Passes & Canyons Blog

Jason Hill and John Lowe went to Ensenada last month as J2 Racing to compete in the 2009 Baja 1000, but the race ended very early for them when John crashed and broke his wrist and other bones. That’s Jason on the right, John on the left.

While I quickly received, and passed on, the general information, Jason has now provided me with the full story, and what a story! I’ve started putting the whole thing up on Examiner.com in segments and you can read the first segment now. I’ll be posting the additional segments one per day until it’s all up there.

So what’s up next on my agenda? Well, when I initially made contact with Jason on the Adventure Riders forum I received a note from another fellow who asked if I’d be interested in covering the ALCAN 5000 via their team. Oh, OK, that sounds interesting.

In case you’re unfamiliar with it, the ALCAN 5000 is a team racing event with cars and/or motorcycles. They cover 5,000 miles (surprise!) and a good bit of Alaska and Canada. This particular team will have two cars and two bikes. The race isn’t until next summer so I won’t be doing much with it for awhile.

And then, asking Jason what’s next for J2 Racing, he says they now have their eyes on the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. That’s great because I had my eyes on that, too. And it looks like I won’t even have to go looking for a team. This could become addictive.

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I linked up with a team racing in the last weekend’s Baja 1000 and was hoping to be able to post frequent, up-to-the-minute reports on what they were encountering, how it was all going, and their general attitude/morale. Because I was not going to Baja with them, I was entirely dependent on them to feed me this information.

Frank Prince, of Big Magic Racing, during the 2007
Baja 1000. (Photo: Mark Hintsa)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hintsa/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Well, we all know about the best laid plans, and there was a reason television, in its early days, quickly switched from live programming to pre-recorded shows. When you’re on the air live and something goes wrong you can find yourself in a very awkward place.

I had discussed with Jason, one of the J2 Racing riders, just what I was hoping he could send me, and he had made it clear he would do what he could but he couldn’t promise the world, the race was his number one priority. I understood and accepted that. But I had hopes that he would find it no problem to update me frequently. And I told everyone I would be providing them with frequent updates. A bit of overconfidence on my part.

As it played out, preparing for the race became all-consuming and 36 hours after the race began I still had heard nothing. What’s more, the team had a GPS website that was supposed to show their location along the course, updating every 10 minutes. Checking repeatedly during the race the only thing it showed was that the GPS unit was in downtown Ensenada and not moving. Did something happen during the pre-running, knocking them out of the race before it even began? Did something totally unrelated foul up their plans and ruin everything? What the heck is going on down there? I really wished I was there.

Saturday night I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about it, and figuring I owed my readers some kind of update, in my head I wrote the gist of the piece I was going to put up come morning if I still hadn’t heard anything. Basically, I was going to tell them just what I’ve explained right here.

But glory be, come morning there was an email from Jason. The good news was that things went fine leading up to the race. The bad news was that early on in the race, John, the other rider, crashed the bike, broke some bones, and the event was over for J2. I still don’t know what the deal was with the GPS.

So of course it’s a disappointment for the guys, although they still seem pretty upbeat just to have gone down there to live out their boyhood dream. And it will still make for an interesting story once I have all the details. I’ll let you know when it’s written.

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I will indeed be telling the story of a racing team participating in the 2009 Baja 1000 race, which gets underway this Friday. I just won’t be following the team I started out with.

The team I am going to be following is J2 Racing. The riders are Jason Hill and John Lowe, two dirt-bike riding buddies in their early years who were reunited just two years ago after an extended loss of contact. Here’s how Jason describes their decision to do the Baja.

As we began catching up, John asked, ‘Do you remember when we were riding as kids how we used to watch the Baja races on TV and always said we’d run it one day?’ ‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Well, it’s time.’ And that was that. It took some convincing, but I finally agreed that it was indeed time, so we began incubating a plan.

I met up with these guys on the Adventure Rider forum. When my initial plans to go to the race and report first-hand fell through I posted a notice on Adventure Rider asking if there was a team going who would like me to tell their story. Jason quickly replied and the deal was set. This time I made absolutely certain to make it clear what our relationship is. I am not a team member, I am an outside observer, and my position is not to tell a bunch of fluffy stories that paint the team as perfect, it is to tell the story as it really is, true to life. Jason is something of a writer himself so he understands that false starts and missteps are part of life, and how you handle them is sometimes the most interesting part of the story.

So anyway, I won’t be posting the reports of their adventure here; that will be on Examiner.com. I’ll post links here to those pieces and if there are any interesting side notes that don’t really fit into the main story, I will, as usual, be telling those stories here.

Additionally, you can follow the team’s progress during the race in real-time on their SpotAdventures.com website.

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I’ve been telling you for awhile that I would be going to this year’s Baja 1000 race in Ensenada, Mexico, but that will not be happening. I had been following the Rsenal Racing team as they prepared for their first-time competition in the event and was going to be riding down with them to present the up-close story of their effort.

Unfortunately, when they read my most recent post on the ongoing story of planning and preparation, they seriously misconstrued what I wrote and informed me that they didn’t want me.

So I won’t be going to Baja but I’m trying to work out arrangements where I can still provide some coverage of the race, although obviously not through the Rsenal Racing folks. You’ll see it here if I’m successful.

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“The road to Ensenada is plenty wide and fast” says Lyle Lovett but he wasn’t speaking about the preparations for the Baja 1000 currently underway with the race team I’ll be accompanying.

First off, if you don’t know what the Baja 1000 is you really ought to view this trailer to the definitive Baja 1000 movie, Dust to Glory.

I’m riding down to Ensenada, on the Baja Peninsula of Mexico, with Rsenal Racing to write about the event and the team’s efforts for the variety of motorcycle publications I write for. The race itself starts Nov. 19 but we’ll be down there in advance to get ready.

Chuck Shortt is the driving force behind this adventure, and what I’m coming to understand about Chuck is that he is a big idea person who then frequently turns to others to make his big dreams become reality. If the dream is improbable but the person succeeds, that’s fantastic, they’ve really accomplished something. If they don’t succeed, oh well, good idea that didn’t work. Move on.

This is not a criticism of Chuck or a bad thing; it is something useful to understand about him.

For instance, when he first told me about this thing, Chuck told me they would have satellite uplinks and wanted to livecast the event via the Web. He asked me if Examiner or RumBum might be interested and able to carry the feed. I agreed to ask RumBum.

Happily, RumBum said they were very interested and their tech guy, Tobias, would contact me to work out details. In the meantime, Chuck told me to hook up with John, the team’s tech guy. Well, it seems that having a satellite hook-up was not in the game, but Tobias suggested that if the team could supply video segments periodically, that would be fine and even easier than a live link.

I figured that before I pushed this any further I needed to check in with Jeff and Sydney Mikelson, the photographers on the team, to see what they felt they would be capable of in terms of supplying RumBum with segments. Surprise, surprise. Sydney told me they had no video editing software, and were planning to bring their raw footage home and turn it over to a friend who is a video editor. So nothing at all available to RumBum unless they wanted raw footage.

Then we learned that the non-satellite internet connection Jack was hoping have set up was not going to be within the team’s price range so the whole matter was really moot. And then Sydney called me to say that she and Jeff had had to opt out of the trip due to financial considerations. Totally moot.

OK, so that’s where we stand. The rest of us are still going, and I’m hoping to have some great pictures and terrific stories to tell. Coming soon.

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If you’re like me you’ve probably heard of the Baja 1000 but you don’t really know much about it. Well, let me tell you, this thing is pretty dang interesting and I’m going to be learning a whole bunch more about it.

About a year ago I met Chuck Shortt, who builds custom motorcycles and owns Rocky Mountain Custom Bikes. Chuck emailed me several months ago to tell me he was going to compete this year in the Baja 1000 and did I want to do an article about him and his team for Examiner.com. I said sure, you bet. But I never made the time to do anything about it until a few days ago.

I finally went down to Larkspur to meet with Chuck, see the bike and his shop, and talk about the race. He told me then that he was inspired to do this race by the movie Dust to Glory. He got hold of it on DVD and ended up watching it five times in one night. Then within a week he started putting together a team to race in it.

Of course I had to watch the movie, and oh man! You’ve got cars and trucks and motorcycles and custom built vehicles all racing at the same time on the same course, as well as spectators who decide they want to ride along with you on their own vehicles. It’s crazy! And it looks like more fun than any human should be allowed to have.

Here’s a couple trailers. You may find yourself tracking this movie down soon to watch it all. You won’t be sorry you did.

Here’s another.

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