Passes & Canyons Blog

The last I had heard, the new motorcycle safety study that had finally been authorized was in jeopardy. Apparently, in this case no news was good news because I see in a recent issue of American Motorcyclist that things are moving along.

I knew that a pilot study had been set up and was functioning, with the intent of determining which factors the overall study should focus on, as well as helping determine methodology. The hang-up had been over costs. The amount originally projected was looking inadequate and there was reluctance to get started without full funding assured.

I still don’t know if full funding has been assured, but according to American Motorcyclist, “The full study is expected to begin soon and will take several years to complete.”

The article also states that “The federal government earmarked up to $2.8 million for the research, provided that the motorcycling community came up with another $2.8 million. The AMA immediately pledged $100,000 for the effort and AMA members kicked in money. Also, the motorcycle industry committed to provide $2.8 million through the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, making the new study a reality.”

So actually, I guess that’s it right there. The money may not all be in hand but someone, somewhere committed to getting the money one way or another.

Great. Let the project begin. This can only do good for those of us who ride.

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Biker Quote for Today

I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol!

“Advanced Safety Vehicles” is the term Honda uses for its efforts to build vehicles with advanced safety features. I’ve written before about conspicuity enhancement, where designing motorcycles that appear to have angry human faces make them more noticeable to drivers. Now I’ve learned about some more of what Honda is working on.

I thought about paraphrasing what Honda says about “LONG design” but what the heck, I’ll just quote. I can’t say it any better than the did and I doubt they’ll come after me for cribbing their text, when what I’m doing is giving them some good publicity. So here are the pictures and the info. And here’s the link to the Honda site.

LONG Design
Since the light from a conventional motorcycle’s headlights comes only from the center of the vehicle, it is often difficult to judge a motorcycle’s distance and speed—often it seems to be farther away and moving more slowly than reality. To achieve nearly the same level of visibility as automobiles, ASV-3 motorcycles are outfitted with two sets of high-intensity LED lights at two different heights. This improves motorists’ ability to judge a motorcycle’s distance by approximately 10%, and improve the ability to assess its speed by approximately 20%, as compared with conventional motorcycles.

In addition to the placement of lights, Honda is also developing a camera system that shows what’s behind you on a screen on your bike’s dash. They call this their “Rear View Assistance System.” With cameras and screens constantly dropping in price, this is likely to be standard equipment before we know it.

Keep the good ideas flowing guys.

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Biker Quote for Today

Anything that was sort of ahead of its time, in its time, that’s what I like.–Jay Leno

I have some heated motorcycle gear I’ve been given by EXO2 The Heat Inside to test and do a product review on, so I was looking for some cold weather here in August. Not the easiest thing to find, except that in the mountains it gets cold no matter what time of year it is. At least at night, and up real high.

I already had plans to be up in Keystone one evening for the return of the Adventure for the Cures “Dirty Dozen” riders from their seven-day cancer research fundraising ride. Fine, I figured I’d stay as late in the evening as I cared to and then return home over Loveland Pass. At 11,900 feet, especially at 11 p.m. or so, I figured it would be pretty dang chilly–perfect weather for testing the gear.

So it got late and it was time for me to head home and I put on the heated vest and gloves, connected the wires, pulled on my leather jacket and helmet, and set off up the pass.

The gear worked fine. I’ll tell you all about that later, once I have more time to do more testing, but I certainly had no complaints that night. I did have some concerns setting out at night in the mountains that I might encounter deer, because they can be deadly if they run out in front of you and you are unable to avoid them. But none of them showed their faces.

What I did not anticipate was issues of equilibrium. Let me set the scene.

It’s a dark night. Cloudy, so no moon or stars. No electric lights going up over the pass, and no guardrails with their reflectors. On top of that, on the lower stretches of the road up the pass, no horizon. The blackness of the trees and mountains blended totally with the blackness of the sky.

What could I see? White and yellow lines. White and yellow lines that curved and rose and fell, all in relation to . . . nothing. In just a short while this started playing tricks on my equilibrium. Am I leaning or is the road curving? I know I’m leaning because I’m in a curve, but am I leaning too far or is the road rising through the curve? I could not tell. There was no point of reference. It was downright scary.

I got over the pass by going about 15 to 20 miles per hour and being super, super cautious, and I was glad I only encountered one other vehicle along the way. That ride was not fun. I’ll be restricting my gear testing to daylight from now on.

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Biker Quote for Today

I always slow down if my riding buddy in front of me disappears or launches skyward unexpectedly.

After nine days on the road as one of nine guys on bikes I have to say that you do not want to use us as your riding safety model. In the early days, when there were just three of us, we worked out some simple safety procedures and it was easy to follow them.

As new guys have joined the group we simply have not done a good job of inculcating those concepts and the result is a hodge-podge group that doesn’t follow any one set of procedures. We’d be safer riders if we did.

For instance, one of the newer guys seem to target-fixate on the tail-light of the guy in front of him. He’ll move in to about 2-3 bike lengths behind and just sit there. If the guy in front moves left, he moves left. If he moves right, this other guy follows, always staying right behind, and way too close.

Some of us try to set up a staggered riding pattern but all it takes is one guy to make a mess of that. I was two back of one such guy at one point, and the guy between us was trying hard to maintain a staggered position. Move left and he goes right, move back right and he goes left, and then sit in the middle. No attention to lane position. I sat back and observed all this and knew exactly the frustration he was feeling when he finally goosed the throttle and pulled ahead of the wandering rider.

It’s not that we don’t talk about these things. It’s just that we don’t seem to ever have the conversations when the full contingent is present. For instance, one night on this trip we talked about how to pass through a town as a group. I said the leader needs to slow down when approaching a traffic signal, while those behind should speed up. This then allows the leader to make a determination of whether everyone will be able to make it through the green and to take appropriate action. Everyone present agreed, but we all knew the worst offender in this strategy was not present for the discussion.

Ditto the discussion about maintaining proper speed so we don’t build up a long line of impatient cars and trucks behind us, and making sure to leave spaces so they can pass one or a few rather than all nine of us at once.

I admit it, I’m as guilty as the next guy in terms of not insisting that we have a full discussion with everyone present. Instead, I just tend to take up position in the rear where I can ride my own ride without needing to be concerned with what the folks ahead of me are doing. And I make damn sure not to be directly ahead of the tailgater. Every year before this trip I tell myself I’ll try to organize the meeting to hash this all out, and every year it doesn’t happen. Maybe I’ll actually do it next year. Somebody kick me in the butt, OK?

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Biker Quote for Today

You might ride fast, but never ride in a hurry.

All righty, time again for the weirdest stuff bikers have hit or almost hit. As always, these adventures come from a thread on the Adventure Riders forum. We’ll dive right in.
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Back in the ’80s I was riding with a friend in Southern California. We were blitzing down a highway and he ran over a half-eaten burrito still in the bag some prick tossed out. He kicked it up with his rear tire and it slapped me in the face. I had my visor open and when I got the wet, stinky slap..it managed to come unwrapped to some degree and spray fermented bean and other assorted fillings upside my face and helmet.
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It was night, doin’ about 50 down Rt 20 with helmet and shield when I see something diving for my light, tried to duck, hit me square in the visor, liked to knocked me off the bike, blood, guts mess, I wipe away, something sharp in visor. I get back to the garage and I found the beak of what I think was a hummingbird snapped off, inbedded in the visor, and penetrated it by about 1/4 inch.
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Here in Phoenix on the I-10 I was able to barely avoid a new computer in a box that fell from the back of a truck I was following. Thankfully I tend to keep plenty of room and I was just changing lanes. The combination of the two saved my bacon. It was close, as I felt it graze my left boot.
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Four of us were riding in northern Wisconsin. We were on dual-sports in the woods on partially overgrown two-track. A black bear sprung from the brush. Stories vary if you listen to rider #3 who hit it and rider #4 who saw it about whether it came from the right or left. Regardless, the bear ran along side the cycle for a few steps then cut in front of the front tire. The bear was t-boned and somersaulted. The bike when down and the rider went over the handlebars. Rider #4 said his first thought was what he should do when the bear stood up and faced them. But the bear did immediately run off. The whole event was only 4-5 seconds.
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While competing in an observed trial recently a bee flew into my face as I was riding the loop trail. It hit perfectly between my cheek and the liner of my open face helmet and wedged itself in just below my right ear. Not only was it stinging me repeatedly but the sound of an angry bee inside my helmet right by my ear was nearly deafening. As I was approaching the next section I stepped off my still moving bike and pulled my helmet off, threw it down wile swatting alongside my head and swearing loudly. The observer probably thought I was having a flashback to a bad acid trip.
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I was behind a moving caravan (weekend drunken buddies in multiple trucks) when the tail gate came down dumping the items from the bed into my path. I was far enough behind to have plenty of time and watch the entertainment as the lawnmower came rolling out…followed by the dryer…..followed by the chest of drawers…….
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Turkey in flight. I followed it down a dirt road at 20 miles an hour, for nearly 50 yards, right on its tail feathers. They should stick to walking, they can’t fly for shit.
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This morning I missed going thru a gaggle of geese. There must have been 50 crossing geese crossing the road 3 to 4 deep. I came around the curve at 70 mph and there they were. I went thru them, but missed hitting any of them. They scattered around and went on off the road before anything else happened.
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I was hauling ass down a fire road in my younger days, just about to run over a yucca stalk when it started wiggling. It was a friggin 6′ rattlesnake sunning itself on the road.
I don’t think I helped it any hitting it square in the middle but I didn’t stop to ask if he was OK.
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Scored a double point bonus last week in Waco. I was coming down the road next to the Dr. Pepper Museum when a squirrel and a pursuing angry sparrow came right in my path. I hit both at the same time. Sparrow bounced off, and continued to fly, squirrel not so lucky.
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One moonless night I wast east bound on Texas 290 just outside Houston. There it is a two lane with median barrier and brand new. A truck was stopped on the right shoulder with its back up lights on. I was in the right lane clipping along at my usuall 80 MPH and moved into the left lane to give a wide berth. Suddenly I realized they were stopped because they had just dropped a dark blue love seat in the middle of the left lane. I dropped anchor and was able to serve around the thing but it was close.

If you will notice, there is always a bunch of trash on the road around the end of the month. This is because this is when people move themselves from one residence to another.
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Riding down through Pennsylvania to visit a friend in Bethlehem, a loud ‘thwack’ announced the impact of a firefly on my face shield, then two more. I shut the lights off for a moment to confirm that the green glowing effect all over my field of vision was not a hallucination.
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Here are the other flying object posts:
Motorcycles and Flying Objects
More Flying Object Tales
Latest Tales of Flying Object Encounters
Even More Tales of Flying Objects
Look! Up in the Sky! More Flying Object Tales
Did You See What I Almost Hit?

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Biker Quote for Today

In the end, it’s all about the stories.

How hard is it to go on after losing a leg in a crash when all you did wrong was to take your eyes off the oncoming car for an instant to check the cross traffic? That was essentially the question I asked Randy and Joan Savely while speaking with them for the series of articles I just posted on Examiner.com.

What I seem to be doing with some regularity lately is working on a story for Examiner and then giving you the background here. That’s definitely the case now.

I met Randy when I joined ABATE earlier this year. I’m in District 10 and Randy is the district rep, which is to say, he runs the meetings. It didn’t take me long to notice that Randy was missing his left leg from the knee down.

One reason I like going on poker runs, going to ABATE meetings, and getting involved in other motorcycle-related activities is that every time I go somewhere I come home with new story ideas. That’s a good thing considering that I write a minimum of five articles every week, frequently more. I smelled a story in Randy.

First, let me make it clear that this is definitely their story, Randy and Joan’s, not just his. When I first proposed the story idea it was Joan who replied that the two of them would be happy to speak with me. Up until then I had been thinking solely of Randy, but it soon became very clear to me that this was indeed their story.

What I hadn’t counted on was how powerfully their story would hit me. I met with them two weeks ago today, expecting to spend less than an hour in the interview. Going on two hours I finally said we ought to stop because there was only so much that a reader will read.

The next day Judy and I left on vacation for a week and on the drive to Utah it was practically the only thing I could speak of. And this was after spending hours telling her about it the night before. The lead sentences quickly formed in my mind and they made it into the story unaltered, even though I never wrote the rest of it until 10 days later:

When everything finally came to a stop, Randy Savely sat up, thinking, “Well, I’m alive.”
A couple moments later he noticed his boot laying in the middle of the intersection.
“That boot don’t come off,” he thought. Then he turned to the driver who had hit him and asked for his belt to use as a tourniquet on his leg.

For two weeks now this story has haunted me (not in a bad way) and has been in my mind almost constantly. Not out of some fear that it could happen to me, that’s not it at all. Probably a lot of it is Randy. Can you imagine having your leg removed by a car and having the presence of mind to put a tourniquet on yourself?

A funny thing there: I asked Randy if he was wearing a helmet and whether he had any head injuries. No and no. But he told me that he really believes in chaps more than helmets because it was the fact that he was wearing chaps that enabled him to tend to his own needs. They covered up the fact that his foot was gone, whereas seeing a bloody stump may well have shaken him up enough to go into shock.

I could go on and on. As I said, this story has haunted me for two weeks. But I won’t. Go read it yourself. It’s not that I’m such a great writer, it’s that their story is an incredible story. I just can’t tell you how fortunate I feel to have had the opportunity to tell it.

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Biker Quote for Today

Live every day as though it was your last, but ride to make sure it’s not!