It looks like 2012 is starting out on the right foot. For the past 3 years I have been inviting riders/friends to go with Don and I on our annual week long ride down in Mexico, Baja California to be exact. Until this year Don and I have made the trip ourselves and it has been fun, entertaining, informational, and educational for me at least. It almost always provides us a chance to meet new riders from all over the world. This ride is unsupported, we ride with a back pack on our back with whatever we think we will need for the week to include tools, tubes, spare parts, extra clothing, shoes, toiletries, etc. That is half the fun, being fully self sufficient with only what you are willing to carry.
We drive down to San Felipe and unload to begin our trip. This year we decided to go as far as Mulege and back. The total mileage ended up being around 1100 miles. We left on a Tuesday and returned the following Tuesday to the truck.
Don has been going to ride in Mexico for somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-30 years to ride. I on the other hand am fairly new and still in the learning stages with my 3rd trip under my belt and the assorted Baja 250, 500 and 1000 races I have competed in the past few years.
Now as the title of this article alludes to, there was a 3rd Amigo along on this trip for his first attempt at an unsupported week long ride in Baja California. His name is Doug, but he came to be known as Senor Kirby! As the newbie to the group he was not aware that he would provide most of the entertainment during the week long trip! Before the trip I cautioned him to ride at a much reduced pace of no more than 60 to 70% because there is no support truck, no medical staff and it is a long way to a hospital!
The first part of the ride was almost too easy as the Mexican government is paving the road south of San Felipe and is now approximately 90 miles south of San Felipe with their endeavor. We reached our first stop in Gonzaga Bay without any issues other than tender back sides from sitting for all those miles on dual sport bikes on the pavement. The dirt section ended up being down to about 15 miles or so.
The following day was scheduled to be almost all off road riding. We left the motel and headed south to the legendary Coco’s corner. About half way there Don encounters a rather large nail in his rear tire of the WR 450 he rides. We found a rock to use as a stand and repaired it to be back on the trail without too much time lost. I think back to our first two trips and don’t remember Don and I ever having a flat, I guess we have been very lucky. We stop at Coco’s corner to see if Coco is there and find out from the local Mexican man that he is not. I am a bit disappointed because I have been there several times now and have yet to meet him. I guess it is one more reason for me to make another trip, as if I need another reason to ride my motorcycle anywhere! Our trio is working our way toward a place called Bahia de Los Angeles. On this day we will encounter dirt roads, a canyon with water crossings, sandy washes and a bit of pavement at the end coming into L. A. Bay. Now things change by the minute on these rides and this apparently is not going to be an exception. I usually am the sweep rider which gives me the opportunity to observe a lot of what goes on. I am taking my place 3rd in line on our train and all the while watching Doug to see how he fares on his first trip. Doug is 70 years old and a very good off road woods rider. However, I am not so sure about his desert skills while riding in Mexico. I think he is going a little too fast for our bikes and loads combined with the dust we make for each other. I see a few swaps, I chuckle, and hope he learns quickly. Did I mention early on that he should not ride more than about 60 to 70%? Doug is struggling with a DRZ 400 loaded with some gear and a backpack full of stuff. I am waiting for him to adapt and heed my 70% rule. He tries to avoid a muddy section and loses the back tire, it results in a low speed tip over. No harm done except for a bent clutch lever. I ask him if he has spare levers just in case he answers ... ummmm no. Back on the trail and I drop back as we come out of the canyon because it is getting too dusty to follow very close. I don’t like riding in the dust. So as I roll along on this rolling dirt two track road I suddenly come across this motorcycle laying on the right side of the road. My first thought is that someone broke down and left this bike laying there. Just as I come to a stop I see movement in the ditch on the other side of the bike. Guess who! Crash #2. Doug is just starting to get up and I ask him if he is alright, meaning do you have any serious injuries or broken bones. He says he thinks he is ok as I begin to pick up his bike. I check the bike over as Doug checks himself. All I find wrong is a broken front brake lever, but there is enough lever there to still be useful. Doug says his wrist is sore but not broken. Now our leader Don is long gone and totally unaware of all the fun Doug and I are having during this past 10 miles. We square Doug away and get back on the trail at a slightly reduced pace with Doug’s wrist being a bit sore. When we get out of this canyon and intersect with a paved section that leads to Bay of L.A. we have a short break and find that Don is having cramps. So between Don’s cramps and Doug’s wrist they decide to take the pavement to our destination for the day. I suddenly become the 3rd wheel of the group because I am not ready to ride the pavement. So I decide to take the intended off road route alone. We agree to meet up at Victoria’s Costa del Sol motel at the end of the day.
Off I go and right away I spot a trail that I have never been on before. So what would any self respecting dual sport/off road rider do? He would find out where in the heck it goes! We had information there was a trail nearby that could take you all the way to Bay of LA. It ended up being one of the best choices I made during the whole trip. I stumbled on a trail that eventually led me to a single track that can only be described in photos. I have since learned that this trail is named Window Rock trail by the man that routed it. His name is Bill Nichols. He is quite the legend in Baja for looking for and making new trails. Bill out did himself on this one! I spent the next 2 hours with my head on a swivel looking at the trail and all the surrounding countryside. It was a picture perfect, remote, challenging trail that passed by a huge rock that gave it the name Window Rock trail. If you were going to take a picture of a desert trail to put in a magazine this would be the one you would want. It had rock climbs, cactus slalom course, sand, drop offs, some incredible views and lots of cactus that reminded you to stay on the trail or there would be a penalty! Perfect. This could be the best trail I would ride on this trip. I finally found myself dumped out into an intersection that headed off in a couple of directions and wisely chose the one that looked like it would exit this canyon area, which it did. I ended up on the pavement riding into Bay of LA at around 4pm. I met up with Don and Doug at the motel and told them of the great trail I had ridden that afternoon. We had dinner, sat and discussed the trip and told stories of days gone by. This looked to be a good trip in the making.
Now when you tell stories you have to remember some of these things may get retold. So this was about the time that Doug came to be known as, “Senor Kirby”. He made the mistake of telling us that he was selling Kirby vacuum cleaners back in 1962 and remembered selling one to a Mexican family. Don and Doug had just met on this trip so they both are in their early 70’s and both have a few stories to tell with more than 140 years of living between them. Don has worked fishing boats in Alaska as a kid and been a Police Captain in Law Enforcement. Those two things alone pretty much guarantee some interesting stories.
Our next part of the trip took us through desert and along the coast line on the Gulf side of the Baja peninsula. We stopped at a place called San Rafael in a small cove with a couple of boats that were beached on the sand. There is a man there named Pancho. He lives there alone in a shack and an old cab over camper from a pickup truck. I met him the year before when I explored this cove because it had a sign that said San Rafael, pointing the way. Pancho speaks very little English and I speak virtually no Spanish. But he seems to always invite guest into his place for a cup of coffee. He did so the first time I stopped there and did the same this time. Don and Senor Kirby were visiting Pancho for the first time and were intrigued by this lone Mexican man living alone in a beautiful but remote setting. We sat and visited for a while and found out that Pancho had been living here for 26 years. He tells us that he does have a neighbor a few miles away on a ranch that makes the 50 mile trip by dirt road to town to get things occasionally and checks on Pancho. As we head out we leave Pancho some of the snacks we are carrying and say good bye telling him we will stop by on our return trip. We arrive at our destination for the night in San Ignacio and check into the motel named “Rice and Beans”. Senor Kirby (Doug) and I decide to take a ride down into the town square and have a look around. It seems that Senor Kirby has some explorer blood in him. We see a church in the town square that was built in the early 1700’s and completed in the latter half of that century. There was so much history we read I couldn’t remember it all. We walked through the church and marveled at the stone construction and tried to imagine how they would do all that work with no equipment. Yes we are spoiled. We also had the opportunity to watch a production line of 4 women making tortillas from scratch. They were very good at it doing all the work by hand, no machines, and they turned out a lot of tortillas in a short amount of time.
The next day we headed off toward the Pacific Ocean to travel south down the coast. We find gas at a remote stop that could almost classify as a convenience store. It was a shack stocked with snacks and supplies. The owner operator also sold gas out of the barrels he keeps for the local fishermen and travelers like us. We top off and head down the coast. Senor Kirby has his first mechanical malfunction along the way. His bike starts cutting out and not wanting to stay running. I am thinking bad gas since we fueled not too long ago. But Don and my bike both are running fine. We start to look for problems and eventually discover that the battery seems to be the problem. We disconnect it and run the bike on the ignition without any electrical accessories. It works for a while but there is something else that keeps cutting the bike out off and on for the remainder of the day. It turns into a long day. We make it through the day and see some really cool stuff along the coast and on the trip back over to the Gulf while traveling through a canyon that connects the east and west coasts of the Baja peninsula. This canyon looks to be a regular connecting trade route for the locals and amazes me that they would drive this in vehicles other than 4x4’s. We make our destination and decide that tomorrow will be the shorter road ride back to a larger town in order to have any chance of finding parts or a battery we may need to get Senor Kirby’s bike running dependably. The following day finds us road riding to a larger town called Santa Rosalia. We pull into an auto parts store to see if they stock motorcycle batteries or can point us in the right direction. We lucked out because they did have motorcycle batteries in stock. But we really lucked out when we discovered several of the youngsters that worked there were all into off road racing. One guy named Serge was the local area champion on quads and also was doing some off road truck racing in a Ford Ranger truck. It was hilarious because they didn’t speak any English and we didn’t speak any Spanish. But we all came together and had a great time mixing it up, trying to tell stories and fixing Senor Kirby’s bike. These kids really went out of their way to help us between waiting on their regular customers. We worked on the bike, looked at their truck on the internet in the store and explored mx43.com while the bike was being worked on. They even fabricated an extension for the battery cable since the battery they had in stock had the terminals reversed making the stock set up too short. We couldn’t have stumbled into a better place to make a repair. These kids were enthusiastic, resourceful, and very helpful on top of cracking us up the whole time. I learned a new term; “chicken-all” is what it sounded like. It seemed to be the Mexican translation for an Okie fix. We spent around 2 hours there fixing and visiting but it seemed like 20 minutes. We said our good byes, took some pictures of our new friends and hit the road. Senor Kirby had lights, electric starter and everything! Almost like a real DRZ 400. We made it back to San Ignacio and settled in for the night. Things were looking up…………………….until Senor Kirby and I went for a walk to the local market to get a couple of things. We were walking along having a conversation about Mexico and all the differences like the lack of guard rails, warning signs, drop offs on the side of the roads, not much in the way of street lighting and decided that they must just consider these things part of the natural selection process. We were walking down the unlit highway toward the market. Oops! No more than 30 seconds later I hear what sounds like a bowling ball being dropped on the asphalt road. It is pretty dark and I can’t see a lot but there is Senor Kirby sprawled out on the roadway, moaning and cussing. He had just stepped too close to the edge of the road way with one of those drop offs and luckily fell on the roadway instead of down into the ditch. Now I know that had to hurt so I asked him if he was ok but didn’t get an immediate response. He finally took inventory and said he was ok and didn’t seriously hurt anything, but was sore and would pay for it tomorrow. At that point I couldn’t hold back any longer and cracked up pointing out our conversation 30 seconds prior to his roadway foot crash. He saw the irony in it and finally chuckled a bit too, just not very loudly. He said he would be laughing too if it had been me instead of him. We went to the store and then retired for the night. I couldn’t wait to see what tomorrow would bring.
We start loading our packs and bikes to head out to see what today would bring when Senor Kirby asks us if we are playing a joke on him by hiding his key for the DRZ. Don and I both swore that we didn’t touch the key to his bike. Senor Kirby was actually hoping that one of us was playing a trick because he now realized he had somehow lost the key. I asked him about a spare key. Nope, didn’t bring one. After a brief search and a walk around Don and Senor Kirby hack into his ignition switch and get the bike running. Away we go.
We have a good day of riding with no more Senor Kirby episodes. We end the day back at Bay of L.A. and stop for the night. Almost as soon as we stop a legendary rider by the name of Jimmy Sones sees us and recognized me from our Baja 1000 ride together on a class 50 team. He comes over to say hello and asks if I have time to do a ride with them since they are doing some local single-track that Bill Nichols, another Baja legend has put through to the Pacific Coast. I am so excited to ride a new trail with guides that I talk it over with my compadres, they agree to ride on without me and let me catch up to them on the following day. So now I get to ride a fairly new single-track that is in the 30 something mile range. It has been named the 22 day trail because it took Bill Nichols that many days to find a way through to connect Hwy 1 to the Pacific Coast. The trail would be difficult to find without someone guiding you to it, but once you are on it you know you are on the right trail. It is a true single-track trail with no turn offs. It goes for miles along ridges, valleys, climbs, decents and covers almost every type of terrain you could imagine from rocks to sand. There are some spectacular views from some of the ridges that give you a view of the valley you leave when you first start the trail and also the Pacific Ocean in the distance. I really appreciate Jimmy and Bill sharing the trail and had a great time. It took us a bit longer than anticipated to complete the ride due to a couple of mishaps during the day so when we reached the end of the trail where it dumped out on an access road at the coast it was almost dark. We had about 27 miles of dirt roads to ride out to get to our meeting spot to load the bikes. I didn’t mind this dirt road commute at all because we were riding near the coast line with the sun setting and it provided such a beautiful sunset I had to stop to take a few photos. A perfect way to end a great day of riding.
The next day was my catch up day so I said good bye to my one day riding buddies and hit the road early to catch up with Don and Senor Kirby. Those two had made the trip back to San Felipe and had spent the night relaxing and having a good dinner, watching a movie and probably telling each other whoppers, I mean stories. By the time I got there Don had his bike loaded in the truck and Senor Kirby had already hit the road for home since he had about a 15 hour drive.
I have since ridden with Senor Kirby (Doug, now that we are back in the States) and he said he had a great time on his first Mexico adventure ride and he is looking forward to doing it again next year. But says next year he is not going to be the main source of entertainment for us on the trip. He is going to have his bike trail tested, load his gear a bit better for multi day exploring/riding, and bring a flashlight for his night walks to the market!
I said, “Bring a spare key, Vato!”
#33
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 8:46PM 
