OFMC 2018: A Bad Day That Could Have Been A Lot Worse
Friggs (right) and Bill inspect Friggs’s bike after his crash. Note his jeans and shirt.
We left Ruidoso early to take advantage of the cool and made good time down the mountain, to Alamogordo, and across the White Sands valley to Las Cruces. Then we turned north on I-25. I toyed with proposing to the guys that we go the 36 miles south and cross the border into Mexico, just to do it, but I didn’t. I realized later that none of us had our passports so we couldn’t have done it anyway. Years ago, on the eighth OFMC trip, Bill and John and I crossed into Canada for about an hour, just so we could say we did. Nevertheless, Las Cruces for me was about 1,500 miles south of where I had been in Canada, on a bike, just nine days earlier.
We got off I-25 at Caballo and headed west through Hillsboro on New Mexico 152 to ride “The Snake,†New Mexico’s answer to the “Tail of the Dragon.†But before we even started to climb we ran into a chip seal in progress. We actually waited on the pilot car on a surface that had only been spread with gravel earlier that morning.
The chip seal went all the way to the top of Emory Pass, probably two-thirds of the fun, twisty road we came to ride. The fun quotient was radically reduced. We made the ride slowly and carefully and I was so glad I was on the V-Strom. I can’t imagine how unpleasant it would have been on the Concours.
We stopped at the view area at the top of the pass and then started down the other side on the good, clean asphalt. I was in the lead and a short while later I was not seeing Bill behind me. I slowed and Bill caught up but he had his turn signal on so I pulled over in a good pull-out. He told me he had not seen the others behind him for too long, so we waited there a few minutes for them.
After about five minutes we headed back, fearing we were going to come around a bend and see something we were really hoping not to see. And the further we backtracked the more our apprehension grew.
Finally there was Friggs headed the other way and he gave us the OK signal. We kept going until Dennis and Brett also passed and we turned around. Obviously we were hoping to find them all stopped somewhere waiting for us and we did, in the same pull-out where we had first stopped.
Friggs had crashed. He was OK, a little skinned up with ruined shirt and pants and boots. Probably looking at a very sore shoulder tomorrow. He had been down-shifting as he headed into a curve and in the blink of an eye he was on the ground. He had no idea why. Dennis had been ahead of him and thought he heard a bang. When Friggs did not immediately come around the curve after him he turned right around. As Dennis rounded the curve he saw Frigg’s bike laying in the middle of the road and Friggs dragging himself out of the road.
The two of them tried without success to stand the bike up but a guy in a car stopped and the three of them got it up. This was just when Brett reached the scene after turning back.
So, only cosmetic damage to the bike and nothing significant with Friggs. But what a scare! This is the first time in the 30 years the OFMC has been taking these trips that someone has gone down. Sure, we’ve dropped bikes but we’ve never had a crash.
The rest of the ride in to Silver City was uneventful but oh, man, we sure had a lot to talk about over brews at the end of the road on this day.
Biker Quote for Today
Sometimes adventure isn’t fun while it’s happening — Mark Tuttle
Tags: motorcycle crash
September 6th, 2018 at 7:20 pm
That’s lucky! Glad to hear Friggs and the bike are both okay.