Lockwood, almost.
[Sunday -
January 20, 2008]
The original plan is to ride Lockwood today. However, it will
turn
out to be everything else but that.
The morning starts off simple enough. Everybody who's suppose to
be present at 8:00 AM didn't show up. I can understand why.
8:00 AM is a hard time to make when it's on the
weekend. The original thought of Lockwood being a 10-12 hour ride
has been shaved down to a 5 and 1/2 hours ride. This means more freeway
than normal but it's best due to the time interest. I know Kevin
can handle the long ride, but I'm not
sure about his buddies.
The night before saw the Captain calling with a mention that he can't
make it
because he's coming down with a fever. Not cool, but I will never
fault anybody who thinks they can't make a ride due to health
reasons. "It's cool. Just take care of yourself," was the
last remark before I hung up the phone.
8:45 AM. Mikee is the last to appears. We're all ready to
go with the exception of me needing to stop by the ATM and all of us
needing to fuel up.
With the final drop of fuel bring put into our tanks, we head out on
the 210 freeway. The one thing about starting a ride this early
in the morning, on a long holiday weekend, is the fact that most people
are either at home snoring away or they're out of town. The
freeway is open and fast moving. Approximately 45 minutes later,
we're on Lake Hughes road next to Castaic Lake. I know this road
take us all the way to Pine Canyon road, but I've never been on it
before. If it turns out to be a good road, we'll take it more
often to head to Gorman instead of taking Little Tujunga and Sand
Canyon.
As I ride this road I can't help but think that whoever is suppose to
maintain this road isn't doing too hot of a job. There were
cracks everywhere and the road shows signs of some needed
repaving. Even the bumpiest sections of Sand Canyon felt like a
baby's bottom. What's worse, there is ever oh so much sand laying
about in the middle of the road. My rear wheel slid a tad in one
section of the road while making a turn. I don't think I'll be
considering this road much in the future.
We eventually make it to Pine Canyon road and head towards
Gorman. I thought everything was fine until I made the left turn
to continue on Pine Canyon Rd (e.g. the corner of Pine Canyon road and
Three Points road). I knew I signaled at least 1/4 mile away from
the turn. Danny, one of Kevin's buddies, was right behind
me. For some reason he doesn't see my signal nor my tail light
when I started breaking. I have the Gizmomill LED tail
light that flashes rapidly to inform the person behind me that I'm
breaking. He goes shooting pass me, comes to a sudden halt, and
then drops his bike. By that time I had already finished my turn
and had stopped on the side of the road. I don't know what
happened, but he's down. I point to Danny as everybody
stopped. The others in the back are much closer to Danny so they
helped him to pickup his bike. Good thing there was absolutely
nobody out here. The bike suffered minor superficial damage.
We continued on. As we got deeper into Pine Canyon road, the
turns start to get steeper and tighter. On the first tight turn,
Danny over shot again and crashed his bike. He said he tried to
stop but ended up on the dirt and could do anything. He broke his
lower left fairing and was a bit shaken up. For me there is no
point to riding Lockwood as it's much more technical than Pine Canyon
road. We're seeing two incidences on a simple road let alone the
road to Lockwood Valley. As a result, I called off the
ride. We eventually made it to Gorman and had lunch before taking
76 miles on the I5 and the 210 back home.
The good thing about today's ride? At least I finished my video
equipment testing. Everything appears to be working as
planned. The other good thing, we didn't ride Lockwood. It
would have been cold and who know how many stream and washout crossings
we would have to do. We'll try Lockwood again when it warms
up. It will have to be May or later.
Rush - Bravado
Written on: January 21, 2008
Last modified: January 21, 2008