Odessa, WA

April 2018

Some events are so gnarly people hang a certificate of participation on their wall. The Stumpjumpers Desert 100 in Odessa, WA, is one of those. Out of the two-thousand who enter the race, only three hundred fifty complete the hundred mile ride. In the full distance class, the casualty rate due to injuries or breakdowns is 41%. I knew none of this before I entered.

I had an idea it would be hard from a friend who’d tried and failed in the past, but no personal reference point for what a hundred miles off road in rugged, rocky terrain would do to a bike and a body. Like most of my experience on motorcycles, I decided the best way to learn would be trial by fire.

My friend Sean and I are outsiders to dirt bike culture. I grew up riding horses. Sean is an illustrator. During our month of “oh fuck” preparation, we rigged a 4’x8′ utility trailer to carry our bikes, outfitted my Subaru Crosstrek with a trailer hitch, bought shoulder pads, and tuned the weakest parts of our machines.

The race is four hours from Seattle in Odessa, WA, a remote town in the scablands north of Moses Lake. Even getting there was an uncertain outcome. We were only half joking when we looked back and said “bikes are still there” every thirty miles during the ride over. Rolling into camp, we were the only Subaru in a sea of RVs. Pitching my climbing tent definitely got looks.

We woke up to rain the first day with a thirty mile warm up ride ahead of us. The desert had turned to swamp and the only thing keeping the bikes afloat were razor sharp rocks. The course winds up and down epic basalt basins in a landscape resembling Iceland. I wish I’d been able to take in more of the view, but thinking “I’m going to die any minute now” and then not dying was also pretty special. I got way better at riding mud than I ever wanted to be.

After returning to camp, the mission became how to dry and clean ourselves without a water supply or heated shelter. We settled on turning the car heater full blast and letting it idle like a laundromat for four hours. The one thing we came with was plenty of gasoline.

Fortunately, the desert wind worked its magic and dried the course for race day. At the starting line, two thousand bikes lined up side by side in a row over a mile long waiting for the cannon to fire. We all ran to our bikes and entered a Mad Max chase scene to get the hole shot where the course tightens.

Between cutting in line at the river crossings and snaking through technical areas my smaller CRF150rb handles well, I was able to maintain good enough course position to make the first fifty mile lap clean. Even after stopping once to empty a gatorade bottle of gasoline into my tank, I coasted into my pit right as my engine died. Laughing my ass off at the timing.

I found out the engine on Sean’s vintage Yamaha XT600 had blown a valve cover and put him out of the race sixteen miles in, engine oil spewing everywhere. He’d had to walk two miles through open desert climbing cliffs and wayfinding just to get back to camp.

At this point my muscles were fully submitted to finishing. Whatever the motorcycle equivalent of runner’s high is, I had it and kept going.

At the seventy mile mark, my bike stopped steering straight. I willed myself not to look down. A quarter mile later I had to accept my front tire was flat and that was it for my race. I should have been tickled to have made it that far, but it was still a devastating moment. I had a spare tube with me, but no time for a repair. So I zip tied the tire to the rim and limped it the last mile to the next check point. Making it to a checkpoint earned me a cold beer and a ride to camp.

I found Sean waiting at the finish line. I called his phone and told him to look behind him. We should have expected neither of us would be returning to camp on our bikes. The situation was too funny and too fair to be mad about. Now the ordeal of retrieving them started.

Being at a checkpoint, retrieving mine was pretty straightforward, but getting to Sean’s involved Google Earth and a “Stand By Me” adventure. We cut through a farmer’s field in the Subaru and dodged a train while hiking a narrow section of railroad track. We found the bike where he’d left it, but we doubted our ability to push it up the course. Not wanting to risk it on the railroad tracks again, we pulled out another pack of zip ties and got to work.

Sean managed to secure the broken pieces of his valve cover in place with eight zips around his engine. By miracle, the bike started and we bounced Harry and Loyd style two miles to the car. During the next week while I scrubbed mud out of everything I owned, that’s the moment I thought about. By far the best of the weekend.