25 riders begin the ride. After 9 ½ hours and 90 miles of trail there were 9 riders left. This year, Johnny (names have been protected to change the innocent) and I decided to make an effort to make sure everyone finished the ride. After all, when the attrition rate gets above fifty percent, people start to talk! As luck would have it, during the same weekend and at the same staging area there was a big trials competition and the course marshal told us about some trails we had never been on! One of them was at the beginning of our planned route and the other was the very last trail to the campground, perfect! What could be better than a couple of trials trails in the mix?
Saturday/The Ride: First of all, Johnny and I were fairly disappointed during the weeks before because we were planning on riding the Trask side of the Tillamook but fire danger was too high, the area was closed. By Saturday morning, however, while we were driving the gas/lunch/diaper truck to the remote stop, Johnny and I were giddy with anticipation to get the ride started. We had formulated an excellent plan that would take us through the most technical trails in the steepest parts of the forest that were still open, some in the wrong direction. Due to rumors of last year’s ride and the fact that many people just don’t like to ride with us, only a dozen hardy souls came up for the ride. This was good, we thought, less is more. Maybe we would break the 100-mile barrier this year.
At 9:00 the ride started at a brisk pace, unfortunately I was leading so I missed out on the first crash of the day. Our youngest rider cross-rutted while blasting up a jeep road and took out some real estate with his forearm. The next section of singletrack brought the blood to a boil and everyone had that “Why am I here?” look. By the 8-mile mark everyone was sweating like Irishmen in a dry county as we dropped off onto the “new” trial trail. The first hundred feet were just fine but then the gravity of the situation took over, no; I mean the GRAVITY of the situation took OVER. Bulldogging was required for quite a while but then we hopped back on. This trail was very old and hadn’t been treaded for quite a while. At one point we had to turn uphill and struggle amongst the rocks and root wads, knowing that there was no way to go back. Once up the hill, where some people had to have there bikes ridden for them, not to mention any names DAVE, we were rewarded with a stream crossing! Perfect! We had managed to go 15 miles in two hours so far and the victims were still looking quite fresh. Now the trail became less technical so we gained some ground and put a few miles on. Oh, that’s if you don’t count the 15 minutes we spent JB welding the cases on Brian’s YZF400, which had encountered a small rock outcropping and began spewing oil. At mile 35, Johnny “I think Tech Tubes are stupid”, got a rear flat and we had to fix it. At this point, I’m sad to say, we lost our first victim. We tried to talk him into continuing on but all we could get out of him was pointed fingers and profanity and something about lawsuits and such. Just kidding! He lent us his own rear tube and took off on the road back to camp. Little did we know that he was very smart in doing so. Well, Ok then. Now Johnny took point and led us straight into a dead end trail that resulted in the premature death of a KX500! This particular hillclimb, at the end of the dead end, was too much for the KX’s cooling system and it managed to blow a plastic bolt straight out of the right-side radiator, stripping the threads and blowing all of the coolant out in a geyser-like fashion. We managed to get the green bike to the remote stop a few miles away.
While refueling and eating some lunch, Johnny and I came to the realization that we would be lucky to get sixty miles in by the end of the daylight hours. We checked out the maps that we had and rerouted the tour a bit, there was still a great deal to be done. And, of course, there was that last trail that we had never been on! For an added bonus we stopped by a small cliff-face known as “Chainbreaker”. Carnage was good at this point. Instead of helping one another, we would just take pictures as the bike and rider would fall backwards and scrape against the rocks while saying “OHHHHH!” By 6:00 we figured there was about 45 minutes of daylight left so we hightailed it to the last trail of the day. Johnny and I knew exactly where we were. We had been down the same ridge before but this new/old trail dropped down at a different point, a little further up the mountainside. If you look at a map, there is a 1500ft. elevation drop from top to bottom. Our trial buddy was “kind” enough to mark the trail for us earlier in the day with a ribbon here and there. Aside from the occasional ribbon, this trail was literally indistinguishable from the natural terrain, one of the nice things about trials bikes. As we passed the familiar trail down (which is a bulldog trail in its own right) the sun set behind the last ridge and dusk began. I was riding sweep at this point and remember thinking that there wasn’t much time left to see, especially in the dense canopy of the forest. After fifteen minutes of extreme off-camber goat trail we came to the point where the trail turned straight downhill. Mind you, it was almost completely dark now but hey, how bad could it be? In fifteen minutes we would all be back at our cozy little campfires, right? I’ve been in this situation before, my friends, so that’s how I knew that we were in deep doodoo. The mountainside was so steep that bulldogging was a major effort. It was about fifty degrees out and all of us were sweating profusely. The dirt (under the ferns and sticks and fir needles) was very soft and offered little traction. Many times the bikes simply washed out from under and went skidding down the hill, ending up with the hangers facing downhill. Instead of yelling out “rock” like mountain climbers do to warn there comrades below, we would here the occasional “Bike”! By the time we had gone 300 yards all vision was gone and we all stood there wondering what the he!! we were doing in this ridiculous position. And then it happened. The realization that we could not get the bikes down and that we would have to try to get down the hill on our own. Hmmmm. Johnny was a few hundred feet further down and had lost all sight of ribbon but was parked in a good spot. I, on the other hand, had to park the 520 on top of another bike just to keep it from going “all the way”. After quite a few moments of silence I heard from below, “Anyone have a flashlight?” I knew I had one but couldn’t believe that nobody else said “I do”. Picture this: I’m walking/falling down a hillside in the dark past abandoned bikes and hapless riders with a penlight in my hand, and I think I’m lucky! We gathered at the lowest bike and began looking for ribbon or signs of trail. After gathering our wits and summing up our problem, we figure that if we go straight downhill we will hit the road to camp. After a few nervous laughs and a couple of tenuous steps we found another ribbon that led us to a big washout. Washouts in this neck of the woods are usually epic landslides from torrential downpours. This was no exception. The good news was that I could finally see the light footprint of a trials tire when I angled the flashlight to enhance the tread. The bad news was that it was going uphill on the opposite side of the bank toward a sidehill path. This was going to be a very difficult section in the morning when we came back, IF we came back. We still didn’t know if we were going to have to camp out overnight or not. After crossing that little adventure we found a few more ribbons every hundred feet or so but then lost them altogether. The range of my feeble flashlight was only about 20-30 feet and every once in a while I would look down into pitch blackness. Knowing that a “void” was probably a fifty foot cliff or worse, we preceded VERY SLOWLY. Picture this: Ten grown men following one small flashlight, arms outstretched and eyes wide open. Falling down, twigs snapping, the occasional thud and heavy breathing, it’s amazing how well you can hear when you can’t see your own fingers in front of your face. Every time I turned around with the flashlight I couldn’t help but chuckle, we looked like a bunch of zombies. Just when I thought things were getting better, they got worse. We came to a point where two creek beds joined into one, we were committed. From here on out we stayed in the creek, sliding down waterfalls, slipping on moss and throwing rocks into eddies to see/hear how deep they were. I thought about turning off the flashlight for a second and saying that the bulb had broken but that would have been a bit cruel. Don’t you think? Besides, I wasn’t too sure about the battery life in the first place. “I see a campfire!” someone said. Sure enough, way down in the valley we could see the faint glow of a fire. We started hooting and hollering. After another half hour the fire didn’t seem to be any closer and even faded from view a few times. After another half hour, however, we came to another creek junction with a lot of undergrowth and log jam. I had the feeling that we were finally at level ground, peered into the blackness ahead and saw a concrete bridge! We made it! After assembling on the road we realized we were only three minutes away from camp. Yahoo! It was now 9:45; we were all soaked with sweat, hungry, bruised, sore and ready for some serious beer drinking and storytelling. It had taken over two hours since we had left the bikes and we probably only hiked a half mile. Our “friends” had been looking for us since dark and were about to start hiking in from the bottom.
Sunday/The Aftermath and Bike Recovery: At approximately 5:12 am I heard the first rain drop on my trailer roof. It was a very faint one but it could have been a large Chinese gong right next to my head for all I cared. I never got back to sleep. The thought of hauling the bikes up the far side of that first washout had me troubled. The rain backed off, however, and the morning hours were spent looking at the sky and talking about how lucky we were to have had a flashlight. If we hadn’t had the flashlight we would have been camping out, no doubt about it. For those of you who are asking why we didn’t use the lights on our bikes by putting it in neutral and jamming a stick in the spokes, you have to realize that we couldn’t keep the bikes pointed in the right direction even if we knew what the right direction was. Also, you can’t keep a bike idling like that for two and a half hours. By 9:00 Sunday morning the trials competition had begun and we started suiting up for what we knew would be an arduous task. I spoke with a few of the competitors, evidently we were the talk of the town as I received many comments and grins from people that knew about our predicament: “Himalayan Death March?”, “Night of the Living Dead?”, “Tree Hugging Hikers!”, “Going hunting? I think I saw some bike sign up the mountain there! Yeah, that’s right, there was a whole heard all hunkered down for the night”. The best part was when we all climbed into the back of a pickup truck to drive a few miles to the top of the ridgeline, everyone in the staging area (a hundred people or so) was laughing. We were famous! After a nice cold drive to the upper trailhead we disembarked and walked, conga line style, to the beginning of the new trail. Looking down the start of the drop off I was appalled at our own stupidity, er, bravery. What couldn’t be seen the night before was painfully evident in broad daylight, perhaps we shouldn’t have done it, d’you think? That first couple hundred yards before we got to the bikes was very surreal. It’s not often that you get the opportunity to watch ten adults in full riding gear reluctantly stumbling down a mountain muttering things like “This was your fault, you jerk” and “The tips of my toes hurt”. As we came to the bikes our mood turned to the matters at hand and we started to actually help one another. When we finally got to the sidehill section that led to the washout, a few of the bikes didn’t want to start. One of the two-strokes had spent the night in such a horrid position that its cylinder had filled up with oil! After changing a few plugs and kicking away for fifteen minutes, it fired. An XR400 had developed a mysterious lack of compression; we gave up on it and pushed it along. A YZ400 suffered from a brain-dead pilot that kept twisting the throttle while trying to start it, but I won’t mention any names BRIAN. So, we managed to get all huddled up at the washout. The first bike to try to get up the other side was a CR500 with a brand new Cheng Shin 4.50, it managed to dig a hopelessly deep trench that pretty much ruined it for all of us! Perfect! There was no run to speak of at the bottom so most of us got as far as we could before summoning the aid of the gigglers and clowns that were standing by watching or catching their breath. There is nothing quite like a good mouthful of Oregon loam and a lungful of point-blank two-stroke exhaust to get you going in the morning. Life is good! It took us an hour and a half to go fifty feet, why, it practically brings tears to my eyes just writing about it! After the washout and footpath that we had followed last night, we came to the point where we had lost the ribbon. First we looked in the direction that we ended up going down, it was UGLY. We already knew that it couldn’t have been the right way so we looked around, sure enough, not fifty yards away was another ribbon, and then another! This way was MUCH easier. As a matter of fact it looked like an old skidder road winding down the mountain, and it was! Soon we came across another sign of civilization, people! And one of them was my brother Cornfed! They had come up from the bottom looking for us, knowing that there might be some excellent “vulturing” to do. As the trail meandered downhill we came to one of the creeks we had stumbled across (pun intended). After a couple of nice features and a four-foot log crossing, our long and strange trip ended, not fifty yards from where we started. It was now 12:30; it took us 3 hours to go less than a mile. Perfect!
Johnny and I were so proud. A few weeks ago it looked like the ride might not have stood up to its lowly reputation, especially compared to last year and the year before when the attrition rate had skyrocketed to 60 percent. Depending on your point of view, however, you could say that we actually hit the 100 percent attrition bell by walking out in pitch black conditions. The zombie line will always be remembered. At first reckoning, you would think that this might be hard to beat but, trust me, we’ll think of something! See you next year!
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