Goldendale, WA

October 2018

“You guys remember your pantyhose?” Roy asked as we pulled into camp. I looked at Sean, then back at the grizzled race veteran and shook my head. “That’s ok,” said Roy, “you can borrow some of mine.” We needed the hosiery to protect our air filters from the choking mud and dust creeping into them over the next 24 hours as we raced dirt bikes all day and night at Starvation Ridge in Goldendale, WA.

Starvation Ridge would be our second big motorcycle race. We’d raced the Odessa Desert 100 in April, but still felt untested in berms and loose dirt. Our skill was somewhere between mild competence and finding out how much we had to learn. Pantyhose was a tip from our more experienced relay partners: Roy, Mari, and Paul.

“So you sleep in it? Like the both of you?” It was another almost sincere question from Roy. This wasn’t the first time Sean or I explained the concept of a tent. Since leaving our rural hometowns a decade ago, we’d landed on a different side of the outdoor tribal divide than the off-road motorsports crowd. We were grateful for the canopy and generator, but neither of us ever considered buying an RV of our own. It was as high on the priority list as wearing energy drink hats.

We arrived for the race in late October on the Washington side of the Dalles. Roy told us to expect every kind of riding in every kind of weather. Desert scablands turn to icy slick mud at even a hint of rain, especially after being converted to fields for farming. The track runs over open plain, up rocky technical draws, and through generations of decaying homesteads. Even passing directly through an old farmhouse and barn. Veteran racers say that narrow handlebars have an easier time making it through the the kitchen. How fast riders go depends on how willing they are to risk catching their bars on a door frame. Each year the doors get a little wider.

Scott, a godfather of northwest dirt biking who’s hosted the race every year on his farm since 2006, chooses the race rules. Some rules, like how the race starts, are purely for his entertainment. This year he gave riders the choice of running to their bikes through a hundred yards of knee deep mud or four hundred yards around it. Fortunately, Sean and I were scheduled to race second and fourth in our team’s line up.

The learning curve was harsh and quick. Halfway through my first lap, a passing rider roostered me so hard the dust David Blained through my goggle lens and into my eyeballs. But by the second lap I was winding out my 300 2-stroke in full drift around corners. Covering large spaces with the throttle wide open felt like riding a dirt bike the way God intended. It was beautiful, too, with amber foliage, grassy valleys, and purple hills all around us, but over the 24-hours we spent three and a half seconds looking at the scenery.

The technical sections were familiar from the rugged race we ran at Odessa. Scott painted the larger rocks pink for visibility, but the color slowly reverted to brown. I watched a rider ahead of me high side into a sharp pile. I helped him with his bike and hoped the good karma would carry me through the race.

A minute after overtaking my next competitor, a rock threw me violently over the handlebars. My bike was fine, but others weren’t so lucky. Our teammate Paul punched a two inch hole in his stator case. By miracle of two-stroke engines that run on mixed gas, he was able to complete another fifteen miles without running out of oil and blowing up his bike.

At night we put on helmet mounted LED lights with powerful batteries strapped to our backs. Visibility was important because the rain turned everything to mud and I didn’t plan on slowing down enough around corners to find out how deep it was. Letting off the throttle meant getting stuck, so I pinned it, hoping for the best and counting on my adrenalin against the falling temperature.

I made my first night lap with a respectable lap time, but conditions were deteriorating. Sean and I were warming up in the car and watching a slick set of whoops where the muddy bumps were betraying one rider after another. We belly laughed at the circus in front of us, then one rider went down extra hard. Moments later Roy walked past the car injured and grumbling. I turned to Sean who’d stopped laughing, “I guess that means you’re up.”

On the wettest eighteen mile lap in the darkest part of the night, Sean proved who had the most grit. He said he could barely hold onto his bike from the arm pump and slid backwards down every hill climb, desperately kickstarting his bike and yelling FUCK at the top of his lungs. The bottomless muck took him double his average lap time in what he described as pure survival mode.

By morning all our bikes were motorized bales of mud and every group was suffering from broken equipment and fatigue. The “good” bike that Paul and his wife Mari were sharing had a flat and a dead battery. The scoreboard showed that even though we’d made the critical cutoff on the second to last lap and successfully handed off the transponder to the final rider, our competition had pulled two laps ahead during the night.

The 342 miles we put in weren’t enough for first place, but they were enough for us. Starvation Ridge is being able to handle things as they come. During the ride home, our motorcycle trailer blew a tire on I-90, taking the fender, tail light, and license plate with it. We pulled out our tools and were on the road within an hour, like the race veterans we were slowly becoming.